Rijksmuseum

ABSTRACT The 1970s Indonesia, marked by Suharto’s autocratic New Order Regime, entailed a critical moment in the reimagination of Islamic education by a generation of Neo-modernist Muslim intellectuals. The aim of this article is to examine how these individuals, working in a repressive political context and in a traditionalist religious milieu, applied notions of democracy, pluralism, and critical thinking in their educational thinking. We argue that political repression restricted their ability to develop critical understandings of democracy, pluralism, and critical inquiry. However, despite such constraints, they established their interpretations of those concepts independently of the prescriptions of the state. Rather than framing Islamic education as either resistance or cooperation with authoritarianism, or their conceptualisations of education as a de-politicised version of Western counterparts, this article shows how their work reflected a complex fusionism where tradition became a resource for pluralism and critical thought, offering an educational and theological and political rearticulation of freedom and responsibility

This recently published Dutch book is meant to reassess the ‘Vietnamese struggle for independence and the West,’ in the words of its subtitle. As such, the quote from journalist Neil Sheehan with which Rimko van der Maar precedes his work can be seen as a statement of intent: ‘There are some events that can be understood only with the perspective of time. The war in Vietnam is one’ (7). Exactly what the book hopes to understand better about, as Van der Maar readily admits, a war that is one of ‘the most researched and described military conflict[s] of the Twentieth Century,’ is then formulated clearly in the introduction, where the author writes that he wants to ‘present the war from a Vietnamese perspective’ (16). Not, to be clear, how the war was experienced by the Vietnamese, but rather how Vietnamese individuals and institutions sought to influence Western decision-making and public opinion. As such, this is very much a book on the ‘force and meaning of information, propaganda and diplomacy’ (16).

Decision-making on long-term coastal climate change adaptation faces deep uncertainty. Compared to traditional hard-engineered coastal defences, nature-based solutions (NbS) are promising multifunctional adaptation strategies under uncertainty. Yet, their adoption remains limited. This research identified how deep uncertainty affects planning and management of NbS for coastal adaptation. We performed unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Dutch experts on coastal NbS, adaptation and decision-making under deep uncertainty. We identified which topics of deep uncertainty affect decision-making, their interactions with NbS, and the implications for adopting NbS. These topics were categorised into three areas: conceptual system understanding, probabilities of outcomes and drivers, and outcome prioritisation. Decision-making primarily faces uncertainties regarding the rate of sea-level rise and political uncertainties on flood risk acceptance. Under these conditions, NbS are promising short-term interventions due to their adaptivity and multifunctionality. However, this potential is limited in the longer term, depending on increasingly uncertain factors. These include climate change impacts, NbS performance, conflicting functions, risk acceptance and the desired state of nature. Our results imply that the multifunctionality and adaptivity intrinsic to NbS are two sides of a coin. They enable robust short-term strategies but increase uncertainty and the risk of lock-in and sunk investments in the longer term. Navigating this trade-off in coastal adaptation requires the integration of political and technical scenario planning. Balancing uncertain multifunctionality against more predictable flood prevention and vulnerability reduction early on is essential for developing resilient long-term coastal management strategies.

During extreme storm events, waves that run-up and overtop levees cause a significant hydraulic load on the landside slopes. In order to determine the effects of these loads on the flood risk, it is necessary to determine the sensitivity of the landside slope to erosion. Models exist for determining the erosion resistance of grass covers to wave overtopping. The challenge has been to qualitatively describe the erosion process due to wave overtopping and to quantify the erosion rate of clay exposed to wave overtopping loads. To address this challenge, prototype scale wave overtopping experiments have been performed. To facilitate the transfer of the results to other locations and clay types, the Erosion Function Apparatus has been used to predict the erosion characteristics from small samples collected from the test sites. Here we present a dataset containing measurements from four experimental campaigns designed to evaluate the erosion resistance of existing and newly constructed clay covers under controlled overtopping loads. It includes soil properties, hydraulic loading programs, overtopping characteristics, wavefront velocities, and erosion progression data. The dataset enables comparative analyses across levee types and provides a reproducible foundation for model calibration, erosion assessment, and flood defence design.