Indonesia is a country that seems to violate a number of widely held assumptions that comparative political scientists hold. For example, under Suharto's 30-year rule, corruption soared, but so did economic growth. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel offers another false generalization for consideration, namely, that despite the rise of ethnic and religious violence in the world since 1990, the widespread religious violence experienced in Indonesia since the mid-1990s is not best understood as part of a global trend. Rather, he argues that “such broad-brush accounts offer little to illuminate the specific modalities of religious violence observed in Indonesia or to help examine the discernable but seemingly inexplicable shifts … in the forms, targets, processes of mobilization, and consequences of this violence in successive periods” (p. 11).
Sidel's argument is that while ethnic and religious identities certainly matter in explaining religious violence, what is especially crucial is how and when they matter in linking microlevel perceptions and identities to political organization, opportunities, and collective actions whose forms shift over time. Religious violence, he argues in his detailed and carefully constructed account, results from heightened states of uncertainty and anxiety when identities and their boundaries are unclear and undergoing possible redefinition. Interests also matter, not in a direct causal manner as in most rational choice explanations but only as they interact with shifting identities.
Sidel considers three distinct forms of religious violence in Indonesia since the mid-1990's—riots, pogroms, and jihad—and seeks to explain the origins, locations, participants, and motivations behind each. To do this, he offers a very detailed account that requires a reader's careful attention, developing an explanation that begins with the constellation of relations during Dutch colonial rule that produced postcolonial alignments and led to the struggle by underrepresented Muslim groups to develop access to power in the Suharto and post-Suharto periods. He eschews an explanation rooted in identity politics as a global phenomenon, choosing instead a more domestic, path-dependent model of contextually and historically shaped identities, political organization, and interests to offer a complicated and intriguing argument—at least to someone like me who is not an expert on Indonesia. At the same time, I wish that the author would have explored the relevance of his argument comparatively, situating the dynamics he identifies in Indonesia in a regional or worldwide context.
What we learn is not only that Indonesia is a large, heterogeneous state but also that at times, within-group differences are as significant as between-group ones. Muslims are not simply united against Christians (and other non-Muslims). Nor are the Chinese and various indigenous Indonesian groups always united against one another. The pathways to power and to coalition formation are more nuanced and more complicated. Sidel describes what he terms the “matrix of class relations” rooted in the Dutch promotion of an overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese capitalist class while building strong local communities that served as the units of economic extraction. Dutch policy separated the Chinese socially and hardened the boundaries between them and the Javanese. These both privileged the Chinese economically and made them a vulnerable minority. As a result, this economic class did not become a ruling class, and the Indonesian political class that emerged was linked to specific educational and religious institutions and networks for socialization and the reproduction of power.
Sidel devotes most of his attention to the social transformation of Indonesia following the overthrow of Soekarno in 1965. Upon coming to power Suharto ruthlessly destroyed the opposition, killing perhaps 300,000 people, many of whom were associated with the PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia). The new regime combined authoritarian rule with a strong commitment to growth, and the Chinese business class soon headed the directorates, carrying out the aggressive development policy, while secular nationalists and Christians who had been educated together controlled the political arena. The regime's strong anticommunist stance drove many Indonesians toward Islam, and yet Muslims, the country's dominant religious group, were outside looking in. Throughout the period, however, despite Suharto's firm control, there were Islamic opposition movements and parties that raised populist challenges to the regime, almost all of which could not be considered hard line by contemporary standards. By the 1980s these groups were dominated by modernist elements whose leaders were tied to the Suharto regime.
Yet try as it did, the regime could not contain all the pressures that had built up in this large, diverse, and rapidly growing country, in part because of conflicts between the modernist Islamic leaders and other factions within the ruling elite, including Suharto's family members. These tensions were then played out through religious violence. From 1992 to 1997, there were some 145 attacks that targeted Christian churches, many of which were burned down. Student-led riots and attacks on Chinese residents and their businesses emerged in 1995. Sidel argues that the timing, location, mobilization processes, targets, and consequences of such rioting are related to “especially acute and unsettling urgency, anxiety, and ambiguity as to the position of Islam and those who claimed to represent Islam in Indonesian society” (p. 98).
Within a year, the form and location of Indonesian religious violence changed as part of the final push to power on the part of Muslim forces within the country. In this phase, the violence targeted specific people more than buildings and increased the tensions between elements of the political class. From 1998 to 2001, both Muslims and Christians engaged in lynchings and communal violence in the form of pogroms, spearheaded by vigilante groups, which took place in more remote regions where electoral uncertainty remained high as competing groups and local networks that were divided along religious lines orchestrated deadly intercommunal violence.
Jihad, a third form of religious violence, developed around 2000, when paramilitary units mobilized assaults on Christian neighborhoods and shifted attention to linkages on the national and international levels. Sidel views these incidents—including the highly publicized bombings in Bali—less as evidence of the spread of radical, fundamentalist Islam than as forms of a desperate acknowledgment that Suharto's overthrow had failed to bring a hard-line Islamic regime to power, lowering the sense of what Muslims could actually obtain in terms of political power and diminishing the potential for achieving Muslim unity.
Sidel concludes that an identity-based approach is required to make sense of these events. He claims that social movement theory cannot do the job as the events he describes have “neither a stable set of actors nor a discernible movement nor a consistent form of mobilization around which to organize a narrative account, much less an explanatory analysis, of the pattern of religious violence in Indonesia in this period” (p. 220). Rather, he argues, the problematic and changing nature of religious identity in Indonesia and “shifts in the discursive, political, and sociological structures of religious identity—and in the structures of anxiety about religious identity itself ” (pp. 220–21) are most central. The events he seeks to explain are not centered on religious ideology as much as they are embedded in the worldly power relations shaped by religious authority and shifting boundaries between identity groups. The author shows how Christian groups initiated some of the worst violence, how patterns of state power in colonial Indonesia shaped political and power relations decades after it ended, and “how secular, ecumenical, or religiously neutral forces … have been imposed and experienced in a religiously coded fashion in Indonesia” (p. 223).
Sidel provides an intriguing interpretation of Indonesian violence. Analytically it is interesting to consider whether there are other plausible explanations that are also consistent with these same events. While he rejects both social movement theory and explanations centering on global patterns of post–Cold War ethnic conflict, comparativists have developed many other explanatory frameworks, and it would be interesting to see how he would grapple with them.
While I am quite partial to an identity-based constructivist explanation such as the one Sidel provides, there are several ways in which his case could be further strengthened. One would be greater elaboration of the concepts of uncertainty and anxiety regarding identities and their boundaries. He makes it clear how and when these arose in Indonesia. Yet it would be good to elaborate on the mechanisms underlying their dynamics more generally. What kinds of changes in political or social relations raise (or lower) uncertainty and anxiety around identities, making certain forms of religious or ethnic violence more or less likely? Is this explanation not consistent with Richard Snyder's finding that rapid democratization often leads to violence? How are these emotions converted into political beliefs and mobilization in various cultural settings? When and why does uncertainty and anxiety produce political mobilization in some situations but political withdrawal in others?
Two suggestions about how to address these questions come to mind. One is to spell out more explicitly the kinds of evidence one needs to identify shifts in the levels of collective anxiety and uncertainty concerning identities. Knowing how Sidel decided that there were significant changes in each at various times would be very useful. The second is that Sidel consider more critically whether his wholly Indonesian-based explanation offers explanatory insight into other cases of religious violence. To answer this, we will need a clearer idea of what does and does not constitute evidence for anxiety and uncertainty surrounding identities. To the extent that there are additional situations where the theory seems useful, he will have provided an identity-based explanation for ethnic conflict that incorporates political interests but, at the same time, does not make them do all the heavy lifting that they are assigned in rational choice accounts.
