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Following nearly a decade of failed covert operations targeting Indonesia, the Central Intelligence Agency turned to allies across the Atlantic in the mid-1960s to assist with undermining the government in Jakarta. During this period, the Information Research Department (IRD), the British covert propaganda department hidden deep within the Foreign Office, established a special unit in Singapore innocuously named the Southeast Asia Monitoring Unit (SEAMU) to spearhead a disinformation campaign to destabilize Indonesia in hopes of ushering in a more friendly regime in Jakarta and putting a premature end to Konfronstasi – Indonesia’s low-level border war waged against Malaysia. With the collaboration of the American, Australian, and Malaysian governments, the British psychological warfare campaign not only flooded the Indonesian market with black propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts, but deftly manipulated the international news circuit to spread Indonesian Army propaganda across the globe to help provide legitimacy to Army claims and help mollify international opinion of the mass murder of up to a million nominally leftist Indonesian citizens.

Chris Hulshof is a historian of empire, covert operations, and international power projection in Southeast Asia during the twentieth century. His work explores how the post–World War II world order emerged not through unilateral Western design but through contested, multilinear interactions among U.S. agents, European interlocutors, and Southeast Asian political elites, with a focus on how furtive diplomacy, militarism, and trans-imperial entanglements shaped local independence movements and global structures of power. His work has been featured in both academic publications such as the Journal of Cold War Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, and Empire Competitions and public-facing outlets such as Floresa, Passport, and Justice in Translation. Additionally, Chris serves as the Director of Community Engagement with the Graduate Education in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium and a Council Member and Chair of the Graduate Student Committee of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

Accommodation: If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at cseas@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.