Violent inter-communal conflicts can claim a large toll on lives and leave lasting legacies on subsequent political and economic dynamics. Although political scientists have provided many explanations for inter-communal violence, why violence returns in some cases (or conversely, dissipates) after particular conflicts is thus far less understood. Patrick Barron's When Violence Works offers a thorough and nuanced answer to this question with his empirical analysis of post-conflict Indonesia, where some areas have continued to experience more violence than others.
With an explicitly instrumentalist lens, Barron conceptualises postconflict violence as a tool political actors use to secure access to resources and power. He argues that ‘where postconflict resources are deployed in ways that reward those who use or threaten violence in the early postconflict period, where those who use violence are not disciplined by the state or others, and where institutional channels do not exist whereby groups can access power and resources through nonviolent means, postconflict violence occurs more frequently’ (p. 7). In other words, violence tends to continue to the extent that it serves the interests of those who employ it. In Barron's framework, the people who organise and engage in violence, and the interests that guide them, also predict the ensuing forms of violence. Larger, more violent clashes (such as extended communal clashes or riots) happen because political actors are involved and stand to gain something from these confrontations, whereas less violent, shorter clashes (such as vigilantism and crime) are more prevalent when no political elites are involved (pp. 21, 198). The greater the number of people at various levels of politics interested and engaged in mobilising violence, the more durable and severe the violence.
The book contains seven chapters, and masterfully draws from in-depth field research in postconflict provinces and event-level data on communal violence in post-New Order Indonesia from 1998 through 2012. In the first two chapters, Barron introduces his readers to his theoretical argument and maps existing approaches and theories on violent conflict in the political science literature. Chapter 3 provides an overview of Indonesia's institutional context and the series of violent conflicts during Indonesia's transition to democracy. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Barron dives into the cases of Maluku, North Maluku, and Aceh, before he explains why violent conflict has not returned to Indonesia in chapter 7.
There is much to like about this book: first, its focus on postconflict violence is unique. Earlier studies have typically stopped at explaining why the violent conflict occurred, but have less to say about why some forms of violence return in some places. Second, the book's empirical evidence is built on impressively rich data and extensive field research. With over 158,000 incidents of violence from 1998 through 2012, and information on the incidents’ location, timing, casualties and damages, form of violence, involved actors, and response/intervention from the state, the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS, hereafter) dataset offers the largest and most fine-grained data of communal violence in the country (p. 24). Other available data on violence (both in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world) typically do not have as many observations, and as much detail about each incident. This dataset is accompanied by extensive field research findings as well. Barron's case studies of six districts in three provinces—all of which experienced similar levels of violent conflicts but varying postconflict trajectories—weaves insights from 300 interviews with state officials, journalists, and individuals who were involved in the violence, who tried to stop the violence or who were victims of the violence (p. 26). Considering that access to postconflict areas is often limited, the scope of this field research is impressive.
Beyond the granularity and scope of the empirical data, another noteworthy feature of the book is its systematic examination of three sets of actors and their incentives and how these influence the occurence of different forms of postconflict violence. Rather than focusing simply on national and local political elites, or only on ‘violence specialists’ (the perpetrators of violence, usually mobilised by political elites) and their motives, Barron incorporates all these groups in his analytical framework and derives clear testable implications on patterns and types of violence based on these actors’ presence and incentives (p. 42).
These strengths aside, the book's inclusive approach to postconflict violence, which the author defines as ‘any incident between individuals or groups (including the state) that results in direct physical impacts such as deaths, injuries, rapes, or the destruction of property’ (p. 17), is potentially theoretically and empirically problematic. By his definition, Barron lumps very different types of violence, ranging from sexual assault, crime, clashes between soccer fans, election-related mobilisation, vigilantism, protests and demonstrations against the state, and clashes between ethnic or religious groups, as ‘escalated versions of the same class of events’ (p. 193). In differentiating postconflict violence based on its duration and severity only, he flattens the various motivations that drive actors to commit said acts, and does not account for why, for example, some incidents revolve around some local elections, whereas others adopt religious symbols and pit religious communities against each other, and still others are protests against government policies on the environment, labour, among others.
Furthermore, like many good books, When Violence Works leaves more questions for future scholars to engage with. Barron's quantitative analysis provides a snapshot of the aggregate patterns of postconflict violence and the regional distribution of certain types of violence in Indonesia, but it stops short of fully utilising NVMS’ rich data on state responses and interventions, the types of actors and weapons involved. Aside from a discussion of the temporal distribution of the count of security forces’ interventions in riots over the years in the early post-New Order era (pp. 187–8), we know little about when, where, and why security forces tend to be ordered to intervene, and in what types of violence. The same could be said about the types of actors involved in the incidents: there is very little mention of how and why some forms of violence involve some groups of actors and certain weapons, and not others. Querying these issues would help us understand better the mechanics of violence continuation in postconflict settings.
Nevertheless, this book has charted a way forward for scholars of conflict and legacies of violence. In highlighting the importance of strategic considerations of both state and non-state actors at various levels in determining the prevalence of postconflict violence, Barron has crystallised a key mechanism that allows incidents of violence to escalate.
