In Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War, Jana Krause undertakes an ambitious set of tasks undergirded by nearly a decade’s worth of in-depth interviews across her four communal case studies embedded in two arenas of violent social conflict. Her focus is a dual examination of how extreme communal violence breaks out and how its worst excesses are sometimes prevented. She examines “unorganized” violence, meaning that the violence is not conducted by insurgent groups but by ordinary citizens, youth groups, informal vigilante organizations, or ethnic militias. The places where extreme communal violence was prevented are the rare areas where local communities—in this case, neighborhoods—managed to avoid the widespread death and destruction within the larger spasms of violence that plagued surrounding areas. As expected with such an ambitious task, Krause’s examination results in the construction of a complicated theoretical framework designed to explain both the outbreak of violence and its prevention.
Krause’s basic argument is that civilian mobilization for violence is achieved through the political mobilization of everyday violence networks, such as youth groups, gangs, and community vigilantes. The outbreak of conflict leads to the polarization of social identities and the traumatization of community members that, in turn, lead to the formation of communal militias and the militarization of local communities; these result not only in intercommunal violence within specific neighborhoods but also the spread of that violence to other neighborhoods throughout the locale. A second argument explains how, in two cases, local elites were able to mobilize the community to prevent the outbreak of violence in their neighborhoods. This explanation focuses on the non-escalation of conflict based on community resilience and adaptation to the hostile environment, led by elites who focused on altruistic forms of rescue agency. These elites used their positions both to control potential internal dissent and to negotiate with external threats to prevent communal violence aimed at community members.
One strength of this dual analysis is Krause’s finding that leadership in these situations can be one key variable in whether communities escalate conflict or prevent violence. In the two matched cases of Poka-Rumahtiga in Indonesia and Anglo Jos in Nigeria, we can identify the failure of weak leadership as one factor that allowed violence to escalate; in their counterparts of Wayame and Dadin Kowa, visionary and often collaborative leadership played a key role in preventing conflict escalation and loss of life.
Where this volume really shines is the depth and rigor of its methodological approach. Using a long-term approach, Krause spent close to 10 months on the ground in Indonesia between 2010 and 2015 and conducted interviews in Nigeria in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015. The book is organized around Krause’s embedded multiple case study comparison of two most-like cases of violence outbreaks in Indonesia and Nigeria. In each case Krause has taken care to develop a research methodology that allows for a robust comparison between the two locales where violence prevention succeeded, as well as the two locales where violence prevention efforts failed or never took place. This kind of depth is rare and gives the text a weight that justifies its winning of the 2019 Lee Ann Fuji Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence.
Despite the book’s methodological strength, Krause made some choices that, in my opinion, unnecessarily weaken the analysis. For instance, Krause chooses to label the successful outcome of preventive efforts in Wayame and Dadin Kowa as “nonviolence.” Such preventive efforts might, instead, have been labeled as successful examples of conflict prevention. Prevention is a widely known subfield of peace studies, comparative politics, and international relations and one that has recently expanded from a limited examination of international and state-directed efforts to analyzing local communal efforts. Additionally, Krause’s choice of the term “nonviolence” to describe conflict prevention outcomes may cause her work to be confused with that of the subfield of nonviolence and nonviolent action studies, which primarily examines how large groups of civilians can use pluralistic forms of coercive power to achieve political change—even political regime change—without resorting to armed conflict. As result, not only might readers be confused but also her work may fail to reach a population of scholars and policy makers who would be the most interested in her findings.
The subject matter that Krause is examining—both the outbreak of communal violence and its prevention—is necessarily complex, involving numerous theories and approaches. To address this complexity, Krause has constructed an elaborate framework that draws on multiple areas of study, including resilience research, conflict dynamics, social identity, and ethnic relations. However, the complexity of the framework tends to create a lack of clarity as to how the whole comes together. For instance, Krause shows how conflicts polarized identities in the areas that succumbed to violence but glosses over the potential effects of fear as a driver of violence, despite her data including ample evidence that people in these communities feared not only being evicted but also being “destroy[ed]” by the other (p. 201). Paying more attention to an important driver, such as fear of extinction, would have helped Krause draw a more coherent picture of why some neighborhoods managed to prevent conflict while others experienced horrific violence. More explicit analysis of fear of extinction might have led Krause to conclude that the leaders of Wayame and Dadin Kowa, by successfully downplaying divisive identities in favor of geographical appellations, did not create a new identity but rather reduced the threat to minority communities in these two areas. In fact, Krause hints at this outcome when she notes that outsiders were not able to target “enemy” members of these communities because they were unable to identify them or where they lived.
Krause has collected a great deal of rich data and given us much to think about. She has tackled a complex topic—extreme communal violence—and demonstrated that is it markedly different from other forms of violent conflict. Additionally, she has shown us that extreme communal violence is not inevitable and that its worst excesses can be tempered. In doing so Krause has done what all good researchers attempt to do: to draw from various disciplines of human study to create a framework of understanding that can illuminate this subject and give scholars and policy makers some hints about how to address and prevent these kinds of outbreaks. This volume has many strengths and one or two areas where Krause’s analysis could be improved through a more unified approach. Overall, the volume is well worth reading and contemplating, and I for one look forward to Dr. Krause’s future work.
