Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States.

His work on the "Cornell Paper", which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country.

[3] He earned a classics degree from Cambridge in 1957 before attending Cornell University, where he concentrated on Indonesia as a research interest and in 1967 received his Ph.D. in government studies.

[1] The violence following the September 1965 coup attempt that led to Suharto taking power in Indonesia disillusioned Anderson, who wrote that it "felt like discovering that a loved one is a murderer".

[3] One of two foreign witnesses at the show trial of Communist Party of Indonesia general secretary Sudisman in 1971, Anderson published a translated version of the latter's unsuccessful testimony.

[3] As a result of his actions, Anderson was in 1972 expelled from Indonesia and banned from reentering, a restriction that lasted until 1998 when Suharto resigned to be replaced by B. J. Habibie as president.

[2] Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, in which he described the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries.

"[22] Like other thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan in his The Gutenberg Galaxy, of particular importance to Anderson's theory on nationalism is his stress on the role of printed literature and its dissemination.

Kemper also stated that for Anderson the "very existence and regularity of newspapers caused readers, and thus citizens-in-the-making, to imagine themselves residing in a common time and place, united by a print language with a league of anonymous equals.

"[21] Therefore, for Anderson, the rise of print technology was essential to create the "deep horizontal comradeship" that despite its socially constructed origins, was also genuine and deep-seated, explaining why nationalism can drive people to fight, die, and kill for their countries.

[25][26] In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Benedict Anderson, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 400+ publications in 20+ languages and 7,500+ library holdings.