Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University

Type/Location: Hybrid / DeKalb, IL

Description:

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Chris Hulshof, GETSEA Director of Community Engagement and History PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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.

About the Speaker:

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).

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.

To attend the event virtually, please register here.