The Indonesian Left in the Twentieth Century: Beyond the Rise and Fall of a Party

This edited volume highlights the work of a new generation of scholars who have reignited the study of the Indonesian left, and the PKI in particular, across continents and disciplines. It reinterprets the Indonesian left and its associated organisations not simply as a local and national phenomenon but as a force of global relevance. Historiographically, the history of the left has always been constructed in conversation and contestation with, on the one hand, the colonial and postcolonial state and, on the other, the communist epicentres of Moscow and Beijing. Moving beyond party-centered narratives, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how diverse global networks and ideologies were translated and transformed within very local and situationally-specific environments. In doing so, they foreground the contributions of people and organizations often relegated to the margins of the PKI, illuminating the Indonesian left as a dynamic site of transnational and local interaction. 

Lin Hongxuan is an assistant professor with the department of Southeast Asian studies, National University of Singapore. His first monograph, Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism, and the Making of the Indonesian Republic was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. 

Klaas Stutje is senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. He moves between the fields of cultural history, with a focus on colonial museum collections and issues of restitution, and Indonesian political history of anticolonial nationalism, communism and anarchism.

Rianne Subijanto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She is the author of Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2025).