Abstract
This study sets out to reconstruct the history and structural repression that followed the 1965–1966 events in Indonesia—events that have long been reduced to a simple “horizontal conflict” between ordinary citizens. Using a socio-historical method, the study examines a wide range of historical literature and documents in order to reframe this violence as a State Crime, seen through the lenses of Critical Criminology and Decolonial Criminology. The findings show that the New Order regime borrowed the tools of subjugation first developed in the colonial era to crush progressive groups—a project that, in essence, served the interests of global capitalism during the Cold War. The mass killings became possible because violence had been normalized, a process that produced the phenomenon of the Banality of Evil within the state apparatus and the civilian militias. This repression then turned into long-term suffering, a condition this study calls “delayed rehabilitation.” The state created a kind of “civil death” for survivors: it stigmatized them through identity documents (the ET/OT codes), practiced institutional racism against ethnic Chinese citizens, and unilaterally stripped thousands of people of their citizenship, producing a generation of political exiles. The study concludes that the instruments of the state remain trapped in a politics of impunity. Transitional justice must move beyond the rhetoric of material compensation toward authentic truth-telling, the removal of stigma, and the full restoration of victims’ civil rights. The study also argues for a paradigm shift in Indonesian criminology—away from a Eurocentric bias and toward the analysis of postcolonial structural crime. It contributes to the development of postcolonial criminology in Indonesia by showing that a proper analysis of structural crime requires an epistemological shift: from the Eurocentric bias of conventional criminology toward a decolonial framework that treats the legacy of imperialism and colonial violence as a structural variable that cannot be ignored. Finally, the concept of “delayed rehabilitation” offered here is meant to enrich the discussion of transitional justice, both within Indonesia and in comparison with other cases of postcolonial state crime across the Global South.
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Recommended Citation
Sumawiharja, S.H., M.Si., M.Krim, Farhan Arif
(2026)
"The Banality of Evil and Delayed Rehabilitation: Uncovering Post-1965 State Crime Through the Lens of Decolonial Criminology,"
Jurnal Kriminologi Indonesia: Vol. 2:
Iss.
2, Article 6.
DOI: 10.7454/kriminologi.v2.i2.1032/
Available at:
https://scholarhub.ui.ac.id/kriminologi/vol2/iss2/6
