STUDIES OF MASSIVE, COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN POST-SOEHARTO INDONESIA

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Davidson / Review Essay

REVIEW ESSAY

STUDIES OF MASSIVE, COLLECTIVE VIOLENCEIN POST-SOEHARTO INDONESIA

Jacques Bertrand, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvi + 278 pp.

Gerry van Klinken, Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia:Small Town Wars. London: Routledge, 2007. xxiii + 180 pp.

John T. Sidel, Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. xvii + 279 pp.

Jamie S. Davidson

Studies of Hindu-Muslim clashes in India have been at the forefront of theoriz-ing on the problem of ethnic riots. A longtime scholar of the country and authorof two books on violence in India, Paul Brass is synonymous with the topic.1 Oflate he has been joined by two U.S.-based political scientists, Ashutosh Varshneyand Steven Wilkinson.2 Their works draw from a wealth of empirical data andaddress issues that resonate beyond India. At the same time, each brings a distinc-tiveness to bear on explanations for the perpetuation of Hindu-Muslim riots.These studies are distinguishable on a number of accounts — methodological,political, and substantive — but one axis of disagreement is especially revealing:which level of analysis best explains the why, how, when, and where of this typeof collective violence.

To be sure, Brass recognizes the importance of national factors, for he blamesthe Hindu right for the preponderance of coordinated anti-Muslim attacks forpolitical gain.3 Yet, it is the specifics of how riots are “produced” in the denseneighborhoods of India’s cities, particularly in the north, that most interestshim. He proposes that over time a division of labor has materialized, with actorsplaying the roles he identifies as “rumor mongers,” “fire tenders,” and “conver-sion specialists.” Meanwhile, spin doctors, journalists, and scholars struggle tocontrol the discursive meanings of the riot after the killings have stopped. Thedisplacing of blame for the bloodshed away from those most responsible — theHindu right and the complicit police forces, in Brass’s estimation — onto othersuch structural factors as poverty, demographics, or lack of civil society sets thestage for succeeding riots.

Brass suggests Hindu-Muslim riots are primarily an urban phenomenon, butVarshney proves the point with the compilation of a comprehensive, fifty-yeardataset of such incidents. For Varshney, the explanation for these episodes lies

Critical Asian Studies41:2 (2009), 329–349

ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 02 / 000329–21 ©2009 BCAS, Inc. DOI: 10.1080/14672710902809450

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in the dynamics of everyday urban life, and thus he seizes on the city, not theneighborhood, as the unit of analysis that best explains the spatial variation ofHindu-Muslim riots. In short, he concludes that cities that exhibit dense, inter-ethnic associational life will be less prone to riots. There, local elites, already en-gaged in civic activities, can act collectively to prevent the occurrence of com-munal violence. In contrast, the absence of thick, cross-cutting ties and net-works — or a bridging form of social capital — leaves other cities susceptible.

Lastly, Wilkinson, who as a graduate student collaborated with Varshney onthe compilation of the aforementioned dataset, argues that the state level is de-terminative. Like Brass, he stresses the role of electoral politics and empiricallydemonstrates that riots tend to cluster during electoral campaigns. Where riotsrarely happen, according to Wilkinson, is in states where Muslims constitute animportant swing vote. This condition causes Hindu politicians to court localMuslim elites in order to form coalitional alliances. In states where Muslim vot-ers are peripheral to electoral outcomes, they risk being targeted by pugnaciouspoliticians whose electoral rhetoric is pushed to extremes due to the competi-tive marketplace for the Hindu vote.

Deservedly, these works have received plenty of attention in scholarly andmass media outlets. But another country in Asia looms as a competing center fortheorizing on the problem of collective violence.4 Given the upsurge of large-scale bloodshed that succeeded the May 1998 resignation of longtime authori-tarian ruler, Soeharto, scholars of Indonesia expectedly have sought to explainthe specifics of this group violence. While the single case study in the form of ar-ticles, book chapters, and institute reports has been the predominant mode ofanalysis, several innovative monographs that cover multiple cases recently havebeen published. This review subjects three of the most sophisticated and im-portant of these to close scrutiny: Jacques Bertrand’s Nationalism and EthnicConflict in Indonesia, Gerry van Klinken’s Communal Violence and Democra-tization in Indonesia, and John Sidel’s Riots, Pogroms, Jihad.

The principal contention of this review is that what the problem of levels ofanalysis is to the study of ethnic riots in India, the issue of case selection is tothese explorations of mass, collective violence in Indonesia. It is a primary dis-tinguishing feature that, in turn, influences each of the author’s approaches andconclusions. An exclusive focus on Hindu-Muslim riots in India allows for parsi-monious explanations that facilitate theory building. The insights of the studiesunder review cannot travel as far as their Indian counterparts, not because theyare inferior or compromised, although none of the authors have the seasonedresearch experience of Brass or the massive dataset of Wilkinson and Varshney,but because of the wider diversity of forms of collective violence that these stud-ies encompass. Taken together, they cover separatist movements, property ri-

330 Critical Asian Studies 41:2 (2009)

1. Brass 1997; Brass 2003.2. Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004.3. Brass 2003.4. Hedman (2005) first placed the work of this trio of scholars on India in a nuanced Indonesian

context.

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ots, ethnic and religious clashes, lynchings, and terrorist bombings. As a result,the empirical richness and complexity of causal mechanisms brought forth donot lend themselves to parsimonious explanations, thereby frustrating theorybuilding at the meso-level.

Although each author grapples with “Indonesia” as a whole, case selectionsare distinctive. None of the three examines all cases available. This is demon-strated in Table 1 above.

That works by scholars as capable as these only converge on the cases ofMaluku and North Maluku speaks to the diversity (and complexity) of thelarge-scale violence that has marred Indonesia’s transition from authoritarian-ism.5 While these authors pay the problem of case selection heed, and acknowl-edge that such choices do place limits on their analysis, this issue continues toproduce tensions in their arguments in ways the authors on occasion do notrecognize. This is especially pronounced regarding explanations for the spatialvariation of the violence. Each author offers instructive yet partial answers tothis question, in part because of their case selection, in part due to the lack ofcounterfactual investigations. Although the authors highlight provinces thatstructurally might function as counterfactual cases, this remains a matter of con-jecture, leaving several important questions left unanswered.

Massive, Collective Violence in Indonesia

Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia is noteworthy for reasons be-yond its perspicacity. The first to apply an analytically rigorous framework to themany cases of post-Soeharto violence, Bertrand goes beyond the onetime typi-cal political study of Indonesia that began and ended with the national capital,

Davidson / Review Essay 331

Van Klinken Sidel Bertrand

Anti-Chinese violence X X

Maluku X X X

North Maluku X X X

Poso, Central Sulawesi X X

Aceh X

Papua X

Central Kalimantan X X

West Kalimantan X X

Java, religious riots X X

East Timor X

Terrorist-related violence X

Table 1. Case Selection

5. Sidel and Bertrand see the violence in North Maluku as part of the greater Maluku tragedy. VanKlinken does the most to establish the former as a distinct case.

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Jakarta.6 Instead, Bertrand productively brings multiple provincial viewpointsto bear on the national developments. It is this regional comprehensivenessthat marks the book’s ambition; of the three works under investigation, onlyBertrand’s encompasses communal and separatist conflicts.

To explain the country’s recent upsurge of ethnic unrest, Bertrand borrowsfrom the historical institutional literature to develop a two-pronged argument.First, he roots his analysis in the idea of a “national model” and its related formalinstitutional makeup, which shapes and influences ethnic identities and rela-tions. For Bertrand, these processes determine an ethnic or religious group’sposition vis-à-vis the state — its access to state power, privileges, resources, andthe status of their group identity. Indonesia’s national model, he maintains, par-ticularly as designed and practiced under the New Order (1966–98), producedtensions — for instance, how the boundaries of exclusion/inclusion weredrawn — in a way that would facilitate intermittent ethnic violence under the re-gime, but would unleash great clashes once it fell. Second, Bertrand finds signif-icant analytical purchase in the concept of critical junctures, those importantmoments when the instability of political institutions opens the way for the re-negotiation of the national model. Whereas these dynamic processes can in-crease anxieties among privileged groups within the national model, it providesthose excluded with an opportunity to demand greater inclusion. Struggles atboth ends of the spectrum tend to produce collective violence. As Bertrand putsit, the “causes of ethnic violence can be traced to the institutional context thatdefines and shapes ethnic identities, the official recognition of groups, theirrepresentation in state institutions, and their access to resources. Ethnic identi-ties become politicized and the potential for mobilization is heightened whengroups feel threatened by the structure and principles embedded in political in-stitutions” (4).

For Bertrand, the institutional framework that informs the recent violence isthe rapid democratization of Indonesia following the May 1998 resignation ofSoeharto, who had ruled the country in a centralistic, authoritarian manner forsome thirty-two years. Bertrand rightly argues that, especially given the growingturbulence that precipitated Soeharto’s downfall, the “large number of con-flicts, and their intensity after 1996, were not coincidental” (218). For specificforms, participants, and locations of this violence and its intensification,Bertrand offers more contextual explanations — confluences of subsidiary andregional factors — within this broad context. One notable incendiary conditionwas the institutionalized marginalization of “backward” ethnic groups underthe New Order’s increasingly restrictive construction of its national model. Vic-tims of such discrimination, for example, include the indigenous Dayaks ofKalimantan whose acts of mass aggression against migrants from the island ofMadura in West (1997 and 1999) and Central (2001) Kalimantan accounted forsome of the greatest death tolls among the incidents of communal violence.7


6. Conversely, books about a region are frequently divorced from national politics.7. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean 2008.

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These acts, according to Bertrand, were the products of frustration at their so-cial, economic, cultural, and political marginalization (46). He further submitsthat these episodes must be seen as attempts by Dayaks to make new claims onthe post-Soeharto state, facilitated by the uncertainties inherent in rapid de-mocratization and institutional change.

Bertrand finds resonance between this marginalization/exclusion type of ag-gression and violence against Indonesians of Chinese descent, creatively juxta-posing each case (ch. 4). At first glance, the comparison strikes one as odd. Forone thing, in times of strife, Dayaks have been the aggressors, the Chinese vic-tims. Equally striking is that socioeconomically the former are far worse off thanthe latter. Yet Bertrand points out that the underlying dynamics of these types ofviolence can be attributed to meaningful institutional exclusion; each groupwas disadvantaged by the New Order’s national model, despite the contrastingdirectionality of violence. The New Order’s sociocultural and political margin-alization of the economically powerful Chinese gave rise to conditions thatproduced intermittent attacks against them, but turned massive when the in-stability of political institutions that undergirded Indonesia’s national modelcorrespondingly proved severe. This was demonstrated by the horrific events ofMay 1998 in Jakarta and elsewhere that anticipated Soeharto’s fall.

Other violent cases are also rooted in a mix of identity politics, group anxiety,and struggles over power under conditions of uncertainty and (pending) insti-tutional change. This pertains to the intensifying religious politicization in themid 1990s — conceived as the late New Order period — highlighted by attacksagainst Chinese property and Christian churches that began in the eastern,Catholic-dominant islands of East Timor and Flores, and later to be repeated (to


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varying degrees) in towns across Java.8 This was a period, for Bertrand, coloredby rising anxiety among state elites over the problem of Soeharto’s potentialsuccession and the role and place of Islam and Christianity in any future politi-cal arrangement (or national model). “Such uncertainty,” he writes, “provokedethnic tensions to rise in spite of existing instruments of control” (42).

This religious polarization then ignited large-scale riots in the eastern groupof islands known as Maluku as institutional instability peaked following Soe-harto’s fall. More specifically, the Islamization of Suharto’s regime in the 1990s“disrupted the fragile balance” in Maluku where “Muslims gained a new sense ofconfidence to challenge the longstanding Christian dominance” (114). In thisway, through the lens of religious politicization and conflict, Bertrand effort-lessly bridges a traditional divide in Indonesian political analysis: the center(Java) juxtaposed against the outer islands.

Bertrand bridges another divide by incorporating cases of separatist conflictinto his analysis. Once more drawing on the twin institutional analysis of na-tional models and critical junctures, he fingers attendant tensions and prob-lems associated with the late integration of Papua (Irian Jaya) and East Timorinto the nation-state to account for the existence of these separatist movements,both of which (expectedly) experienced a sharp rise in collective violence as aresult of the turbulence of the early post-Soeharto state.

Bertrand’s account of the interplay between national and multiple regionaldynamics is perhaps the richest of this ilk since the 1952 publication of the lateGeorge Kahin’s classic, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia.9 His analysisdoes experience difficulties, however, in its attempt to theory-build at a mesolevel. The core problem lies in the clash between the theoretical framework andthe case studies. This incongruity is especially pronounced when evaluatedagainst the claim that his approach — which looks at “responses to the institu-tional evolution of the Indonesian state, and the particular national model itcame to represent” — can “explain in large part why conflicts emerged in partic-ular places and periods of time, while not in others” (8).10 On both dimensions— temporal and spatial variation — the narrative falls short. Bertrand is the un-witting victim of his own lofty ambitions.

Let us first tackle the temporal dimension by scrutinizing the concept and theuse of critical junctures. As was alluded to above, Bertrand proposes that at“each critical juncture, incidences of ethnic violence occurred” (29) and that“an analysis of critical junctures can provide compelling explanations of thesources of ethnic violence” (23). He identifies three such junctures in Indone-sia’s modern political history characterized by a clustering of conflicts: (1) the1920s–1940s (the formative years of the country’s national model; (2) the mid-1950s–1968 (the gradual institutionalization military-dominant authoritarian-ism); (3) and post-1998 (rapid democratization).


8. These towns included Surabaya, Situbondo, Tasikmalaya, and Rengasdenklok.9. Kahin 1952.10. In a recent article, Bertrand (2008) acknowledges the limited ability of his framework to ac-

count for spatial variation (444).

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Note the expansiveness of these time periods. When tallied, they constitutesome 60 percent of the time under consideration (1920s to early 2000s). Thisfigure even increases if the lead-up to a critical juncture — the mid 1990s, for in-stance — also produced heightened tensions and thus collective violence (42).Proposing that such broad periods of contemporary Indonesian history areprone to violent conflict diminishes the analytical worth of the concept of criti-cal junctures and the subsequent claim to account for the violence’s temporalvariation.

The use of critical junctures can be sharpened, I contend, by applying it tospecific regional experiences and histories. As was stressed above, Bertrand’sanalysis sheds light on the resurgence of violent mobilizations in Indonesia’sseparatist cases following Soeharto’s fall. Yet, it works less well in accounting forthe origins of these conflicts, which suggests that critical junctures must not besolely derived from a national level framework. For instance, the New Orderarmy’s late 1975–early 1976 invasion of East Timor surely constitutes a criticaljuncture in this history; yet, the invasion (and subsequent killing and “disap-pearance” of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of East Timorese) does not fitany national-level critical juncture Bertrand identifies. A similar case can bemade for Papua, which was integrated into the Republic by a sham 1969 Act ofFree Choice, clearly an episode that constitutes a critical juncture for Papua.This event engendered the Free Papua Organization–led rebellion and gave riseto attendant New Order human rights abuses throughout the province. Inter-estingly, Bertrand recognizes the importance of conceptualizing critical junc-tures at regional levels: “The process of late integration,” he notes, “marks atraumatic critical juncture in the histories of East Timor and Irian Jaya” (135).His national-level theorizing is not adjusted accordingly, however.

On the question of spatial variation, problems are equally acute. This stemsfrom the lack of theory (or justifications) guiding case selection. Violent casesare studied because these areas experienced violence. By linking cases togetherwithout theoretical guidance, Bertrand commits the sin of selection bias. Tohave greater confidence in our conclusions, however, it is advisable to selectsimilar cases that lead to different outcomes — in this case, no violence.Bertrand does not claim that his explanatory framework comprehensively ex-plains the spatial variation of violent conflict, but without differentiation on thedependent variable, we have little understanding of where mass violence may(or may not) occur in Indonesia.

Consider the example of indigenous Dayaks on Kalimantan. To reiterate,Bertrand suggests that the frustration caused by their institutionalized margin-alization led to mass attacks against the Madurese in West Kalimantan in 1997and 1999 and in the neighboring province of Central Kalimantan in 2001. If thiswas the root cause, why did similarly marginalized and frustrated Dayaks not at-tack Madurese (or other migrants) in the provinces of South or East Kalimantanduring this period? That they did not suggests that other critical interveningvariables might explain these episodes.

Other counterfactual examples are available. When the May 1998 violencebuffeted Jakarta and Solo, why did other cities with significant numbers of Chi-


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nese, either on Java (like Semarang) or in the outer islands (Pontianak, WestKalimantan), not erupt? Bertrand perceptibly notes that the Christian-Muslimrioting of 1994 and 1995 that hit the island of Flores set the stage for subsequentreligious riots on Java (96–97). Why then did such episodes on Flores not reoc-cur following Soeharto’s resignation when national instability was acute? Why isFlores not counted among the cases of massive, post-Soeharto regional vio-lence? Extending an analysis of this case to the early post-Soeharto state, therebyengaging a counterfactual period and location of nonviolence, might give us abetter grasp of the complicated yet important issue of temporal and spatial vari-ation that is constitutive of Indonesia’s collective violence.

Communal Violence and Democratizationin Indonesia: Small Town Wars

Whereas Bertrand expansively covers violent cases on Java and the outer is-lands, and explores separatist and communal conflicts, Gerry van Klinken ze-roes in on cases of regional communal violence. Why would he bypass thewell-known separatist cases on Indonesia’s peripheries? One possible answer isjust that: they are well-known and much has been written about them.11 But vanKlinken attributes his focus on regional, communal violence to its novelty. Theviolence took Indonesians and observers of Indonesia by surprise; few, if any,anticipated it. Separatism, in contrast, has a long history and the violence thatflared in the three cases (Aceh, East Timor, and Papua) following Soeharto’s fallwas not surprising. The horizontal killings in the regions also ran contrary to thestandard practice of state violence committed against citizens under the NewOrder. The post-1998 incidents were not the stuff of human rights violations perse, but featured, as van Klinken puts it, “citizen against citizen” and were“spread over a large area and [went] on for weeks or even years” (xvii).

While the shock value and newness of these communal conflicts inform vanKlinken’s case selection, it also influences the explanatory synchronic frame-work he adopts. Van Klinken does not dwell on the institutional evolution of theIndonesian state — for instance, the failures of parliamentary democracy in thelate 1950s — as Bertrand does (ch. 3). This difference also in part accounts forthe literatures upon which each author draws. Whereas Bertrand relies on a his-torical institutional literature, van Klinken finds recourse in social movementstudies, a corpus of work that favors synchronic over diachronic analysis. Its fo-cus on the dynamics of identity construction, the framing of issues, and the mo-bilizations of actors, as van Klinken notes, complements the processes under-pinning ethnic riots well, although the observation is not novel.12

By applying only one facet from the social movement toolkit to each case, vanKlinken produces a concise analysis in a mere 146 pages. The list below com-prises his case selection with each corresponding primary social movement–re-lated feature:


11. Van Klinken himself has written on the topic. See Tanter, van Klinken, and Ball 2006.12. Brass 1997.

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1. Identity-formation: “How does a sense of bounded identity grow in agroup?” (West Kalimantan)2. Scale-shift (or escalation): “How does a conflict that starts small escalateto involve more actors?” (Poso, Central Sulawesi)3. Polarization: “How does the political space between rival claimantswiden as they gravitate towards the extremes?” (Maluku)4. Mobilization: “How do you get normally apathetic people onto thestreets?” (North Maluku)5. Actor constitution: “How does a previously unorganized or apoliticalgroup become a single political actor?” (Central Kalimantan) (11)13

Like Bertrand, van Klinken spotlights the great structural changes to stateand society under the New Order, whose sudden collapse led to palpable un-certainties and power struggles, processes that, in turn, unleashed horrificbloodshed. More concretely, van Klinken emphasizes acute competition overthe control of the rapidly democratizing state apparatus, particularly in the re-gions where local economies are highly dependent on the state sector, either inthe form of employment or contracts. Therefore, more than Bertrand does, vanKlinken underscores the role — albeit perhaps unintended — that Indonesia’sbold experiment of post-Soeharto decentralization had in fomenting condi-tions for regional bloodshed. Whereas Bertrand sees the devolution of mean-ingful financial and administrative authority to the regions as a possibleameliorative to restore center-periphery relations that heavily favored the cen-ter under the New Order (ch. 10), van Klinken blames the policy — at least inthe short run — for pitting groups against each other in their aggressive pursuitto capture the now substantially endowed local state apparatus. These struggleswere predominately led by members of the small yet aspiring middle (or inter-mediate) class located in regional towns, locations through which substantialstate-related resources now flowed. Here, the significance of the subtitle of vanKlinken’s book, Small Town Wars, becomes apparent.

Van Klinken does give credence to the influence of other such factors as thepoliticization of religion and the partial withdrawal of the army from the publicsphere — in particular, the transfer of responsibility for domestic security fromthe army to the police, who after playing second fiddle to the army for decadeswere ill equipped to handle the riots.14 Broadly speaking, congruence betweenBertrand’s and van Klinken’s arguments is evident.

Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia similarly addressesthe issue of the violence’s spatial concentration. If fierce competition over stateresources in regional towns is the epicenter of the communal bloodshed, whatexplains why only a handful of these places experienced sustained killings? VanKlinken presents an inventive, if partial, answer to this question in chapter 3,entitled “Why Here? The Town beyond Java.” He constructs what he calls a vul-


13. He notes that each feature was chosen at random; any of the five features could have been ap-plied to each of the cases.

14. A point emphasized by Tajima 2008.15. This includes the “special regions” of Jakarta and Yogyakarta.

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nerability index to demonstrate the provinces susceptible to large-scale, com-munal violence. Two components comprise the index. One is rapid urbaniza-tion (from a low base), the other, high economic dependence on the statesector. These components, so the logic runs, produce a meager private sector,which, in turn, engenders acute competition among socially mobile, urbangroups over greatly increased state resources. As the local state apparatus sub-sequently becomes increasingly politicized, any significant split among nationalelites is likely to provide opportunists a chance to lash out against local, rivalclaimants.

According to van Klinken, a province’s vulnerability is calculated by multiply-ing the rate of change in the increase of nonagricultural workers (from the1970s/1980s to the 1990s) with the ratio of civil servants to nonagriculturalworkers (data point 1990) (44, Table 3.5). Van Klinken ranks twenty-five prov-inces from the least vulnerable to the most.15 All cases of regional communal vio-lence rank low on the scale, that is, they are highly vulnerable: Central Sulawesiis the third most vulnerable; Maluku, the fourth;16 Central Kalimantan, the sixth;and West Kalimantan, the eighth. These are striking results.

While van Klinken intends his index to be suggestive rather than determina-tive, do its results hold up to closer scrutiny? Consider the case of East Java. Ac-cording to Bertrand and Sidel (see below), this densely populated provinceconstitutes a case of collective violence; yet, it is scored as the second least vul-nerable province on van Klinken’s index. Does this condition thus compromisethe index? I do not believe so, because the forms of violence in East Java weresignificantly distinct from those in the regional cases he examines. From 1994 to1997, for instance, collective violence in East Java could be characterized inlarge part as property riots, not civilian-on-civilian mass killings. They were alsoshort-lived; none lasted more than a day or so. In the regions, episodes lastedmonths in some cases, years in others. When incidents in East Java did turndeadly — for instance, the slaying of male sorcerers in the eastern part of theprovince from 1998 to 2000 — the forms of this violence more closely resem-bled that of lynchings, not communal riots. In distinguishing the two types,Horowitz writes that in the former the victim is

typically chosen because of his ethnic group plus some alleged individualcrime or breach of the mores of ethnic relations…. Presumably, the killerswere eager to make the point that the alleged violation of mores was indis-pensable to lynching and that nonviolators were exempt from that form ofviolence…. In contrast, a riot victim is a member of an ethnic group, cho-sen randomly because of group membership.17

In other words, the qualitatively distinctive dynamics of communal killings andproperty riots or lynchings rescue van Klinken’s index from the problem thatthe case of East Java poses.


16. Van Klinken explains that since North Maluku province was first created in 1999, it did not existduring these data points.

17. Horowitz 2001, 22, emphasis in the original.

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Defending the index against the anti-Chinese riots of May 1998 is knottier.First, these tragedies transpired in non-vulnerable locations — Jakarta ranks thefifth least vulnerable and Central Java, where the city of Solo hosted violent mo-bilizations, is at the top, as the least vulnerable. Second, these events typify whatHorowitz has evocatively labeled “deadly ethnic riots.”18 The communal aspectsof the civilian-on-civilian killings question the validity of the vulnerability index(and van Klinken’s case selection). Unlike for East Java, in this case one cannotargue away that he is not interested in collective violence on Java.

To get van Klinken out of this jam, we have to turn to the social movement ap-proach he adopts. According to van Klinken, a collectivity must demonstrate atleast three out of five features to be considered a social movement (7). The fiveare: (1) collective, or joint, action; (2) change-oriented goals or claims; (3) somecollective action that is extra- or non-institutional; (4) some degree of organiza-tion; and (5) some temporal continuity. Taking this list into account, can the col-lectivities that formed to unleash the anti-Chinese violence in May 1998 be con-sidered a social movement? If they can, van Klinken should have conceivedthese episodes as a case, which would thereby undermine the integrity of his in-dex. If we appraise van Klinken’s list (above) using a nominal approach — a


18. Horowitz 2001.19. Mahoney 1999, 1164.

Venting their anger over price increases, protestors hurl stones at an ethnic-Chineseowned shop in Medan, northern Sumatra, 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) northwest ofJakarta, 6 May 1998. Ethnic-Chinese, Indonesia's weathiest ethnic minority, are commonlytargeted as scapegoats as economic crisis-ridden Indonesians suffer price rises, the latestbeing a 71 percent increase in the cost of fuel. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

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strategy that determinatively considers whether a feature exists or not — thenthe collectivities in question must be considered social movements. They ex-hibit points #1, #3, and #4.

Is van Klinken’s case selection and corresponding index thereby compro-mised? Again, I do not believe so, for these collectivities were not social move-ments, although for reasons he does not provide. If we change our tactic andanalyze van Klinken’s list using an ordinal approach, the social movementcharacteristics of the collectivities in question are cast sufficiently into doubt.An ordinal appraisal “has the advantage of avoiding deterministic eliminative as-sumptions and allowing analysts to recognize that the degree to which a givenvariable is present may make an important difference in the explanation of anoutcome.”19 In other words, by considering the degrees to which a feature waspresent or not, we can argue that points #2 and #5 were conspicuously lackingin the anti-Chinese violence, especially when evaluated against the regionalcases that lasted for months or years and whose aggressors expressly articulatedtheir aims. Their absence trumps the mere presence of points #1, #3, and #4.In the end, van Klinken’s social movement approach and vulnerability indexsurvives this test.

Does their validity hold when evaluated vis-à-vis the cases of regional, com-munal violence that are central to van Klinken’s study? In this regard, van Klinkendoes acknowledge the index’s shortcomings with respect to counterfactualcases (43). For instance, highly vulnerable provinces that lacked massive, collec-tive bloodshed include Bengkulu (the most vulnerable), Southeast Sulawesi(second most), and East Nusatenggara (fifth most). Like Bertrand’s study, vanKlinken’s analysis would have benefited from a counterfactual investigation ofthese provinces to better appreciate the reasons behind the spatial variation ofthe killings.20 Such an understanding might then help inform policies to preventpossible outbreaks in the future; it would also make a welcome theoretical con-tribution to the literature on collective violence.

One also detects a discrepancy in van Klinken’s effort between the provinciallevel as the index’s unit of analysis and the specific locations where the violenceerupted, that is, at the town (or district) level. Similarly, the index cannot speakto the evident spatial variation of the fighting within these large outer islandprovinces or for other important modalities of the violence. A notable exampleis the processes of target selection and the mobilization of violent identities —ethnicity in the cases of West and Central Kalimantan (Dayak versus Madurese),and religion in Maluku, North Maluku, and Central Sulawesi (Christian versusMuslim).

Van Klinken’s reliance on a synchronic perspective works less well in the caseof West Kalimantan. While the emphasis on novel, mass violence may fit hisother cases, whose recent pasts are devoid of such incidents, the same cannotbe said for West Kalimantan. This vast province possesses a riotous past. Thisform of violence has occurred periodically since the late 1960s; it began as an


20. In a recent review article, Aspinall (2008) remarks similarly (569–70).

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unintended consequence of a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign conductedby the Indonesian Army against largely Chinese communists who were resistingSoeharto’s rule. In the aftermath of bloody efforts to expel Chinese communi-ties from the countryside, Dayak-Madurese riots broke out and over time be-came routinized. Without fully coming to grips with this violent lineage, expla-nations of the massive riots in West Kalimantan of 1996–97 and 1999 ringhollow.21

Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia

What rapid democratization is for Bertrand and decentralization is for vanKlinken, the strategizing of political Islam in Indonesia is for Sidel. Before delv-ing into why Sidel considers its status to be so critical in Indonesia, it would beinstructive, as was done for the two works above, to consider the broader litera-ture he engages. Sidel writes against a certain literature as much as he writeswithin one. He takes aim at increasingly politicized field of religious violencestudies in the United States and in Europe, which, he contends, comes in twoforms. One is the product of international financial or development institutionswhose work tends to produce policy recommendations that are overly predi-cated on neoliberal, market-based prescriptions. The promotion of such tech-nocratic or apolitical solutions as good governance and civil society isexemplary. The second category is terrorism studies, where the conclusions ofdecontextualized, agency-centered investigations tend to legitimize politicalwitch hunts and wars on terror.

In contrast, Sidel aims to bring to the fore the analytical complexities and am-biguities that emerge from a contextual, sociohistorical account of the changingforms of religious violence in one country. Calling his approach “comparativesociology,” he draws from a wellspring of empirically informed, multidisci-plinary area study writings, including the accounts of domestic scholars, jour-nalists, and human rights activists. In other words, Sidel’s choice of literature ispolitical.

While it appears that he tackles a single form of collective conflict, religiousviolence, he makes the case that in Indonesia from the mid 1990s to the mid2000s, religious violence comprised three distinct modalities that demand ex-plication: riots, pogroms, and jihad. The three forms have unfolded chronologi-cally in this order and the reasons for the changes are historical, sociological,and political. Sidel’s argument is sophisticated and multilayered, but ultimatelyhe situates all three forms within the structural context of the changing role ofIslam within Indonesian state and society. He notes that “religious violence…has been associated with one or more religious hierarchies and the problemsthat accompanied efforts to assert and maintain religious authority over, andidentity among, one or another religious flock (jemaah)” (xii). In this way,“shifts within the religious field in Indonesia, and in the position of religion inthe broader field of power relations, have prefigured corresponding shifts in


21. Davidson 2008.

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the modalities of religious violence” (xi). Hence, Sidel seeks to explain not onlythe why of religious violence, but how its timing, its locations, its mobilizationalprocesses, and its outcomes have changed over time.

To what extent Sidel achieves his aims can be evaluated along three lines.First, does he convincingly demonstrate that the violence under investigation ischaracteristically religious, as opposed to class- or ethnic-based? Second, doeshe justify his emphasis on large structural processes over that of agency-cen-tered explanations? Third, does he account for “the shift from one form of reli-gious violence to another, as seen in the varying locations, perpetrators, targets,processes of mobilization, forms of agency, and outcomes associated with eachphase” (xi)?

The brief review below intends to show that Sidel’s account stands up to thechallenge, especially points one and two; the third point will be addressed sub-sequently. For Sidel, the foundational element of religious violence is the socio-logical and historical formation of a Chinese economic pariah class that has itsorigins in Dutch policy and practice. Thus, as Indonesia gained its independ-ence, this economically strong yet politically weak Chinese class was juxtaposedagainst the impoverished masses of Javanese who, living in closed, corporatevillages, held an ingrained aversion to capitalism, a system of exploitative rela-tions of production that was equated with colonialism and being “Chinese.” Inbetween the two emerged a diverse yet unstable political class of Muslim secu-larists or nationalists alongside a small but powerful Christian minority found inthe upper echelons of the army, some political parties, and the bureaucracy —the by-product of Dutch missionary activities and education. The influence of


“The impoverished masses of Javanese who, living in closed, corporate villages, held an in-grained aversion to capitalism, a system of exploitative relations of production that wasequated with colonialism and being ‘Chinese.’” (Credit: Robert Finlayson/Yayasan Interkultur)

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these two groups was one powerful reason why Islam was denied as a constitu-tional basis for the new nation-state.

Sidel thereby suggests that at specific moments when Islam felt under acutethreat, anti-Chinese violence occurred — for example, the 1910s, 1963, and1980 (98). But it is the late New Order period that grabs his attention — as it didBertand’s. Although he recognizes the growing income gap as a result of the lib-eralization of Indonesia’s economy under Soeharto starting in the 1980s, hemaintains that the violence experienced across Java in the mid to late 1990s wasreligious in nature, although always infused with possibilities of class-based mo-bilization. Islamic elites were jockeying to better their positions as discussionsof Soeharto’s possible succession loomed. Meanwhile, the riots occurred in no-tably pious towns and participants, mobilized along patently Islamic idioms, inlarge part attacked churches. These characteristics, for Sidel, also point to largerstructural processes that had occurred under Soeharto’s New Order. With theleft having been decimated in the bloodbath of the 1965/66 anticommunistpurges, and with the regime-led industrialization of the 1970s and 1980s, it wasfitting that the strong social and organizational capacities of religious groupsfound a restive, urban working class ready to be mobilized.

Regarding this religious violence, a peculiar thing happened as Soeharto’svice president B.J. Habibie accepted the reins of power from the outgoing Soe-harto.22 Significant anti-Chinese violence disappeared, a fact that, according toSidel, can be attributed in part to a change in focus by the forces behind politicalIslam; they quit attacking Chinese in order to focus on obtaining national politi-cal power (136–37).

This condition led to the alteration of the predominant form of religious vio-lence — that is, property riots — to pogroms that featured the killing of people.For Sidel, that the anti-witchcraft killings took place in the outer reaches of EastJava from 1998 to 2000 on the fringes of the traditionalist Islamic strongholds,which had a history of “religious diversity and tension” (146) and where “uni-versalistic scripturalist religions largely failed to climb” (148), was telling. Withthe now traditionalist Abdurrahman Wahid in the presidency at that time — anoutcome of parliamentary deal making predicated on the results of Indonesia’s1999 foundational, democratic elections — modernist, scripturalist forceslashed out at their traditionalist nemesis. This signaled a key change in the formof religious violence. Sidel writes: “If 1995–97 was about the upward push ofthe recognition of Islam, the push was no longer upward but rather downwardand outward” and it “no longer centered on a fixed hierarchy located within acentralized state but [was] redirected and diffused within the broader, murkierrealm of Indonesian society” (137).

With the religious pogrom an established form, this downward and espe-cially outward push helped to ignite massive religious violence in the regions,


22. Soeharto had allowed Habibie, a brilliant engineer and pious Muslim, to head the modernistAssociation of Muslim Intellectuals of Indonesia (ICMI), when it was established in 1991. Bythen Soeharto had turned toward modernist Islam, as represented by the creation of ICMI, inorder to co-opt the growing middle and upper classes of urban Muslims.

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first in Poso, Central Sulawesi, and then on a greater scale in Maluku. Sidel com-ments on their similarities with the attacks on sorcerers in East Java: they “tar-geted religious ‘others’ and ‘outsiders’ (including immigrants) and worked to(re)establish authority structures and boundaries during a period of great un-certainty and anxiety” (153). While one may question the appropriateness ofapplying the term pogrom to events that were characteristically two-sided, thetwo regional cases were both affected by three interlocking developments thatSidel emphasizes: (1) boundaries of officially recognized faiths of Islam andChristianity, with Protestant churches as sources of alternative authority; (2) ac-cess to state resources; and (3) decentralization, including the redrawing of dis-trict boundaries, which produced local border tensions and anxiety “not onlyamong Islamic and Christian ecclesiastical establishments but also among rivalMuslim and Protestant networks of local politicians, businessmen, gangsters,civil servants and (active and retired) military and police officers” (155). Here,overlap with van Klinken’s account is demonstrable.

Sidel then goes beyond what Bertrand and van Klinken consider to tackle athird form of religious violence, that is, jihad-inspired, terrorist-like activities ex-ecuted by the radical fringe of the country’s Islamist organizations. This shift,for Sidel, occurred as a less-Islamist form of political Islam was accommodatedwithin the post-Soeharto state. Importantly, attempts to thoroughly Islamizestate and society — for example, to enforce Islamic law at the national level forall Muslims, or to transform Indonesia into a state based on Islam — failed. Oneconcomitant disappointment was the poor performance of Islamist parties inthe 1999 elections. Hence, Sidel finds instructive the fact that this new form ofreligious violence (re-)emerged in 2000. This was when frustrated radicals, withinternational links, began a deadly campaign of bombings, including the target-ing of tourist areas in Bali (2002, 2005), and in Jakarta: the American-ownedMarriot hotel in 2003 and the Australian embassy in 2004. All of this coincidedwith the murderous participation of Islamic paramilitaries in the aforemen-tioned Poso and Maluku affairs.23 All told, Sidel contends that the changingforms of religious violence in Indonesia entail “shifts in the discursive, politicaland sociological structures of religious identity — and in the structures of anxi-ety about religious identity itself ” (220–21, emphasis in original).

Having established the religious orientations of the violence under consider-ation and the structural emphasis to explain such conflict, now we turn to thecounterfactual question Sidel proposes at the start of his work: “Why has vio-lence assumed certain forms, involved certain kinds of agency and mobiliza-tion, occurred at certain times, in certain places, with certain targets and certainconsequences — but not others?” (6, emphasis in original).

Here I address two of these elements: the issue of changing forms, followedby a discussion on the topic raised above, spatial variation. Sidel recognizes thathis singular focus on religious violence excludes other violent modalities, in-cluding labor strikes, separatist conflicts, and ethnically ascribed riots. In this


23. On the paramilitaries, see Hasan 2006.

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way, his framework might possess “limited analytical value for examining themanifold forms of violence in Indonesia since the early 1990s” (8). I argue, how-ever, that one of these bracketed forms strongly influenced the changing formsof religious violence that is integral to Sidel’s narrative. As was noted above,Sidel underlines the critical shift of religious violence from the property riot tothe pogrom, and points to the importance of the anti-sorcerer killings of 1998–2000 in this process. He also considers the May 1998, anti-Chinese attacks thatwere “unprecedented in their scope, violence and impact” and contained “actsof violence and brutality unseen in previous riots” (121). What informed thisupturn in intensity of gruesome, civilian-on-civilian violence in Indonesia, how-ever, was the early 1997 Dayak-Madurese riots in West Kalimantan. Theseclashes lasted weeks and featured the horrific slaying of hundreds of mostlyMadurese, thereby constituting Indonesia’s gravest such incident in some thirtyyears. In other words, ethnically ascribed bloodshed accounted for a crucialchange in modality of religious violence. In Indonesia, the two forms are not al-ways analytically distinct.24

Sidel’s image of the religious pogrom pushing outward to the fringes anddownward into the shadowy realm of Indonesian society is powerfully stated.But does it account for the details of the outward push? Like van Klinken, Sidelproposes a partial response that is structural in nature. He notes a demographicpattern in eight provinces that contain a Muslim population of 30 to 85 percent.This suggests that in areas of a significant Christian or Muslim minority estab-lished religious authorities will feel sufficiently threatened, thereby creatingtensions and anxieties conducive to violence. Five such provinces hosted col-lective clashes: West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi, Malu-ku, and North Maluku (190). The others — Jakarta, East Kalimantan, and NorthSumatra — did not, leaving Sidel to write in the corresponding footnote: “all ofwhich merit further treatment as counterfactual cases of nonoccurrence ofcommunal violence during this period” (255). Taken together, only three of theeight provinces hosted large-scale, religious violence, Sidel’s object of study. Be-low we return to the elusiveness of accounting for the geographical pattern ofthe riots in an attempt to better understand the matter.

Implications and Conclusions

These three works ably forge social science literatures with intricate coun-try-specific knowledge to produce grounded and sophisticated analyses abouta series of violent events that many still find confounding. By “scaling-down”25

to lower levels of aggregation to create a multiple-n study, they increase theirnumber of observations. Despite being singularly focused on Indonesia, thesewell-written studies are patently comparative; they strike a delicate balance be-tween multiple regional perspectives and national developments.


24. In separate article reviews, Hefner (2008) and Aspinall (2008) take Sidel to task for not givingthe violence on Kalimantan due consideration.

25. Snyder 2001.

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Substantively, they are also state-centric, and they agree on the importantrole of the emotive and political meanings people invest in collective identities,and how these struggles are implicated in relations of power and acute competi-tion over the state. Conflict, oftentimes in lethal forms, is highly anticipated, es-pecially under conditions of social turbulence and political uncertainty. Thispertains to Indonesia’s broader environment following Soeharto’s 1998 resig-nation, a period characterized by a swift transition and institutional instability.Each author, however, places different emphases on a set of explanatory vari-ables: Bertrand seizes on democratization and the state’s institutional frame-work of exclusion and inclusion; van Klinken zeroes in on regional power strug-gles over the state apparatus brought about by decentralization; and Sidelfeatures the anxieties propagators of religious identity and institutional powerholders experience in the pursuit of domination and state control. Other diver-gences are less evident. In his tracing of the evolution of state institution in In-donesia, Bertrand finds sentiments of ethnic and religious nationalism almostequally powerful in explaining violence; van Klinken barely mentions the con-cept of ethnonationalism; and Sidel prioritizes religious networks and struc-tures and the haunting permeability of religious identity in explicating ques-tions of power in contemporary Indonesia.

Together, these studies deny mono-causal explanations. Reasons for thegroup violence have been simply too complex and its forms too diverse to berooted in a singular source. Neither would anyone accuse these three scholarsof being economic determinists. Economic forces are not ignored, but in ques-tions of mobilization and violence, class differences tend to recede to the back-ground, overcome by more affective “primordial” — usually created — identi-ties. These works also shun considerations of cultural explanations for thebloodshed, armchair explanations that are often stereotypically packaged in tra-ditional repertoires of running amok or headhunting that suggests “Indonesianculture” is inherently prone to gruesome violence.

Conspiracy theories — common to explanations of violence in Indonesia —are further denied meaningful roles. But this line of fruitless questioning gainsvalue if tied to the problem of agency, as it relates to the most accused agent pro-vocateur of igniting conflict, the army: the most visible and tangible entity ofSoeharto’s legacy. Over the past decade it has come under immense societal(and international) pressure to reform.26 Despite some acquiescence, such asthe withdrawal of parliamentary representation and the denunciation of itsdual-function doctrine that enabled it to interfere in the civil and political affairsof state and society under the New Order, the army has doggedly defended itsmost sensitive strategic and most profitable business interests. Their defensivereactions, along with a past, heinous human rights record, has led some observ-ers to implicate the army, or in more sophisticated versions specific individuals,for the flare-ups. These studies under review are not averse to calling out anyrole active or retired officers may have had at any stage of the conflicts. Neither


26. Mietzner 2006.

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do they suggest, however, that as an organization the army had the power to setthe archipelago alight. Expectedly, while the army performed dreadfully in theepisodes of communal violence — at times its members participated in thefighting itself, especially in Maluku27 — it saved its worst human rights abuses forthe separatist conflicts.28

Moving away from agent-oriented explanations, these studies lay significantemphasis on the broad sociological and historical structures in which actors areembedded. Once again, this does not mean certain individuals cannot play per-fidious roles in inflaming ethnic relations — for example, van Klinken fingers acertain KMA Usop, a local Dayak leader, for mobilizing fighters in CentralKalimantan, and Sidel pinpoints Catholic gangsters hailing from Flores for lead-ing vicious attacks against Muslims in Poso. On the whole, however, they favorthe structural and social forces that give identities credence and theorize on theconditions that lead to violence.

In this way, their analyses remain at odds with some of the literature on col-lective violence that stresses the incendiary role of elites who mobilize followersto commit horrendous acts against real or imagined Others for the rational pur-suit of material and political gain.29 Another point of departure is the way theseobservers of Indonesia provide causal narratives to account for the collectiveidentities engaged in conflict. In other words, unlike some studies on Serb-Mus-lim violence, Protestant-Catholic clashes, or Hindu-Muslim riots, these worksdo not assume the identities or forms in which the fighting takes place.

These inductive studies are also less interested in generalizing their find-ings.30 This reluctance may be attributed to personal reasons, but I find their at-tempts to tackle a broad array of violent episodes across Indonesia more reveal-ing. Unlike India, Indonesia lacks a clear, powerful, and identifiable master nar-rative that resembles the Hindu-Muslim divide. Religious and ethnic divides inIndonesia are multiple and cross-cutting, even so within established identities.Islam is illustrative. Sidel demonstrates that the evident splits with this megalith— tensions between traditionalists and modernists, for one — explain much ofthe religious violence over time and space, particularly on Java. And we shouldnot lose sight of the fact that, as Bertrand notes, Muslims in Aceh rebelledagainst a Muslim-dominant government in Jakarta.31

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to return to issues raised above, disentangling the problemof spatial variation and the related concern of counterfactual cases. It has beenshown that each author under review leaves this issue unresolved. By combin-ing insights, we can better fill the gaps. A violence-prone province might (1)


27. International Crisis Group 2000.28. Davies 2006.29. Hardin 1995; Snyder 2000.30. Similarly they on the whole avoid the comparative ethnic violence literature. Varshney 2008.31. It is more common for insurgents to share the religion of the state’s army than not. See Fearon

and Laitin 2003. GAM has favored a secular, ethnonationalist — or even an internationalist —orientation over an Islamist one. Aspinall 2002.

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possess a significant Muslim and/or Christian minority and (2) be structurally“vulnerable,” that is, experience rapid urbanization with a high dependence onstate sector employment. One immediate result of this exercise is the elimina-tion of proposed counterfactual cases. Sidel would remark that van Klinken’sthree counterfactual cases — Bengkulu, Southeast Sulawesi, and East Nusa-tenggara — lack the requisite demographic (a 35–80 percent Muslim popula-tion). Van Klinken might claim that Sidel’s counterfactuals — North Sumatra,East Kalimantan, and Jakarta — are inadequately vulnerable.

This leaves us with Maluku,32 Central Sulawesi, West Kalimantan, and CentralKalimantan, the big four cases of communal violence. None of which, save forWest Kalimantan, experienced sustained and significant communal violencefrom Indonesia’s anticolonial revolution (1945–49) until recently. Ideally,greater specification is called for. As was mentioned above, these provinces aremassive. West Kalimantan is larger than the entire island of Java, and CentralKalimantan is larger than its western neighbor. No one would consider satisfac-tory an analytical framework that pinpoints the island of Java as being suscepti-ble to violent conflict. Standards should be no less for the regions. A great boostwould be not only to pursue thorough investigations of counterfactual casesmentioned above, but also explore variations within the violence-prone prov-inces. This would give us greater confidence in our conclusions.

All told, these authors under review provide richly informed historical, politi-cal, and sociological investigations and have done a great service by significantlyimproving our understandings of the multiple and crosscutting dynamics of themany recent cases of mass violence in Indonesia. This is all the more impressiveconsidering their go-it-alone approach, toiling and collecting data across acountry as large as Indonesia without the deep pockets and rich data of the Ja-karta-based offices of the World Bank or United Nations Development Program.Future studies would be hard-pressed to surpass the contributions these threehave made. In part this is due to their analytical acuity, but also to the providen-tial passing of the large-scale violence — for now.


32. Here, for ease of argument, I leave out North Maluku as does van Klinken.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This essay was first presented at the 8th Asean Inter-University Con-ference on Social Development, Manila, 28–31 May 2008. Natasha Hamilton-Hart,Jacques Bertrand, Gerry van Klinken, John Sidel, Vince Boudreau, and Portia Reyes pro-vided insightful feedback on earlier drafts. They are not accountable for the views or er-rors contained therein.

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Documents

STUDIES OF MASSIVE, COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN POST-SOEHARTO INDONESIA