This Christmas it will be ten years ago that a huge tsunami struck the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, India and several other countries surrounding the Bengal Bay and the Indian Ocean. The huge waves...
KITLV is involved in a program called ‘Governance, Markets and Citizenship’. It consists of economists working on regional economic developments, public administration people looking at ...
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...