Violent conflict in Indonesia has been the subject of growing scholarly concern since 1998, when the initiation of Indonesia's democratisation process created space for long-suppressed regional and localised grievances to forcefully resurface. Though the literature on Indonesia's internal conflicts continues to expand and diversify, there is little consensus among researchers about the primary perpetrators of the violence, just as authors vary markedly in their emphasis on the ethnic, religious, cultural, political and socioeconomic factors behind the violence. There are also dissenting views on the role of state institutions and actors in engineering Indonesia's communal conflicts for personal or institutional gain.

Gerry van Klinken's Communal violence and democratization in Indonesia considers this relatively new pattern of communal violence in post-New Order Indonesia from a localised structuralist perspective, prioritising regional actors and their institutionalised power relations over national events and developments. In contrast to many recent political writings on violence in Indonesia, this book is dismissive of Jakarta-based conspiracy theories and downplays the activities of central political and military elites in exacerbating the country's outer island conflicts. Instead, van Klinken draws on the ‘contentious politics’ strain of social movement theory to convincingly argue that in a ‘cruel sense, the violence was just part of normal politics’ operating at the local level (p. 7).

The book is divided into nine chapters. In the first three chapters, van Klinken provides an overview of the temporal underpinnings of the post-Suharto violence and lays out his theoretical framework. It is in these introductory chapters that van Klinken puts his compelling case that Indonesia's ‘frontier’ conflicts were to a great extent fuelled by the predatory and parasitic intermediate classes who dominated Indonesia's local governments, ‘not because they are wealthy but because they are numerous and can raise hell if they are not heard’ (p. 48).

The next five substantive chapters (Chapters 4–8) provide empirically rich accounts of the causes and consequences of communal conflicts in west Kalimantan, Poso, Ambon, north Maluku and central Kalimantan. Despite diverging local contextual conditions, van Klinken highlights some key points of commonality in each case study, which he effectively summarises in the ninth concluding chapter. In all of these conflict areas, local elite power struggles over limited state resources were exacerbated rather than reduced by Indonesia's democratisation and decentralisation processes. In each case, predatory interests became embedded in nascent democratic state institutions and impeded the internalisation of crucial aspects of democratic procedure. In all cases, too, local community leaders and government officials mobilised popular resistance around communal identity in their pursuit of institutionalised power.

Though van Klinken presents a convincing argument about the role of local elites in instigating and perpetuating Indonesia's communal conflicts, he makes some nebulous claims. He argues that in 2001 Indonesian state power was not ‘as weak as the term “weak state” suggests’ on the grounds that ‘Power and money was there in plenty, but it circulated through informal channels’, such as through the establishment of a thriving black economy and an illegal logging industry in Central Kalimantan (p. 127). Yet Indonesia's black economy weakened the state from within by diverting the flow of limited material resources outside the state's institutional reach. The involvement of state actors in Indonesia's black economy further eroded state power as local authorities tended to subvert or ignore state policy directives that threatened to bring an end to the material benefits derived from these illegal business interests.

In his concluding reflections, van Klinken also claims that by mid-2001, greater stability amongst Indonesia's ruling establishment led ‘militant alliances to dissolve, militias to demobilise and identities to grow less salient’ in the regions (p. 141). While this was the case in van Klinken's five case studies, the opposite could be said of Indonesia's separatist regions of Aceh and Papua, where militia activity and mobilisation of nationalist minority identities escalated under Megawati Sukarnoputri's presidency. The return of military hawks to positions of political influence under Megawati contributed to Jakarta's growing reliance on military force (including the use of militia proxies) in dealing with Indonesia's internal conflicts.

These minor issues aside, Gerry van Klinken's book makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the causes and consequences of communal violence in post-New Order Indonesia. The book is theoretically and empirically important, and skilfully integrates ideas and events into an elegantly and engagingly written narrative. At a time when so much is being written about Indonesian national politics, this excellent book reminds us that the post-Suharto wave of violence has complex roots with many local variables and dimensions.