Which country is doing better in economic terms, Indonesia or the Philippines? Not many people will hesitate when answering this question: Indonesia, of course. In 2011, Indonesia’s Gross Domestic ...
Suddenly there were parking meters on Jalan Sabang in the centre of Jakarta. I saw them after I checked into a hotel around the corner and went for dinner. A novelty in an Indonesian city where tukang parkir (parking men) dominate the...
“Are you a pessimist or an optimist?” one of the examiners asked at my recent thesis defence. The question caught me by surprise. In my thesis I argue that the colonial state in the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s...
Since 2012 KITLV has been engaged in the project ‘Dutch military operations in Indonesia 1945-1950’. At first it was to be a project of three institutions; NIOD (War Documentation Institute, Amsterdam), NIMH (Institute...
Last month, from 16-30 September 2014, I attended the 9th Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago on the northwest coast of the Caribbean island of Trinidad....
Serious riots were not expected, but ethnic tensions between Creoles and Hindostanis were heating up a few months before Suriname’s independence in 1975. The last detachment of Dutch soldiers was prepared to...
The Caribbean: hundreds of islands in the heart of the Americas. Cuba is the largest (about 106,000 km2) and with 11 million inhabitants is also the most populous country. Tiny Saba (13 km2), a special municipality of...
Whenever I see another piece of research using social media data, I must admit I roll my eyes. Social media will only ever capture the voices of the urban young - the type of people who have less difficulty in getting their voices...
‘Small scale’ is an adjective hardly ever used about Indonesia. Ranking only behind China, India, and the USA in terms of population size and comprising over 17,000 islands (1.9 millionsq. km, putting it in the top 20 in...
Does democracy change people? How enduring are the traces of dictatorship in the attitudes and beliefs of people? These questions kept popping up during the campaign for Indonesia’s presidential elections...