Bradley Simpson

Brad Simpson teaches and researches twentieth century U.S. foreign relations and international history, and has an interest in US-southeast relations, political economy, human rights and development. His first book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (2008) explores the intersection of anti-Communism and development thinking in shaping U.S. Indonesian relations. Currently, Simpson is researching a global history of self-determination, exploring its political, cultural and legal descent through post 1945 US foreign relations and international politics. He hopes to use the contested history of self-determination claims to re-think contemporary notions of human rights, sovereignty and international order as they intersected with the processes of decolonization, Cold War conflict and globalization.He is also founder and director of a project at the non-profit National Security Archive to declassify U.S. government documents concerning Indonesia and East Timor during the reign of General Suharto (1966-1998). This project will serve as the basis for a study of U.S.-Indonesian-international relations from 1965 to 1999, exploring how the international community's embrace of an authoritarian regime in Indonesia shaped development, civil-military relations, human rights and Islamic politics.

Recent essays and reviews of Simpson's are in International History Review, Cold War History, Reviews in American History, Diplomatic History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Critical Asian Studies, Peace and Change, and East Asia and the United States: An Encyclopedia of Relations Since 1784 (2003). He was featured in the recent Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary Accomplices in Atrocity; The Indonesian Killings of 1965.