Although, as Gerry van Klinken reminds us, received opinion would have it that the transition from the authoritarian government of Suharto to those of Habibie and Wahid went relatively smoothly, in reality, between about 1997 and 2002, several substantial episodes of violence occurred in isolated parts of the Republic of Indonesia. More than 9,500 people died in large-scale communal violence in five places in Indonesia during this period: Western Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Poso in Central Sulawesi, Northern Maluku, and Ambon. By scrutinizing in all necessary detail the events that happened there, Van Klinken attempts to understand the dynamics that motivated the slaughter.

Van Klinken finds the book published by Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), a key source for a number of what he refers to as “key processes” (p. 11) for making sense of the sociopolitical mayhem, and he rigorously applies them where he considers they might have heuristic value. These key processes are (1) identity formation, (2) scale shift (or escalation), (3) polarization, (4) mobilization, and (5) actor constitution. Employing these notions—to excellent effect—he demonstrates that while the factors implicated in the violence that erupted in these areas are not replicated exactly in every single one, they shared common elements. The most salient difference perhaps is that, whereas the Kalimantan violence was an unequal confrontation between the overwhelmingly more powerful indigenous inhabitants, the Dyaks and Malays, and grossly outgunned migrants from Madura, in the other areas, the bloody struggles were between groups more or less equal in strength. They might, in fact, be viewed as more like civil wars. In the Kalimantan situation, the confrontations persisted for only a few weeks and resulted in the devastation of the weaker ethnic group, but they covered a large region—that is, the whole district of Sambas and beyond and virtually all of Central Kalimantan. Insofar as similarities go, each of them took place within the aforementioned time period, involved the middle class, and was a consequence of the much-vaunted movements toward democratization and decentralization supposedly resulting from the overthrow of Suharto. The violence with which Van Klinken concerns himself was a function of location, opportunity, and time. Small towns in these islands were dependent on government money coming from Jakarta, and here, in order to retain the privileged access they had to these state resources, local social elites, by exacerbating local ethnic and religious suspicions, incited those lacking these political and economic advantages into perpetrating atrocities on their neighbors. During the time the New Order governed with an iron fist, the opportunity for communities to indulge in large-scale killings was limited, and by roughly 2002, political circumstances militated against wanton slaughter. But during the approximately five-year window left open as the Suharto regime came under increasing pressure and eventually imploded, members of the middle class took advantage of Jakarta's weakened presence to press their own malicious agendas. Van Klinken characterizes this agitation as “local politics by other means,” a phenomenon that came into being when, as he puts it, “the opportunities for all kinds of hopeful and desperate policies lay wide open” (p. 138). He contrasts the ability of the well-connected social elites in these government-dependent urban centers to generate local support with the situation in Java, where the government was less influential on local economies, and notes that Jakarta, being more geographically removed from the islands, lacked the power to “contain such irregular politics” (p. 139), as of course it could nearer the political center.

The author ends on a grim note. The scene today is now apparently entirely different. Or is it? True, there have not been new outbursts of violence that could be claimed to be entirely new, and the 2004 elections were unsullied by violence. But in his opinion, the underlying pattern of politics that manifested itself in the histories he describes is actually present all over the country, though in covert form. As he phrases it, “The possibility that the small town wars in remote places could come back to haunt Indonesia's heartlands is the most disturbing aspect of the whole story” (p. 145).

Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia is a study whose conclusions have pertinence outside the places on which the author directs his focus—and not only for Indonesia. Throughout his exposition, Van Klinken takes pains to cite the findings of other scholars who have studied elsewhere, such as Sierra Leone, Latin America, and India, and he frequently undertakes forays into theoretical avenues pioneered by an array of other social scientists. I suspect, then, that this book's appeal will transcend the regional boundaries of the republic, and his insights will excite not only scholars with an interest in the study of Indonesian politics, but all whose concerns lie with discovering what motivates groups of human beings in shedding one another's blood.