Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968

Bradley R. Simpson, assistant professor of history and international studies at Princeton University, will discuss his new book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968. David Painter, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, and David Ekbladh, assistant professor of history at Tufts University, will provide commentary.

Bradley Simpson is assistant professor of history and international studies at Princeton University and author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968. Simpson is also founder and director of an ongoing project at the George Washington University's National Security Archive to declassify U.S. documents concerning Indonesia and East Timor during the reign of General Suharto (1965-1998). The documents are being used as the basis for a major study of U.S.-Indonesian relations focusing on how the U.S. and the international community's embrace of authoritarianism in Indonesia shaped development, human rights, civil military relations and political Islam.

David Ekbladh is assistant professor of history at Tufts University and a specialist in international history and modern U.S. history. Ekbladh earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003 and is the author of "How to Build a Nation: A Simple 52 Year Program" published in the Wilson Quarterly in Winter 2004, as well as The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, 1914 to the Present (forthcoming).

David Painter is associate professor of history at Georgetown University where he specializes in diplomacy and international economic relations, especially with respect to the oil industry. Painter is the author of The Cold War: An International History and Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-1954, and is editor, with Melvyn Leffler, of Origins of the Cold War: An International History.