Heritage

• Healthcare and the Dutch East India Company - The Dutch East India Company (VOC) took healthcare seriously, albeit mainly for business reasons. This research reveals that although healthcare in Asia was well organised, the VOC faced persistent problems for two centuries.

• The Confluence Of Water and Power - The study discusses the relationship between the central courts and local communities in the constructing and managing of water systems in the Brantas river basin, East Java, Indonesia between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries CE. The study looks into what extend Java’s specific longue durée conditions of topography and climate have determined these systems, exploring the temporal and spatial dynamics of the system. Nearby systems as existed in mainland Southeast Asia are compared with the systems in East Java.

• Empire's Violent End - This study, now published into a book compares Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization during the period of 1945-1962.

• Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History -  This study, published in 2019, is structure around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' It draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis.

• The League Against Imperialism attracted anticolonial activists in postcolonial world. This volume is the first to capture the global history of the LAI by bringing together contributions by scholars researching the movement from various regions, languages, and archives. Told primarily from the perspectives of those on the peripheries of empires, the volume argues that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism during the interwar years and remained an inspiration for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global south. 

Language, cultures, and worldview

• Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: The Lesser Sunda Islands - What can languages spoken in the Lesser Sunda Islands today tell us about the histories of its various population groups?

• A History of Alorese - This PhD research reconstructs the history of Alorese, spoken in eastern Indonesia, by combining perspectives from oral history and historical linguistics. The social history of the Alorese people is reconstructed through migration stories based on narrative accounts from fourteen Alorese villages. The dissertation can be accessed through the Leiden University Repository.

• Oral Traditions Studies in Indonesia. Joint doctoral project between LIAS and Konsortium Tradisi Lisan. The consortium consists of Universitas Indonesia, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Universitas Udayana and Universitas Gajah Mada and is coordinated by the Assosiasi Tradisi Lisan.

• The |0100| Project studies the discourses, practices and imaginaries of Islamic information society’s most debated component- Artificial Intelligence- using multimodal and mixed methods and comparing and contrasting narratives and imagery of AI-religious-futures in Muslim Southeast Asia.

• Indonesian Islamic manuscripts in the digital age - This project combines ethnography and textual analysis to explore how digitisation transforms the cultural and political significance of Islamic manuscripts in Indonesia and the Netherlands. By examining how digitisation interacts with these views, the project will inform debates on the legacy of sacred texts and the ethics and practices of their digitisation in postcolonial and crosscultural contexts.

• Middle-Class Conundrum: Its Growth and Stagnation in Indonesia - This research evaluate the Indonesian middle class in the period of 2014-2024. At the national level, the share of the middle class increased from 18 to 23 percent in the first period but returned to 18 percent in 2023. This pattern generally holds across regions, with Java-Bali and Kalimantan consistently showing a higher than national average share of the middle class. The research is one of the project under the Leiden Political Economy Group.

• A study into students' motivation and engagement in problem-based learning in Indonesia HE - Problem Based Learning and Case Based Learning support students to work in groups to actively construct their knowledge through the ‘reorganisation of their previously acquired mental structures’. The study indicates that students' motivation and engagement in PBL and CBL significantly affected students' academic performance.

• After the Tsunami - Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Aceh, the output of this research shows how the everyday work of recovery is indispensable for any large-scale reconstruction effort to succeed. Addressing post-disaster reconstruction from the survivors’ perspectives opens up space for criticism of post-disaster governance without reducing the discussion of recovery to top-down interventions. 

• Ecosystem services associated to birds around oil palm plantations. Within this study, land use and oil palm plantation management in relation to bird-related ecosystem services will be investigated. 

• Understanding the ecology system “plant-herbivore interaction” to improve carbon capture and sequestration and the anthropogenic impact to this system. The project focuses on the resilience of  tropical intertidal “blue carbon”seagrass meadows, grazed by Dugong (Dugong dugong) and the impact of anthropogenic stressors. This research is placed in Balikpapan Bay East Kalimantan, Indonesia.

• The development of eDNA for quantifying biodiversity from freshwater ecosystem in oil palm plantation. eDNA is a new tool for assessing biodiversity. It is a rapid and consistent tool for detecting the animal community in certain area.  One of the challenges is that this tool needs optimation in fieldwork and lab work.

Socio-Legal Perspectives on Indonesian Legal Institutions: Research from the Van Vollenhoven Institute

This panel presents the Van Vollenhoven Institute’s (VVI) socio-legal research on Indonesian legal institutions, focusing on the interaction between law, governance, and society. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, the VVI investigates how legal systems function in practice and how they are shaped by political, cultural, and social dynamics. 

In addition, the VVI hosts a wide range of PhD and postdoctoral research on topics such as criminal justice, tax law, land and natural resource governance, and data protection—often in partnership with Indonesian institutions like the Indonesian Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR).

Featured projects include:

• LAMPU (Lawmaking Politics Under Democratic Decline in Indonesia), a collaboration with Gadjah Mada University that examines how democratic erosion affects legislative processes.

• PINTAL (Project for Innovation in Teaching Adat Law), which supports the renewal of customary law education in Indonesian universities through context-sensitive and collaborative approaches.

Previous projects and/or PhD research include: 

• Building Land Tenure Systems - Land tenure issues in Timor-Leste are complex and deeply shaped by the nation’s history. Taking an insider’s perspective, this socio-legal research studies the development of the Timorese formal land tenure system from independence in 2002 to 2018. It shows how political, legal, and administrative decisions on land administration are made, what and who influences them, which problems and dilemmas politicians and state officials face, and how the formal land tenure system works in practice.

Strengthening Global Health Through Collaboration

Together with leading Indonesian institutions, LUMC is engaged in addressing major health challenges—from the persistent threat of infectious diseases to the growing impact of non-communicable diseases. Joint research initiatives span diverse fields, including immunology, infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and the social and environmental drivers of disease.

With initiatives such as the LUMC Global and HypoVax Global, supporting young researchers and encouraging south-south-north collaboration linking our Indonesian partnerships to pertners in other regions, this partnership is evolving into a platform for inclusive, global innovation—one that empowers all participants and communities involved. Several of LUMC projects are:

• Professor dr. Maria Yazdanbakhsh (infectious diseases) leads a team of global researchers looking at immune systems of populations with varying levels of exposure to microorganisms and parasites, which may influence disease patterns and vaccine responsiveness globally. She has promoted several Indonesian PhD students that have become postdocs or hold leadership positions at our partner institutions in Indonesia.

• For over twenty years, Prof. dr. Rob Nelissen (Orthopaedics), adjunct professor at Universitas Airlangga hosts Indonesian clinical & research fellows at his department at LUMC and LUMC orthopedic residents have visited Indonesia in return.

• Professor dr. Annemieke Geluk leads a research group on Immunodiagnostics of leprosy and tuberculosis which includes PhD students from Africa, South-America and Indonesia.

• Professor dr. Joris Rotmans (internal medicine) works with Universitas Indonesia to investigate how the prevention and treatment of kidney diseases can be improved. Serious kidney diseases are relatively common in Indonesia, partly because kidney stones are common and relatively many patients have kidney damage as a result of infectious diseases.

The faculties of Biology and Pharmacy of Universitas Gajah Mada and the faculty of Science of Universiteit Leiden started a twin laboratory in Yogyakarta. This laboratory, similar to the one in Leiden, concentrates on Zebrafish research and meets the highest standards of research in both Biology and Pharmacy. The laboratory will be used for nutritional and pharmaceutical purposes.