According to the definition employed by the project leaders Gert Oostindie, Ben Schoenmaker and Frank van Vree in Beyond the Pale (Over de grens), in which the project’s overall findings are presented, ‘extreme violence’ largely denotes violence employed outside or in the margins of regular military operations, directed towards civilians or captured enemy fighters, and without military justification or clearly delineated military goals. The term serves a descriptive aim, but according to the researchers also opens up possibilities for considering the impact of violence on victims, and its political and moral dimensions.¹ However, can such an intuitive, generic and undertheorised concept as ‘extreme violence’ actually carry all this weight? How applicable is this concept outside of the confines of a contemporary Dutch political debate about responsibility and historical reckoning? Does it align with approaches used by international scholars when examining colonial violence in a wider comparative framework?

The editors of Beyond the Pale largely avoid such fundamental questions. The most obvious consequence of their definition is the creation of a single container term for the multidimensional violence of the coloniser and the colonised, quarantined from more nuanced discussions of the origins, context, and aims of violence. In the style of traditional military history, the odgoi project took for granted the norms of modern war. This might serve researchers well at the purely empirical level of cataloguing atrocities within a context that is nothing but violent, but such an approach seems to fare less well when trying to explain the dynamics of (extreme) violence, let alone its moral implications. After all, as odgoi’s authors frequently remind the readers through an aphorism of former Dutch minister Ben Bot, Dutch extreme violence was only one part of a war in which the Netherlands stood ‘on the wrong side of history’.² This statement has serious implications for the status of all violence employed by the Dutch, not just ‘extreme’ military violence. However, these implications actually become more difficult to explore once the highly subjective distinction between ‘extreme’ and an unidentified converse (not extreme? normative? permissible?) stands for the supreme moral and political measure. For precisely this reason, a long line of political theorising going back at least to Frantz Fanon has examined and roundly rejected the notion that the violence of anticolonial uprisings can or should be approached with the same intellectual tools as that employed by the colonial powers.³

In Dutch public debate, criticism has focused mostly on what the term ‘extreme violence’ potentially excludes, concentrating particularly on whether or not ‘war crimes’ would have been a more appropriate designation for at least some of the actions by Dutch political and military authorities and Dutch armed forces. Years before he joined the odgoi project, Bart Luttikhuis had already commented that Dutch concerns with legalistic framings tend to overshadow larger moral questions of responsibility in grappling with colonial history.⁴ Notwithstanding that individual historians from the odgoi project in fact do use the phrase ‘war crimes’ now and then⁵ – even though it was excluded as an official term of reference – debates on concepts and definitions have not formed a substantial part of the outcomes of the project. Only in the edited volume Empire’s Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945-1962 (2022) did odgoi scholars explicitly address some theories of violence to justify the terms ‘extreme violence’ and ‘impunity’.⁶ In the end, Bart Luttikhuis and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg settled on soldiers’ ‘commonsense’ understandings of ‘crossing a line’ in wartime.⁷ This point of view of course avoids the question of how norms around what constitutes ‘acceptable’ violence in a ‘peacetime’ colonial setting developed historically and became discursively naturalised and legally justified.⁸

When faced with the task of analysing violence during the Indonesian Revolution and the Dutch war of reconquest, odgoi researchers do at times opt for explanations that, implicitly or explicitly, unsettle the framework of extreme violence. For example, in making international comparisons of insurgent and counter-insurgent violence, Roel Frakking and Martin Thomas note that ‘the supposed extreme nature of violence we have considered can be understood as a series of logical, if troubling, choices.’⁹ The careful attention to differences in circumstances, motives and patterns of violent acts in the volume dedicated to the local dynamics of the Indonesian Revolution, edited by Bambang Purwanto et al., similarly challenges the homogenising tendencies in the term ‘extreme violence’.¹⁰

In the volume Onze Revolutie. Bloemlezing uit de Indonesische geschiedschrijving over de strijd voor de onafhankelijkheid, 1945-1949 (Our Revolution: An Anthology of Indonesian Historiography on the Struggle for Independence, 1945-1949), editors Abdul Wahid and Yulanti Yulianti present a select Indonesian historiography that does not feature the term ‘extreme violence’ at all, except in the introduction that relates the anthology to the odgoi research.¹¹ Neither does the question of whether the Dutch were culpable for extreme violence during the Indonesian war of independence play a major role in present-day Indonesian scholarly or public debate. After all, the rejection and final overthrow of a Dutch colonial regime that was violent in its ordinary, unexceptional actions formed the basis for the establishment of an independent state (Figure 1).

While careful not to phrase this quite so explicitly, both Grace Leksana and Farabi Fakih in this forum note the extent to which the project’s framing was driven by Dutch concerns.¹² In his important and unsparing epilogue to Beyond the Pale, prominent Indonesian historian Hilmar Farid states: ‘As the research questions, the conceptual framework and the methodology were defined in these debates [Dutch debates on the violence perpetrated by the Dutch army, sp and pb], the relevance of this book will be appreciated more in the Netherlands than in Indonesia.’¹³ That is not to say that the odgoi research has nothing substantial to offer to scholars outside the Netherlands. Its findings on the dynamics of interethnic, religious and political violence committed during the course of the civil war and social revolutions in Indonesia will certainly stoke historical debates. However, these findings will not, in all likelihood, affect the basic parameters from which the legitimacy of the Revolution or the violence employed against it will be judged in Indonesia. For the Netherlands, where separating extreme or exceptional violence from regular violence has always played a highly problematic role in debates about the legitimacy of Dutch military actions, the unwillingness to engage on a more conceptual level with the question of violence presents a missed opportunity.

Although odgoi’s conclusions are important for destroying the notion that Dutch atrocities were mere ‘excesses’, the concept of ‘extreme violence’ still rests on the basis of a separation between the regular and non-regular that is itself entangled with colonial assumptions (Figure 2). The introduction and conclusion of Beyond the Pale address criticisms raised from within and outside the project team, but never reflect on how different methodological choices – for example, making a clearer distinction between the violence of the coloniser and the violence of the colonised – might have led to different emphases or outcomes.

A second concept central to the project’s conclusions, yet given little serious reflection, is that of ‘impunity’. The odgoi project’s official conclusion that extreme violence was caused by the impunity of military offenders commits the fallacy of circular argumentation. Impunity is not so much an explanation for structural violence as part of its description. That the notion of ‘impunity’ adds nothing substantial to the historical understandings of the structural aspects of Dutch military violence in Indonesia, and in fact only leads to ambiguity and confusion, is demonstrated by some of its perverse outcomes. One example is that vociferous critics of odgoi among Dutch veterans and their political allies often oppose the project’s findings with the argument that Dutch military and political authorities were in fact to blame for the actions of ‘rogue’ soldiers like the notorious Captain Raymond Westerling. The odgoi conclusion of ‘impunity’, and Prime Minister Rutte’s apology, which excluded veterans from responsibility, has done nothing to displace that contention. Debate in the Netherlands consequently stalls at a bizarre junction: whether Westerling was a hero, a war criminal, or an ordinary soldier carrying out orders. The bigger issue in defining ‘structural’ violence – the deeper roots of Dutch colonial violence that precede and transcend the governing structures of the 1940s¹⁴ – has been left to future historians to address.

What undergirds the impunity with which Dutch governing and military authorities acted during the Revolution to sweep evidence of war crimes under the carpet and leave perpetrators unpunished? Getting historians to agree, so the saying goes, is like herding cats, and so it is completely standard that the odgoi researchers answer this question in different ways. Remco Raben and Peter Romijn are quite clear on the deep-seated, chauvinistic colonial mentalities that justified the Dutch launching a war of reconquest and its framing as lawful and necessary.¹⁵ In their introduction to the edited volume Empire’s Violent End, on the other hand, Brocades Zaalberg and Luttikhuis point to the nature of warfare itself. Comparative research on decolonisation in the French and British empires shows the Dutch were not alone in practicing violence with impunity, and they question whether there is anything distinctive about the violence of colonial (or anti-colonial) warfare.¹⁶ Their focus on military-historical views of wartime violence arguably blurs the wider social, political, cultural and economic landscape in which the norms of empire were globally and locally negotiated and contested. It also crops out the deep-rooted, epistemic nature of racial capitalism on which Dutch colonialism had been founded since the seventeenth century.

Other odgoi outcomes document ‘impunity’ by examining how Dutch governments of the 1940s and later decades used propaganda to actively cover up military scandals from the Revolution.¹⁷ But how surprising is it really that Dutch authorities lied to conscripted soldiers and civilian voters with the ‘police action’ myth? Wartime censorship and propaganda are well-established phenomena in democracies and totalitarian regimes alike. That the government and military of the day ‘sold a colonial war’ to domestic and international stakeholders in the conflict in Indonesia is a necessary but insufficient condition for explaining the resilience of pro-colonial narratives.¹⁸ After all, the view from the top does nothing to show the widespread everyday buy-in to colonialism that was standard in the Netherlands for centuries and certainly in the 1940s – with exceptions among anti-colonial activists from Indonesia and the Caribbean, card-carrying communists, some socialists and other radical critics of empire. And it remains deeply embedded in sections of contemporary Dutch society. To focus on authorities occludes how non-state stakeholders – like combatants who become veterans – co-created narratives of ‘good soldiers’ during the war in Indonesia and decades after it ended.¹⁹

There are significant recent studies of the memory politics of decolonisation in the Netherlands that have eroded the national myths that hide a long history of colonial violence.²⁰ Perhaps the most powerful explanatory framework, however, comes from Michael Rothberg’s notion of the ‘implicated subject’, a figure who represents the ‘distinct but intertwined histories that position subjects in relation to both victimisation and perpetration simultaneously.’²¹ Rothberg’s work prompts us to think ‘beyond victims and perpetrators’ and recognise situations where ‘subjects can occupy multiple positions simultaneously or in succession’ and ‘different relations to past and present injustices’ can coexist.²²

Conscripted Dutch veterans may indeed have been compelled by their government to fight in Indonesia on pain of imprisonment for conscientious objection.²³ However, some of these men also committed or were complicit in war crimes. For those who were not on the frontlines, there remains plenty of evidence in their ego documents, military publications and veterans’ advocacy materials that many were representative of their milieu in accepting the righteousness of Dutch colonial reconquest following the Japanese occupation. Ordinary soldiers did more than passively absorb colonial propaganda. Many of them actively produced and maintained apologist narratives of the war and centred themselves, rather than the Indonesians, as victims.²⁴ Around 1945, and long after, the notion was commonplace in the Netherlands that Indonesians were not ready for self-governance, but rather, in need of further guidance from a more ‘civilised’ power, and that the Revolution was the work of savages and terrorists rather than of a politically, morally and ideologically-driven population seeking self-determination (Figure 3). There is also copious historical evidence that Indo-Europeans with European-equivalent status (those who were gelijkgesteld) had enjoyed certain degrees of agency and status in colonial society. Importantly, they wielded power and precedence over Indonesians in ways that deeply implicated them in the benefits of colonialism before the Japanese occupation in 1942.²⁵ Following Rothberg, ‘[t]he experience of historical trauma does not inoculate subjects against implication in other regimes of power.’ ‘Complex’ implication can ‘attach to people who have had shattering experiences of trauma’ ‘with lines of direct or indirect connection to histories of both victimization and perpetration.’²⁶

Rothberg’s work on collective memories of trauma mobilised for political recognition of past injustices is also useful theory.²⁷ Competitive memories about experiences of slavery, colonialism and suffering and their legacies frequently play out between diaspora communities from the former Dutch empire in the Caribbean, Suriname and Indonesia, not to mention between victims of the Holocaust, the German occupation of the Netherlands and of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia.²⁸ Rothberg explains how stakeholders in difficult histories frequently identify and mobilise multidirectional memories to select creatively from the resonances between these past injustices.²⁹ These concepts do more than give a politics to what Paul Bijl and others have termed ‘colonial aphasia’ (partial forgetting).³⁰ They identify the mechanisms for contemporary alliances between decolonial activists in the Netherlands and Indonesia, but equally for those between conservative veterans, Indisch and Indo-Dutch lobby groups and far-right politicians in the Netherlands.³¹

This essay has not focused so much on odgoi’s empirical findings, but on key concepts employed to achieve the project’s overriding explanatory aims. However, as most historians will admit, concepts and findings cannot so easily be separated. Prioritising ‘extreme violence’ used by all sides in the conflict over the regular, everyday, normalised violence of colonial oppression fits a long tradition in Dutch historiography, but much less so the Indonesian and international historiography of decolonisation. In this sense, it could be said to reflect the inward-looking struggles in a former colonising country to come to terms with its own historic defeat. A more fine-grained approach to the dynamics of violence that allows for differentiating between the (extreme or otherwise) violence of colonisers and colonised could have helped situate the significant findings presented across the odgoi volumes into the dynamics of revolution, inter-ethnic strife and colonial brutality more firmly within international debates on colonialism, decolonisation and their legacies. The potential of such an approach is indeed illustrated at several instances where individual authors chose to employ a more layered conceptual apparatus to understand revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, colonising and decolonising violence, as for example in the project’s volumes on local dynamics of the revolution and on Indonesian decolonisation in comparative perspectives. Such findings could have been the basis for a more thorough reflection on theory and concepts in Beyond the Pale and as part of the project conclusions. However, such a reflection would also inevitably have brought into question the wish of the Dutch government to give an important place to Indonesian violence against the Dutch in framing the project.

Likewise, the project’s emphasis on ‘impunity’ does little to sketch out the historical structures that permitted a Dutch war of reconquest in the late 1940s, the last of many over centuries of Dutch colonialism, and one framed as a restoration of law and order in a land of subjects deemed unfit for sovereignty and self-rule. Finding evidence that Dutch perpetrators of violence against Indonesians went unpunished in such a war simply describes the epistemic violence that underpinned all the everyday forms of violence governing colonial life before the Revolution began.