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Abstract Sukarno took a personal interest in using the arts for presenting Indonesia in a positive light. He oversaw cultural missions abroad and produced 'cultural events' that showed off his grace and charisma on the dance floor to overseas guests. While Soeharto showed little interest in the arts, new modes of arts diplomacy flourished during the New Order-scholarships for foreigners to study arts, artists in residence at Indonesian embassies, large-scale festivals aiming to facilitate artistic exchange and encourage foreign investments, to name but a few. In Indonesia today, arts diplomacy is represented by its own sub-directorate in the Ministry of Education and Culture. Indonesia is promoting itself through collaborations between Indonesian governmental agencies and professional, international producing bodies, galleries, and festivals. Cultural Houses are being built in key cities abroad, along with a nationwide platform for international festivals, Indonesiana. 'Indonesianists', including foreign academics and students of the arts, are being recruited to promote Indonesia abroad.

The mid-1950s saw the relationship between China and Indonesia evolve from one of mutual hostility to one of fraternity as a trend of détente emerged out of the Geneva (1954) and the Bandung (1955) conferences. This article explores why and how the two newly independent nations applied art diplomacy to reduce their ideological differences and facilitate their commercial and political rapprochements for the sake of Asian solidarity. Through contextualizing a series of art activities between the two nations, especially China’s reproduction of President Sukarno’s private collection of paintings and Chairman Mao Zedong’s gifts of Chinese ink paintings to President Sukarno, this article argues that interactions in the name of art exemplify how China shaped its modern profile as an independent and industrialized power. It will also show how China deviated from its diplomacy of ‘Leaning to One Side’, formulated in the late 1940s, towards the ‘Peaceful United Front’ of the mid-1950s. More broadly, art relations between China and Indonesia reflect intensive cultural exchanges between the newly independent, yet ideologically clashing, nations of the Third World in the postwar period and offer a multifaceted history of the Cold War beyond the binary paradigm of the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

This paper examines one of Nusantara commentary books entitled Tafsîr al-Azhâr that is written by Hamka. By analyzing the contents of the commentary and tracing the historical roots of the birth of the work, this study shows that Hamka contextualises his interpretation as a criticism against the Sukarno regime. Among the critiques that he poses in his commentary suggest that Sukarno aligns to Communism and the political policies of his administration resonate to the interest of Communist while at the same time are detrimental to that of Muslims. From the historical perspective, there was, in fact, a conflict between Hamka and Sukarno concerning the issue of Communism. In other words, there is a close relationship between Sukarno’s affinity to Communism and Muslim’s conflict with Communists in Indonesia. In the development of tafsîr studies so far, tracing the interpretation material in the context of social criticism is considerably understatement. This is the reason why this study takes this approach. This study suggests that tafsîr (Quranic exegesis) is not just a task of understanding the divine message, but can also be a social critic.

The anti-communist killings of 1965–66 comprised the single most traumatic political event in independent Indonesia, with a consensus estimate of approximately 500,000 deaths. However, these estimates, along with a geographic and political characterization of the killings, have been informed exclusively by anecdotal accounts. In this article, available census data are used in conjunction with demographic analysis to provide a comprehensive and systematic picture of the killings. Using East Java, one of the four hardest-hit Indonesian provinces, as an example, this article estimates and illustrates their impact and provides a geographic characterization of the killings with evidence about the relationship between their locations and local political milieux. While this study is not able to apportion degrees of agency or responsibility for the killings across the various perpetrators, including the Indonesian army and political opponents of the Communist Party of Indonesia, the patterns presented in this article parallel and build on prior research by anthropologists and historians.

The current research aimed to explore the political language of Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno. The exploration was conducted to reveal the ideology behind Soekarno’s political language. The research was focused on inspecting the language form and ideology of the language. The researchers have applied the three dimensions of analysis of the Critical Discourse Analysis theory proposed by Fairclough. The projection of language form was inspected through the analysis of the first level, while the projection of ideology was inspected through the analysis of the second level. Following that, an analysis of the third level was conducted to indicate social-political change in Indonesia as an impact of Soekarno’s political language. The findings have drawn conclusion about the three main ideologies of Soekarno that have shaped nation of Indonesia. They are ‘unity as the most important value’, revolution as the soul of Indonesian’ and, ‘imperialism as the main enemy’.

This article focuses on the history and current political relevance of the Sukarno dynasty in Indonesia. It analyses the reasons for the political longevity of the family, but also discusses internal and external pressures that have forced the dynasty to adopt new strategies to secure its survival. The article tests a number of assertions that political theorists have typically made about dynasties and their political parties: for instance, that they are institutionally weak, electorally unstable and have low levels of representativeness. I argue that the Sukarno family has been able to mitigate most of these much-discussed deficits, but has faced a series of succession crises that, if unresolved, threaten its long-term position in Indonesian politics.

Indonesian President Sukarno established the Games of the New Emerging Forces (ganefo) not only as an alternative to the Olympic Games in the 1960s, but also as part of a systemic challenge to the international status quo. They occurred twice, once in Indonesia in 1963 and again (as “Asian ganefo”) in Cambodia in 1966. The ganefo drew on Asian left-nationalism and neutralism and foreshadowed a possible alternative United Nations that Sukarno planned to call the Conference of the New Emerging Forces (conefo), with membership from the People’s Republic of China and other Asian states. This research note explores the link between sports, Indonesian nationalism and neutralism, ideas of Indonesian martial masculinity, and global politics during the 1960s in East Asia. Contrary to the ideal of the International Olympic Committee (ioc) to keep sports and politics separate, it suggests that both the ioc and Sukarno’s Indonesia mixed sports and politics, but in very different ways.

Natalie Sambhi, a research fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre, examines the violence in Indonesia in 1965-66, when an estimated 500,000 people were murdered. The Indonesian army, which instigated the slaughter, continues to prevent the country from reckoning with its bloody past. The impasse between survivors and the military establishment makes it difficult-even dangerous-to take steps toward a national reconciliation.

Of the mid-twentieth-century European imperial powers, only the Netherlands experienced foreign occupation during World War II, followed soon after by the declaration of independence of the East Indies, its prized possession. I argue that the first series of events constituted a “cultural trauma,” and that, after May 1945, Dutch politicians and pundits viewed developments in Indonesia through this lens of wartime trauma. By the year's end, political actors had begun to interpret the recent metropolitan past and the developing Indonesian conflict according to the same rhetorical framework, emphasizing binaries such as “resistance versus collaboration.” While those on the political Left analogized the two conflicts in order to promote a negotiated settlement, their opponents hoped that, by refusing to recognize Sukarno's Republic of Indonesia, the Netherlands could avoid a second and perhaps even more damaging cultural trauma.