Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia - Softcover

Duncan, Christopher R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801479134 ISBN 13: 9780801479137

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

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From the Back Cover

"In Violence and Vengeance, Christopher R. Duncan adds a new dimension to the analysis of communal conflict in Indonesia and beyond, showing how the way in which participants come to understand a violent conflict, given biases and limited information, is likely to reflect long-standing tensions or divisions in a society. However, Duncan does not reduce the conflict in North Maluku to a primordial religious antagonism. Instead, he shows under what conditions this conflict came to be seen as religious despite its origins as a conflict between indigenous people and migrants over the way in which redistricting affected their claims to power. He shows how the religious understanding of the conflict blossomed and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is a must-read for scholars interested in ethnic and religious conflict and NGO activists who work in the field of conflict resolution."--Elizabeth Fuller Collins, Ohio University, author of Indonesia Betrayed: How Development Fails
"Violence and Vengeance is a wonderful book, grounded in fine-tuned, careful, and empathetic ethnography that foregrounds the experience and concerns of ordinary people in the unfolding of religious violence in North Maluku. This book will be most welcome in a field dominated by studies that privilege elite interests in violence's production and proliferation and for its acute attention to how the religious terms in which the conflict was played out became memorialized postconflict in monuments made to commemorate its perceived victims and heroes."--Patricia Spyer, Leiden University

"Violence and Vengeance is an important and unsettling book. Uncompromising in its analysis but deeply humane, it presents an account of one of the bloodiest conflicts that accompanied Indonesia's democratic transition. Challenging interpretations that emphasize elites and their machinations, it views violence from the perspective of ordinary people and shows how religion was central to the ways in which violence was manufactured, understood, and remembered. Christopher R. Duncan has produced a book of great significance for all who seek to understand the dynamics and meanings of communal conflict."--Edward Aspinall, Australian National University

About the Author

Christopher R. Duncan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the editor of Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0801479134
• ISBN 13: 9780801479137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264