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Conferenties & Workshops

Conferentie Dekolonisatie - Abstracts

Regimes of order: public security and crises in authority

The withdrawal of the colonial state was often accompanied by large outbreaks of violence. The (de)colonized territories were subjected to prolonged periods of turbulence and chaos, affecting the population in the most central part of their lives: it threatened the sense of personal security and the guarantee of house and home. Pre-existing institutions and mechanisms guaranteeing order, administering justice, or bolstering social cohesion weakened or even became obsolete, or were perhaps even discarded by the new regimes. Lifting the colonial lid, the ideological and cultural content, not to mention the power and riches of the new nation were heavily contested. Ideological and party strife, as well as a heightened ethnic and class competition formed serious threats to the basic (feelings of) security in many regions. This cluster focuses on the feelings and reactions of the local populations towards the crises in authority and the threat to their personal security.

The Colonizers after Decolonization:

Japanese civilians in Manchuria at the end of the Second World War

Li Narangoa

Faculty of Asian Studies
Australian National University

The Japanese client state of Manchukuo, founded in 1932, was home to more
than a million and a half Japanese settlers who came as farmers, soldiers,
officials and craftsmen to seek a new future on the Asian mainland. On 8
August 1945, just before the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Army
entered Manchukuo on 8 August 1945 to help restore the territory to
Chinese rule. The Japanese civilians in Manchukuo had not been well
informed about the progress of the war, and they were completely taken by
surprise at this turn of events. Before they realized how serious the
situation was, the war was over and Japan had capitulated on 15 August.
Within one week the status of the Japanese in Manchuria changed from
colonizers to citizens of defeated nation. Most of them were not able to
return to Japan until a year later. This paper shall investigate the
traumatic adjustment of Japanese civilians to the new demands of life in
decolonized Manchuria. By looking at their despair, daily survival and
dreams about their past and future this paper will argue that rapid
decolonization process is as violent and violates basic human rights as
effectively as colonization.

Typologies of Decolonisation, identity shifts and security from 1919 until 1968

Karl Hack

National Institute of Education

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

The period from the end of World War One to the 1960s was one of great adjustments for colonial peoples, in which they had to make repeated choices of identity, in the face of colonial, nationalist and chauvinist demands. The impact of cumulative globalisation, increasingly interventionist colonial states, and war, demanded that the kampong dweller and the sojourner be able to link to wider identities. Just as Islam emerged in seventh century Arabia to mediate such changes for tribesmen, so refomist Islam, communism and nationalism vied to fill the void as adat and gotong royong , penghulu and local teacher ceased to be adequate routes to survival, the wider world and ‘modernity’.

In one case that is not that atypical, an Indian in this period migrated from India, joined the British Special Branch in Singapore, passed to the Japanese kempeitai (others joined the Indian National Army), then back to the British, before transferring loyalties to a new Malayan, and then Malaysian, state. An Ambonese might have started by joining the Dutch colonial forces, fought in the 1945-49 period, and then migrated to the Netherlands. Chinese in Malaya found themselves called to choose between China-centred identity, Malaya-centred identity still based on traditional Chinese associations, communism, the idea of a new, syncretised ‘Malayan’ identity, and then a more Malay dominated Malaysian identity. The failure to appease Burma’s hill-tribes disastrously skewed the future history of Myanmar.

The point here is that this period was one of shifting options in terms of identity, varying from assimilation to metropolitan culture, to radical nationalist rejection of the colonial power, and from unifying pan-state identities, to fracturing local adat, ‘tribal’ and regional allegiances.

Furthermore, the way individuals and states handled these identity options shaped security, while security states were in turn constructed in an attempt to reshape identities, or at least to place out of bounds markers on how far these could impinge on public space and public discourse.

This paper will re-examine the traumas of decolonisation through looking at the interactions between identity and security. It will take as its areas of study the countries bounding the coastline from the end of India in the north to the beginning of Australia in the south, in other words Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Timor. Within this region, it will argue that Singapore’s experience as strategic bastion and ‘global city’ is best seen in a completely different context, with comparisons to Malta, the Treaty Ports and Hong Kong.

The paper will draw on the authors’ work on what makes security states work, and not work, on his recent editorship of a book on Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia , and on his interest in the comparative study of British colonies. The aim will be to establish a typology of situations, colonial policies, and postcolonial results. It will argue that the lessons and problems of this period continue to be relevant, not just because ‘decolonisation’ is ongoing – Acheh and West Papua being cases in question – but because the lessons of integrationist security policies, the role of ideology in making and breaking states, and the importance of combining disciplinary modes with good governance, remain as important for tomorrow as for the decolonisation of yesterday.

Community and the Provision of Social Services:

A Comparison of Colonial and National Eras in the Rural Philippines

Greg Bankoff

School of Asian Studies

University of Auckland, New Zealand

The inability of the state to provide social services to the majority of its population is a recognised fact of daily living in the Philippines that the process of decolonisation did not significantly alter. Instead, rural communities have had to rely primarily on a long and rich tradition of community associations in the archipelago. While there is often a certain amount of historical romanticising about a golden era of autarchic indigenous communities in tune with their environment, there is also a long history at the local level of formal and informal associations committed to individual and community welfare that enhances people’s capacity to withstand personal adversity and the depredations of nature. Many of these developments have gone largely unnoticed. Seeking to uncover more mono-specific associations in relation to community welfare according to their own criteria of what such organisations should comprise, western social scientists have often failed to recognise the existence of other more multi-specific ones that do not share the same outward form but may fulfil many of the same functions. Nor did the attainment of independence in 1946 significantly change the situation for many rural people to whom the state continues to represent more of a threat than a source of services. This paper t races the evolution of local associations formed in the face of misfortune and travail based on archival data from the time of the seventeenth and eighteenth century cofradias , through the turnuhans of the 19 th century to the clubs and PTAs of the first half of the 20 th century to the current blossoming of samahans post 1972, paying special attention to the process of decolonisation.

Courting the enemy: The ‘psychological factor’ in the 1950s

Darul Islam conflict in South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Esther Velthoen

Netherlands Institute for War Documentation

Abstract: forthcoming

Security in Jakarta in the age of decolonization: mapping reservoirs of violence

Robert Cribb

Australian National University

Explanations of intense violence tend to be instrumentalist or circumstantialist. Instrumentalist arguments see violence as a fundamentally rational (even if undesirable) response to conflict. Violence reflects the intensity of material and/or ideological conflicts and is more or less calibrated to the seriousness of the conflict and to the availability and attractiveness of other potential solutions to that conflict. Circumstantialist explanations, by contrast, stress a process of escalation in which the initial motive for violence is overtaken by the logic (and illogic) of violence itself. The result is a vicious circle of escalating violence which ceases only with catastrophe, exhaustion or outside intervention. Circumstantialist arguments do not explain the origins of violence -- in this respect they are supplementary to instrumentalist arguments -- but they claim to explain how the intensity of violence often seems to exceed what might be demanded by 'rational' planning.

A new concept, 'reservoirs of violence', adds texture to the circumstantialist arguments by suggesting that intense violence is often a result of the breaking down of barriers which normally segregate from the rest of society those sectors where violence is the norm. These sectors are parts of society where violence is routine but which are normally insulated from other parts of society in a kind of functional division. The bursting open of reservoirs of violence in times of rapid social or political change tends to flood violent practices into the rest of society.

In this paper I seek to identify the reservoirs of violence which influenced the pattern of public security in Jakarta/Batavia during the decade of decolonization, 1940-1950, paying especial attention to military and criminal violence.

The struggle between Luba and Lulua in Congo during decolonization

Zana Etambala

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Abstract: forthcoming

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