CALL FOR PAPER CONFERENCE
Indonesian Internationalism: Global Struggles across Orders
The Indonesian history of the twentieth century is fundamentally internationalist. From the early 20th century onwards, Indonesian anti-colonial activists envisioned and built global networks in their struggle against Dutch imperialism, drawing inspiration from ideologies such as pan-Islamism, socialism, and the democratic revolutions of the West. Transnational solidarity from Arab and Asian nations helped shape the Indonesian revolution (1945-1949), thanks to a wide array of informal diplomats and post-colonial politicians. These endeavours crystallized in world-making initiatives such as the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the New Emerging Forces, where Indonesian internationalists advanced ideas from the Global South, challenging the bipolar hegemony of the Cold War.
Inspired by Taufik Abdullah and Sukri Abdurrachman’s notion of ‘Indonesia across Orders’, we believe that Indonesian internationalism defies neat chronologies or totalizing concepts like the state. Movements from Indonesia worked against and beyond the colonial and Japanese occupations and the Sukarno and Suharto regimes. For example, Indonesia’s state vision of anti-imperialist internationalism during the Guided Democracy era (1959-1965) had its clear rivals. Moreover, internationalism did not fully disappear under the tyranny of Soeharto’s Orde Baru. During this period human rights, environmentalist, women’s, labor, pro-democracy, and indigenous movements, among others, built or engaged in transnational networks, both as a way to internationalize domestic struggles and as a means of building solidarity with movements in other places. Suharto’s fall was equally driven by cooperation between activists from Indonesia and abroad. Indonesian internationalism moved against as well as beyond political orders.
This conference views world history and Indonesian history as inextricably bound. To that end, we seek to bring together new research that places ‘Indonesian internationalists’, including their organizations and movements, at the forefront of the scholarly discussion. To build a truly global history of Indonesia, this conference departs from an understanding of internationalism as having multiple points of origin. To that end, the conference departs from a capacious view of internationalism that includes the full political, cultural and religious spectrum. In particular, the conference will interrogate the networks and spaces where ideas about solidarity were exchanged, exploring how mobility and interpersonal relationships contributed to repeated attempts to build more inclusive global movements and practices.
This gathering is a collective project to decolonize and globalize our shared understandings of the past by portraying Indonesian actors who shaped networks, cultural scenes, religious organizations, and revolutionary politics on the world stage. We explicitly welcome contributions that move beyond the Cold War or Euro-American lenses and experiences of internationalism by foregrounding the challenges and opportunities posed by Indonesian movements in building international coalitions across imperial borders and postcolonial regions. Whether your focus is on communist politics, Afro-Asian movements, the arts, international feminism, human rights, labor and migration, non-governmental organizations, religious activism, indigenous politics, or the diasporic movements of students and exiles, your voice is essential to the emerging field of Indonesian internationalism.
The conference
We invite contributions from scholars at all career levels, but we particularly welcome submissions from early career scholars based in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The working language of the conference is English, but we also warmly welcome papers from scholars whose primary working language is not English. Because historians can and should not monopolize the study of the past, we also welcome interdisciplinary approaches from political science, sociology, and other relevant fields.
The conference will convene based on pre-circulated papers of approximately 7,000 words, with the intent to publish after a cycle of post-conference revisions. Submitted papers will be circulated only to the confirmed speakers.
Join us from July 12-14, 2027, at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. Please submit a brief proposal (max. 300 words) and a short bio by October 31, 2026 via email indonesianinternationalism@gmail.com (Please use “Call for Paper 2026” as the email subject). Notifications of acceptance will be announced in December. The submission deadline for the papers is May 1, 2027. There are no registration fees for this event.
Research topics
We invite papers spanning the entire twentieth century. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Internationalisms between Indonesia and specific regions in the decolonizing world;
- The imagination and participation of Indonesian internationalists in cross-border ideologies and communities, such as Pan-Asianism, Pan-Islamism, socialism, and communism;
- Interwar and post-war connections between Indonesian and other movements across Dutch empire, such as with Surinamese and Caribbean activist;
- The history of religious Indonesian movements and their internationalist connections;
- Popular Afro-Asianism in different inflections;
- Networks between Indonesian feminists and movements abroad and questions of gender;
- Intellectual histories of and conceptual reflections on ‘Indonesian internationalism’: What does internationalism mean, specifically from an Indonesian point of view?
- The internationalist roots and ties of the Indonesian environmental movement
- Indonesian engagement with indigenous internationalism
- The internationalism of subnational and secessionist movements (for example those based in Aceh, Papua, or the Maluku);
- The internationalism of pro-democracy and human rights activists during the New Order (and after)
- Cultural exchanges or artistic cooperations between Indonesian artists and the wider world;
- The world of work: global networks of Indonesian trade unionism;
- Histories that decenter Java: how did movements in places like Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Maluku connect directly with movements outside the archipelago?
Organising committee
Dr. Wildan Sena Utama (Universitas Gadjah Mada)
Sander van Der Horst R.M.A (Leiden University-KITLV)
Prof. Bradley Simpson (University of Connecticut)
Dr. Grace Leksana (Utrecht University)
Contact Mail: indonesianinternationalism@gmail.com
Image: Delegates from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and India, presumably during the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung (1955). Source: KITLV (406391) http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:845106.