In academia, there are generally three different kinds of edited volumes. First, there are those that contain a loose collection of articles, which all vaguely relate to a specific region or subject, but otherwise have little to do with each other. Second, there are edited books that impose strict methodological guidelines on their contributors, leading to a publication in which all authors test or adopt a particular theoretical approach. Third, at times edited volumes are published in which the contributors not only follow different hermeneutical models, but in fact use the book to attack and contradict each other. Ashutosh Varshney's Collective violence in Indonesia falls into this latter category, with its editor and authors disagreeing on almost everything, from the scope and causes of violence to the best way of setting up databases. While readers seeking a clear-cut proposition of a coherent model may be confused by this approach, others will find it intellectually stimulating, empirically informative and methodologically rigorous.
In essence, the volume highlights deep divisions between scholars trying to document and explain the spike of ethno-religious violence that shook Indonesia between 1997 and 2001. For instance, Varshney, Tadjoeddin and Panggabean make the stunning claim that a ‘mere fifteen districts (kabupaten), holding 6.5 percent of Indonesia's population in 2000, accounted for 85.5 percent of all deaths in collective violence’ (p. 22). In the following chapter, however, Barron and Sharpe dismiss this figure as the result of a flawed methodology that relied only on data from provincial newspapers. Had data from district-level newspapers been used, they claim, the statistics would show a much wider distribution of violent incidents, with a significantly larger number of victims. In the same vein, the volume's contributors disagree over the causes of the conflicts. Bertrand, for example, argues that the decline and eventual fall of the authoritarian New Order regime created a situation in which the fundamental relationships between ethno-religious groups and the state were renegotiated. For him, the period 1997–2001 was a critical juncture in which the status quo gave way to violent fights over the new terms of inclusion and exclusion. Local groups, sensing that the national government was temporarily weakened and that the new arrangements would last for decades, were anxious to advance their interests by all means necessary — hence the eruption of violence in places with previously disadvantaged ethnic or religious groups. But Tajima, in the book's subsequent chapter, finds this explanation seriously lacking. He contends that Bertrand and others have overlooked the role of the military in the conflict. According to Tajima, the increased emphasis on human rights since the mid-1990s constrained the armed forces, leaving it powerless to intervene effectively when communal tensions emerged in the wake of the political transition. In contrast to Bertrand, however, he cannot explain why the violence died down as Indonesia's democracy stabilised and its military became even more constrained by public scrutiny.
Despite (or probably because of) this cacophony of opinions, the volume delivers useful material for further theory-building. The approaches chosen by Bertrand and Tajima, for instance, can be productively combined to formulate a comprehensive model to explain the emergence of violence at the time of Suharto's fall and in the early post-authoritarian transition. Arguably, the Indonesian military was not so much constrained by new concerns over human rights (as Tajima claims), but it experienced a fundamental identity crisis as far as its relationship with the state was concerned. Like other strategic groups discussed by Bertrand, the military had its terms of engagement with the regime renegotiated from 1997–2001, turning it from Suharto's palace guard (which had a strong institutional interest in suppressing any form of dissent) into an armed force largely indifferent towards the preservation of the incumbent regime. However, once senior generals became aware that democracy too can provide them with successful (and lucrative) careers, the military's effectiveness in managing security disturbances was restored. At the same time, the police went through an even more complicated process of adjustment. Like the military, the police force was impaired during the transition not due to constraints imposed by newly discovered human rights concerns, but because it had to define and establish its role in the post-authoritarian polity. Once it had settled into that role, its capacity to manage conflict increased dramatically. As a result, much of the large-scale communal violence subsided after 2001.
Overall, the book gives an excellent overview of the multitude of methodological and theoretical approaches to the sudden proliferation of ethno-religious violence during Indonesia's democratic transition. While the conflicts in Papua and Aceh are mostly excluded, readers will find a wide range of interpretations on the religious carnage in Maluku and Poso, the ethnic tensions in Kalimantan and the vigilante killings across the archipelago. As indicated above, some readers may have preferred a more uniform conceptualisation of the chapters, but a collection of highly contradictory viewpoints is indeed more reflective of the dynamism of the scholarly debate than a methodologically standardised volume would have been. Consequently, Ashutosh Varshney is to be commended for enriching the discussion with a volume that no scholar of Indonesian affairs or theorist of communal conflict can afford to ignore.
