Professor Harold Crouch is a scholar of Indonesian politics and founding director of the International Crisis Group office in Jakarta. Born in Melbourne, 1940, read political science at the University Melbourne before studying at the University of Bombay for Masters on Indian trade unions in the early 1960s. He was one of first Australians at an Asian university for higher degrees.

His PhD, written under Herbert Feith at Monash University and completed in 1975, was published in 1978 as The Army and Politics in Indonesia. It is regarded as a 'milestone' in the study of Indonesia’s New Order. While undertaking his PhD, he taught political science at the University of Indonesia 1968-1971.

After marrying Malaysian historian Khasnoor Johan in 1973, Crouch became Senior Lecturer at the National University of Malaysia, 1976–1985 and 1988-1990. He taught at the University of the Philippines 1983-1984.

In 1991, he joined the Australian National University as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. He was appointed Professor in 2002 and retired in 2005.

Crouch founded the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group in 2000-2001. Professor Crouch is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University.

His career has included a number of significant monographs in the study of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, including The Army and Politics in Indonesia (1978), Domestic Political Structures and Regional Economic Cooperation in Southeast Asia (1984), Government and Society in Malaysia (1996), and Political Reform in Indonesia after Soeharto (2010).