Drawing on her forthcoming book, Infrastructures of Impunity, Elizabeth F. 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—taken together, all elements can be described as a unified entity, a dynamic infrastructure whose existence explains and accounts for 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.

ELIZABETH F. DREXLER is an 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 projects explore 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.
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