In memoriam, Vale Emeritus Professor Harold Crouch (1940 - 2023)

Emeritus Professor Harold Crouch, who died on August 27 2023, was an eminent scholar of Indonesian and Malaysian politics, and of Southeast Asia generally. The author of numerous works on the region, several of which are considered standard treatments of their subjects even decades after they were published, his career was marked by deep commitment to first-hand research. This included not only meticulous scouring of the written record, but also long periods living in the countries he was writing about, and interviewing the leading politicians, military officers, and others who were shaping their politics.

A member of the Department of Political and Social Change (formerly in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, now in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs) during the latter part of his career, he supervised many PhD students who have become prominent scholars of Indonesian, Malaysian and Southeast Asian politics in many countries around the world. As well as being an influential researcher, Harold’s personal characteristics of integrity, modesty, and generosity also left a lasting impact on those he taught, mentored and worked with.

Education and early research
Harold’s interest in the politics of Asian countries began at a relatively early age. He enrolled as an undergraduate at Melbourne University in 1958 and, by 1963, he was already in India, enrolled in a Masters degree at the University of Bombay (as it was then called), financed by a Government of India Scholarship under the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme. Writing a thesis on the politics of the Indian trade union movement, he met and interviewed numerous labour movement leaders and activists, and forged lasting friendships with several Indian academics (the thesis was published as a book in 1966 – almost a full decade before he completed his PhD).

Harold then switched focus to Indonesia. He moved to Jakarta, teaching in the political science department at the University of Indonesia as a volunteer between 1968 and 1971. Upon his return to Melbourne, he enrolled as a PhD student at Monash University under the supervision of another renowned Australian expert of Indonesian politics, Herbert Feith. During his time in Jakarta, and while on subsequent visits in 1973 and 1975, he collected an enormous amount of material on the history of the Indonesian military and on the tumultuous and violent transition from the “Guided Democracy” regime of President Sukarno to President Soeharto’s authoritarian “New Order” in 1965–1966. Witnessing at first hand the early years of the New Order, he also interviewed many of the leading military and political figures of the time.

This material then became the basis for a monumental PhD, completed in 1975 and published, in significantly truncated form, as The Army and Politics in Indonesia, by Cornell University Press in 1978. Banned in Indonesia under Soeharto, this volume remains a standard work not only on the military’s role in politics during the first decades of Indonesian independence, but also on the birth and early phase of the New Order regime, of which Harold was to remain a leading interpreter until it collapsed two decades later in 1998. A 1979 article in the journal World Politics, “Patrimonialism and Military Rule in Indonesia”, which focused on the fusion of personal interest and public power under Soeharto, influenced not only future studies of Indonesia but also of other countries in Southeast Asia and beyond.