Indonesia is currently affected by many serious conflicts which have arisen as a result of a variety of ethnic, religious and regional tensions. Presenting important new thinking on violent conflict in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, this book examines a selection of conflicts in detail and discusses the nature of violence and the reasons behind violent outbreaks. Chapters include analysis of conflicts in Aceh, East Timor, Maluku, Java, West Kalimantan, West Papua and elsewhere. The contributors provide analysis of political, ethnic and nationalistic killings, with a concentration on the post-Suharto era. The book goes on to examine vital questions concerning the way in which violence in Indonesia is represented in the media, and explores ways in which violent conflicts could be resolved or prevented. The last section turns the focus onto victims of violence and forms of justice and retribution.

This volume foregrounds the dynamics of displacement and the experiences of internal refugees uprooted by conflict and violence in Indonesia. Contributors examine internal displacement in the context of militarized conflict and violence in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, and in other parts of Outer Island Indonesia during the transition from authoritarian rule. The volume also explores official and humanitarian discourses on displacement and their significance for the politics of representation.

Between 1999 and 2000, sectarian fighting fanned across the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. What began as local conflicts between migrants and indigenous people over administrative boundaries spiraled into a religious war pitting Muslims against Christians and continues to influence communal relationships more than a decade after the fighting stopped. Christopher R. Duncan spent several years conducting fieldwork in North Maluku, and in Violence and Vengeance, he examines how the individuals actually taking part in the fighting understood and experienced the conflict. Rather than dismiss religion as a facade for the political and economic motivations of the regional elite, Duncan explores how and why participants came to perceive the conflict as one of religious difference. He examines how these perceptions of religious violence altered the conflict, leading to large-scale massacres in houses of worship, forced conversions of entire communities, and other acts of violence that stressed religious identities. Duncan’s analysis extends beyond the period of violent conflict and explores how local understandings of the violence have complicated the return of forced migrants, efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Since 1998, which marked the end of the thirty-three-year New Order regime under President Suharto, there has been a dramatic increase in ethnic conflict and violence in Indonesia. In his innovative and persuasive account, Jacques Bertrand argues that conflicts in Maluku, Kalimantan, Aceh, Papua, and East Timur were a result of the New Order's narrow and constraining reinterpretation of Indonesia's 'national model'. The author shows how, at the end of the 1990s, this national model came under intense pressure at the prospect of institutional transformation, a reconfiguration of ethnic relations, and an increase in the role of Islam in Indonesia's political institutions. It was within the context of these challenges, that the very definition of the Indonesian nation and what it meant to be Indonesian came under scrutiny. The book sheds light on the roots of religious and ethnic conflict at a turning point in Indonesia's history.

Ethno-religious violence in Indonesia illustrates in detail how and why previously peaceful religious communities can descend into violent conflict. From 1999 until 2000, the conflict in North Maluku, Indonesia, saw the most intense communal violence of Indonesia’s period of democratization. For almost a year, militias waged a brutal religious war which claimed the lives of almost four thousand lives. The conflict culminated in ethnic cleansing along lines of religious identity, with approximately three hundred thousand people fleeing their homes. Based on detailed research, this book provides an in depth picture of all aspects of this devastating and brutal conflict. It also provides numerous examples of how different conflict theories can be applied in the analysis of real situations of tensions and violence, illustrating the mutually reinforcing nature of mass level sentiment and elite agency, and the rational and emotive influences on those involved. This book will be of interest to researchers in Asian Studies, conflict resolution and religious violence.

Potentially destabilizing ethnic conflicts continue to challenge nation-states worldwide: The countries of Southeast Asia are no exception. Globalization, population movements and historical and political fault-lines in a tremendously ethnically diverse region, coupled with continuing uneven access to economic development, have seen the resurgence of old conflicts or the flaring up of new ones. Along with violence and the loss of life and livelihood there are also longer-term cross-border impacts to consider in the form of refugees or displaced persons, illegal migrant labour, as well as drug and arms smuggling. Written by country experts, this volume examines ethnic configurations as well as conflict avoidance and resolution in five Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. Ethnic Conflicts in Southeast Asia is a resource for scholars, policy-makers, NGO personnel, analysts and others who wish to deepen their understanding of the region, or develop strategies to prevent, modulate and resolve such conflicts.

Maluku in eastern Indonesia is the home to Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics who had for the most part been living peaceably since the sixteenth century. In 1999, brutal conflicts broke out between local Christians and Muslims, and escalated into large-scale communal violence once the Laskar Jihad, a Java-based armed jihadist Islamic paramilitary group, sent several thousand fighters to Maluku. As a result of this escalated violence, the previously stable Maluku became the site of devastating interreligious wars. This book focuses on the interreligious violence and conciliation in this region. It examines factors underlying the interreligious violence as well as those shaping post-conflict peace and citizenship in Maluku. The author shows that religion—both Islam and Christianity—was indeed central and played an ambiguous role in the conflict settings of Maluku, whether in preserving and aggravating the Christian-Muslim conflict or supporting or improving peace and reconciliation. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews as well as historical and comparative research on religious identities, this book is of interest to Indonesia specialists, as well as academics with an interest in anthropology, religious conflict, peace and conflict studies.

Indonesia suffered an explosion of religious violence, ethnic violence, separatist violence, terrorism, and violence by criminal gangs, the security forces and militias in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2002 Indonesia had the worst terrorism problem of any nation. All these forms of violence have now fallen dramatically. How was this accomplished? What drove the rise and the fall of violence? Anomie theory is deployed to explain these developments. Sudden institutional change at the time of the Asian financial crisis and the fall of President Suharto meant the rules of the game were up for grabs. Valerie Braithwaite's motivational postures theory is used to explain the gaming of the rules and the disengagement from authority that occurred in that era. Ultimately resistance to Suharto laid a foundation for commitment to a revised, more democratic, institutional order. The peacebuilding that occurred was not based on the high-integrity truth-seeking and reconciliation that was the normative preference of these authors. Rather it was based on non-truth, sometimes lies, and yet substantial reconciliation. This poses a challenge to restorative justice theories of peacebuilding.

Jakarta, Sambas, Poso, the Moluccas, West Papua. These simple, geographical names have recently obtained strong associations with mass killing, just as Aceh and East Timor, where large-scale violence has flared up again. Lethal incidents between adjacent villages, or between a petty criminal and the crowd, take place throughout Indonesia. Indonesia is a violent country. Many Indonesia-watchers, both scholars and journalists, explain the violence in terms of the loss of the monopoly on the means of violence by the state since the beginning of the Reformasi in 1998. Others point at the omnipresent remnants of the New Order state (1966-1998), former President Suharto's clan or the army in particular, as the evil genius behind the present bloodshed. The authors in this volume try to explain violence in Indonesia by looking at it in historical perspective.

This thoroughly updated new edition of an already popular text brings together specially-commissioned chapters by leading authorities, rigorously edited to ensure systematic coverage. It provides students with an accessible and up-to-date thematically-structured comparative introduction to Southeast Asia today.