Yuhki Tajima, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside and an affiliate of the World Bank’s Conflict and Development Team.
Description:
In 1996, reports of communal violence rose steadily throughout the Indonesian archipelago until their peak in 2000, after which incidents of communal violence declined as steadily as they had risen. Besides the well-known cases of Christian-Muslim violence in the Malukus and Central Sulawesi and the indigenous-migrant violence in Kalimantan, this rise in communal violence was also manifested as inter-village clashes and small-town riots in every province in Indonesia. What explains the rise and fall of the incidents in communal violence during this period? Why did some villages and towns experience violence while others remained peaceful? The commonly cited hypotheses that point to the Asian financial crisis, the resignation of Suharto, decentralization, and electoral liberalization are unable to account for the timing of the violence since the rise in violence in 1996 predated the financial crisis (1997), the fall of Suharto (1998), and the passage of decentralization and electoral reforms (1999).
Based on fieldwork, formal modeling, and statistics, it is argue that the withdrawal of the military, characteristic of many authoritarian breakdowns, led to greater violence due to resultant mismatches in formal and informal security institutions. These mismatches emerged because informal security institutions that had developed in the shadow of the military now could no longer rely on the military to intervene in quickly repressing escalations of communal violence. These mismatches were more likely to emerge in locations accustomed to military intervention than in places that had been less exposed to military intervention. Over time, communal violence decreased as non-state actors revise their expectations and adapt informal security institutions. Communal violence could result from these mismatches until locals renegotiated the form of institutions that governed their everyday interactions. The research draws on primary case studies in Lampung and Central Sulawesi and tests the implications of the theory on over 53,000 village observations from the Podes and Census datasets.
RSS