Infrastructures of Impunity (Hardcover)

Hardcover. In Infrastructures of Impunity Elizabeth Drexler argues that the creation and persistence of impunity for the perpetrators of the Cold War Indonesian genocide (1965-66) is not only a legal status, but also a cultural and social process. Impunity for the initial killings and for subsequent acts of political violence has many elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, and affective. Although these elements do not always work at once-at times some are dormant while others are ascendant-together they can be described as a unified entity, a dynamic infrastructure, whose existence explains the persistence of impunity. For instance, truth telling, a first step in many responses to state violence, did not undermine the infrastructure, but instead bent to it. Creative and artistic responses to revelations about the past, however, have begun to undermine the infrastructure, by countering its temporality, affect, social stigmatization and demonstrating its contingency and specific actions, policies and processes that would begin to dismantle it. Drexler contends an infrastructure of impunity could take hold in an established democracy. "A study of the stalled/non-existent process of legally reckoning with the 1965 state-sponsored genocide in Indonesia"-- Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…