On ‘Extreme Violence’ and ‘Impunity’

Susie Protschky; Pepijn Brandon

doi:10.51769/bmgn-lchr.19567

On ‘Extreme Violence’ and ‘Impunity’

Author(s)

Susie Protschky VU Amsterdam
Pepijn Brandon VU Amsterdam

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51769/bmgn-lchr.19567

Abstract

A key element of the conclusions of the large-scale ODGOI project was the frequent and structural usage by Dutch armed forces of ‘extreme violence’. This extreme violence was enabled by the climate of impunity created by politicians, civil servants, judges, and others in authority positions. The choice not to describe such violence as ‘war crimes’ led to a storm of criticism. This essay rather focuses on the concepts of ‘extreme violence’ and ‘impunity’ themselves. It argues that these terms remain undertheorised, tend to obscure important differences between the violence of the coloniser and the violence of the colonised, and provide limited guidance in addressing questions of historic responsibility and implication.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Susie Protschky, VU Amsterdam

Susie Protschky is Professor of Global Political History at VU Amsterdam. She is a historian of Dutch colonialism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indonesia, and an expert on politics and visual culture. She is the author of Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Manchester University Press 2019), Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Brill 2011), and various edited collections on modern history and photography in Indonesia. Her current book project, contracted to Cornell University Press, is Seeing Like a Soldier: Photography and Colonial Violence in Dutch Indonesia. E-mail: s.protschky@vu.nl.
Pepijn Brandon, VU Amsterdam

Pepijn Brandon is Professor of Global Economic and Social History at VU Amsterdam and Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History. His work focuses on the intersections of the histories of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and war. He is the author of War, Capital, and the Dutch State (1588-1795) (Brill 2015). Brandon coordinated several large-scale research projects on the Dutch involvement in global slavery, including the project commissioned by the City of Amsterdam that led to formal apologies by Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema. Brandon is currently the chair of the editorial board of BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review. His work on this forum was conducted before he accepted that position. E-mail: p.brandon@vu.nl.

Downloads

Published

2025-06-30

Issue

Vol. 140 No. 2 (2025)

Section

Forum

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

a) Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

b) Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

c) Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.

Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their published article in their institutional repository.

How to Cite

Protschky, S., & Brandon, P. (2025). On ‘Extreme Violence’ and ‘Impunity’. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 140(2), 89-101. https://doi.org/10.51769/bmgn-lchr.19567