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This article focuses on John Dryden’s 1673 play Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, and more particularly on the figure of Ysabinda, and the island she represents, as contested territory. This article demonstrates that Ysabinda’s relationship with her English fiancé Towerson comes to politically stand for the fantasized absorption of the Spice Islands into Britain’s imperial project. Through a rhetoric of trade and ownership, Dryden stages Ysabinda’s commodification and ultimate rape as a way to fuel anti-Dutch sentiment while at the same time justifying Britain’s colonial practices. However, this literary endeavor is only sustainable through the erasure of the ruling power around the Indian Ocean at the time, the Mughal Empire, as well as through the distortion of the real-life figure behind Ysabinda’s character: the Armenian Indian Mariam Khan.

Apis cerana is widely adapted to vast areas that stretch from Russia to Sundaland (Indonesia) through Palawan in the Philippines. By using mitochondrial DNA of the cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COX1) gene, the cytochrome oxidase subunit 2 (COX2) gene, and the COX1-COX2 intergenic regions (IGS), as well as the nuclear major royal jelly protein 2 (mrjp2) gene, we aimed to explore the number of new haplotypes of A. cerana in Indonesia and the genetic variations of A. cerana in Indonesia, particularly between Sundaland A. cerana with the Moluccas and West Papua. These studies found three main findings; the first is the 11 A. cerana new haplotypes in total for the COX1, COX2, IGS, and mrjp2 gene sequences. The maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree agreed with the haplotype cluster. Apis cerana in West Papua and the Moluccas clustered in the same clade with the Sundaland A. cerana from Java, Banten, and Belitung, that suggests common origin of these bees. The third finding is genetic distances of COX1 gene between A. cerana in Java and those from West, East, South Kalimantan, Sabah, and Sarawak were approximately 4% which is similar to genetic distance between Indonesian A. cerana (A. cerana javana) and East Asia (A. cerana cerana and A. cerana japonica). The genetic distance also proved the separation of the Indonesian A. cerana lineage with the Indo-Malayan lineage (Sabah, Sarawak, and Kalimantan) from previous studies. This result gives rise to the possibility of the emerging new subspecies of A. cerana in Kalimantan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Moluccas were among the provinces devastated by communal conflict following the fall of the New Order regime in 1998. Peace-building activities were conducted after the violence subsided. The field research for this ethnographic study was conducted in the province from January to December 2009. The objective of the study was to examine the nature and impact of peace education projects supported by foreign agencies in selected schools in the province. The findings show that suspicion and hatred between Muslim and Christian students remained intact in Schools 1, 2 and 3, despite the fact that they received a peace education intervention. In these schools, the peace education projects were framed within what was perceived as Moluccan local tradition. However, School 4 was able to mitigate the effects of the conflict and to nurture peace in the school, despite the fact that it did not receive a specifically tailored peace education intervention. Students of School 4 showed a strong preference for national identity, which encompasses religious and ethnic boundaries. The study indicates that identity politics were at play in the form of the inclusion of what was perceived as Moluccan local tradition but the exclusion of other possibilities in the peace education curriculum, as the cases of Schools 1, 2 and 3 show. The study also shows that school principal leadership was prominent in helping to create a peaceful atmosphere, as the case of School 4 reveals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]