Co-sponsored by the Rutgers International Institute for Peace, the American Institute for Indonesian Studies, and the New York Southeast Asian Network
Background
Impunity is not simply a legal process, it permeates the social, political, legal and cultural contexts. Understanding the repeated performance of impunity as an infrastructure discloses how a number of dynamic systems intersect to compound impunity over time and space. Prof. Drexler will explore how victims, family members, and activists persistently demand justice (most often defined in legal terms) despite repeated failures to achieve accountability and consider how their consistent and creative demands may ultimately subvert the infrastructure in the realm of affect rather than truth and law.
Speaker: Elizabeth F. Drexler, Director, Peace and Justice Studies and Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University
Speaker’s Bio:
ELIZABETH F. DREXLER is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Peace and Justice Studies. She has been working in Indonesia since 1996 focusing on issues of human rights and state violence. Her research explores how societies address the legacies of political violence, emphasizing the relationships among institutions, transnational interventions, historical narratives, and contested memories in establishing the rule of law and reconstructing social and political life—or failing to do so. She is particularly concerned with the role that knowledge of past violence, whether acknowledged or denied, plays in the present. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled “Infrastructures of Impunity: Millennials and Affective Engagement with New Order Violence in Indonesia” which critiques the belief that documenting history and past state crimes leads to non-repetition, and it demonstrates that affective dimensions of the disclosures of past violence color the social and political present. This work pays particular attention to how youth are engaged and invoked by differently positioned actors and advocates and how youth themselves contribute to knowledge and memory projects about authoritarian violence. Additional research explores current developments in human rights discourse, norms and practice in Indonesia through the lens of criminalization and irregularities of law enforcement. In an ongoing research project, Drexler is exploring the visual and artistic representations of intersectional experiences of structural injustice in the United States. She is the author of the award-winning Aceh, Indonesia: Securing the Insecure State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, awarded the Cecil B. Currey Book Award).
Register here: https://rutgers.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lcpbxoPpQKi1_11C3q8OrQ
