Three decades after Suharto fell, the army is back. On the night of 8 May 2026, a screening of the documentary film Pesta ...

Wiji Thukul wrestled with the daily realities of poverty and violence. During the late New Order he was acknowledged as one of Indonesia's best poets, and he remains a standard bearer for radical ...

The second round of direct elections for governors and district heads shows that democratisation is allowing powerful families to entrench themselves in local politics After the decentralisation of ...

Before she even opens her mouth, the petite, jilbab-wearing and refined looking Shuniyya Ruhama Habiiballah has already gone a long way towards achieving one of her driving missions in life: to ...

In 1778 the Bataviaasch Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen or Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences was established in Batavia, now Jakarta. The exclusively male Board of Directors, was ...

Perhaps few people in Indonesia know that there is a large community of people of Indonesian descent living in the north of the continent of South America. Over 70,000 ‘Javanese’ live in Suriname, a ...

The collapse of the New Order during the Asian financial crisis paved the way for many political and economic reforms in Indonesia. In exchange for development aid, multilateral donor agencies such as ...

According to local resident Om Nono Muma, most of residents in the small West Sumatran town of Sawahlunto are descendants from migrants who came from other parts of Indonesia, particularly Java, to ...

On September 1, 1998, Pak Tafsir and his wife Bu Miswa had just finished their evening meal and were preparing for bed when they heard a shout from outside their small bamboo home. 'Grandfather, can I ...

Everyone in Indonesia is familiar with the case of Ariel, arguably Indonesia’s best-known pop star, who went to jail in early 2011 when videos of him having sex with a couple of famous and beautiful ...

Still from the film Prologue of a nation by Bibi Fadlalla in the exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance/ Bibi Fadlalla reproduced with permission Amsterdam ...

In the past two years race and racism has come to the forefront of political and social debate in many countries, including Indonesia. America’s #BlackLivesMatter movement resonated globally and ...