Feb 08, 2025 Last Updated 9:40 PM, Feb 6, 2025

Society

Review: An act of manipulation?

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a bold, disturbing and ultimately unsatisfactory exploration of the place of violence in modern Indonesia

Art and the city

Indonesian artists are using new media to rethink urban space

Soft diplomacy in heavy metal

Indonesia’s liberal art scene attracts adventurous Australian artists

Herstory in art

Titarubi’s art challenges masculinity in Indonesian visual arts and beyond

Review: The making of an Indonesian human rights lawyer

Dan Lev explains how an outsider became a national hero

What gives rise to moral outrage?

Rather than being merely the result of religious extremism, recent cases of moral outrage point to a wide range of current political and social problems

Teaching remote Indonesia

A new program sends Indonesia’s best and brightest graduates to teach children in its poorest villages

Indonesia’s secret police weapon

Perfectly coiffed hair and rose-pink cheeks underpin Polri’s latest policing tactic

The middle of nowhere

Highland communities in Papua are demanding access to services, but there is a limit to what can be offered in the most remote settlements

Disease control in democratic Indonesia

As infectious diseases spread, strategic governance becomes ever more important

Traveling for a cure

Rebuilding trust in doctors will be an important part of Aceh’s post-conflict recovery

A new model for mental health care?

Mental health services have been seriously neglected in Indonesia, but emergency responses to the Aceh tsunami and conflict have led to new ways of thinking

Ignorance that kills

Many Indonesian women face great difficulties in accessing safe terminations of unwanted pregnancies

A healthcare revolution in the regions

Regional governments around Indonesia are devising new and ambitious free healthcare schemes for their electorates, but to what end?

Medicine for a sick system

Healthcare in Indonesia suffers from many chronic problems that only healthier politics can cure

Where there’s smoke, there’s politics

Campaigns against smoking are finally gaining ground, but the tobacco lobby is fighting back

Living without a state

People in rural Papua are more interested in basic services than grand political struggles

The biggest cock

In Jakarta’s crowded neighbourhoods, beliefs in supernatural power and invulnerability still surround the figure of the jago tough man

Selling nationalism

Indonesian television advertisements are constructing images of Indonesia by appropriating well-known nationalist themes

West Java’s mini-fictions

Technology is opening up new possibilities for Sundanese literature

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