Geoffery Robinson, professor of history, has received the George McT. Kahin Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for his 2018 book, “The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66.”
“The Killing Season” explores how 500,000 people, mostly members of the Communist Party of Indonesia, were killed and more than 1 million others detained without charge in a shocking anti-leftist purge that gripped Indonesia from October 1965 through mid-1966. In 2018, during a book talk at UCLA, Robinson analyzed how the mass violence of 1965–66 can be attributed to three major factors: existing historical conditions related to Indonesian political life, the army’s leadership and the influence of powerful external states.
Robinson is working on a sequel with the National University of Singapore’s Douglas Kammen to explore a visual history of Indonesian violence from 1965 to 1967. He hopes to give people a sense of what life was like in the period before, during and after the violence to create a societal memory and alternative history different than the dominant military narrative.
