Like many new democracies in postcolonial countries, Indonesia’s transition at the end of the last century witnessed episodes of interethnic violence. That violence was not evenly distributed throughout Indonesia, however: important variation existed across both time and space. The uneven explosion of ethnic riots during Indonesia’s early democratic years is the focus of Risa Toha’s new book, Rioting for Representation.

The systematic study of ethnic riots had its first regional center of gravity with work on India by Paul Brass, Ashutosh Varshney, and Steven Wilkinson. This work was implicitly scope-condition-limited by the established democratic institutions of India’s postindependence history, albeit ones inhabited by local elites willing to employ violence for political gain. By contrast, more recent work on Indonesia has had to focus on constantly evolving institutional dynamics, from late autocracy to new democracy. It is on this latter period in Indonesia that Toha’s analysis focuses attention.

In initial multiparty elections—especially in multiethnic regions in which a former autocratic ruling party was long dominant—local ethnic elites look to electoral results as signals of how inclusive institutions are likely to be to minority interests. Here, Rioting for Representation presents two important and broad contributions to the study of ethnic politics. First, Toha is insistent that the origins of riots are to be found at the local level—dynamics of incumbent and excluded ethnic elites, capacity for mobilization, and whether local institutions accommodate demands by the excluded are absolutely central. Second, she makes use of a common but understudied form of inclusion: the creation and proliferation of new local administrative units. In the same way that American congressional districts may take a form intended to enhance representation for minorities, Toha argues that the same is true in the spatial administrative makeup of new democracies. The difference in the Indonesian context is that these units were often created to serve as a vehicle of inclusion for communal minorities, replacing quotas or ethnic party representation in local legislatures.

Building on Albert Hirschman’s iconic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty model (1970), Toha suggests that local electoral competitiveness, and the capacity for ethnic groups to mobilize, shape the decisions elites make about whether to employ violence as a postelection signal demanding group representation. In short, she argues that they do so only when (1) they perceive regular, if new, political channels to be ineffective and (2) their mobilizing resources are sufficient for the task of organizing violence. “Loyalty,” in this framework, is passivity in the face of electoral loss or exclusion. “Voice” may take the form of violence if not rewarded in elections. “Exit,” finally, is available to the extent that local actors can seek (and obtain) new administrative units or better representation in other existing ones. In Toha’s words, “violence can be expected during a political transition when formal political channels fail to usher in the accommodation desired by excluded local actors and when local networks can be readily mobilized to unleash violence” (p. 33). This elegant proposition is broken down into eleven testable implications, which form the basis for the empirical layout of the book.

That empirical design begins with chapter 5, after two chapters that develop the historical dynamics of regime, institutional change, and ethnic politics up to the collapse of the New Order in 1998. Chapters 3 and 4 lay out how ethnicity came to matter in Indonesian regions, how the New Order regime used local ethnic elites to help to augment its rule, and how that varied according to the level of diversity within districts. In short, the Golkar party’s strategy was to rely on local ethnic elites. In homogeneous districts, this did not tend to generate interethnic inequity whereas, in diverse ones, some groups gained at the expense of others. This regime dynamic produced both a set of legacies and a set of ways for ethnic elites to think prospectively about their chances for greater representation in democratic Indonesia post-1998.

Chapter 5 addresses the dynamic of competitiveness in local elections, across time (before and then after the New Order demise) and space (different districts post-transition with variation on Golkar’s performance). Without burdening non-Indonesianists with the details of Toha’s efforts to deal with possible bias and sample truncation, she went to significant effort to incorporate multiple sources of conflict data and to maximize temporal coverage. This work results in measures for the dependent variable—local-level violence and death. The independent variable—competitiveness—reflects the dominance of the New Order ruling party Golkar. The logic is that, where Golkar continued to dominate in diverse districts, previously marginalized groups had good reason to fear continued exclusion. Where they had capacity to mobilize violence to demand inclusion, these districts would be most likely to experience conflict.

Chapter 6 explores another plausible source of violence via exclusion: local ethnic elite response to the appointment (from the center in Jakarta) of governors or other local officials who were either not from the region or from the wrong religious or ethnic community. Like many chapters based on microqualitative field research, this chapter both illuminates some of the local dynamics implied in Toha’s central argument and casts some problematizing light on them. The main reason is that two local dynamics seem to be dominantly at work in these settings: first, ethnic or religious leaders’ choices about whether to provoke or stand in the way of violence and, second, local communal groups’ anger about central (Jakarta) appointments of officials either from outside or from the “wrong” communal background. Recall that the main operationalization of competition in chapter 5 was Golkar electoral performance. Yet, here we do not hear much mention of that: rather, the former ruling party plays at most a bit part while it is local elite machinations doing the heavy causal lifting.

I emphasize this apparent lack of fit not as a criticism of Toha’s masterful scholarship, but simply to observe the truth of Robert Bates’s pithy statement in his Passion, Craft, and Method interview that “[f]ieldwork is the cure for bullshit” (quoted in Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder, Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, 2007, p. 511). The broad thrust—about local politics being paramount and about exclusion both provoking violence and being amenable to change in institutions or policy—of Toha’s framework can support the mechanisms illuminated in both chapters. But the precise processes through which we see these broad theoretical parameters at work vary considerably depending on which methodological lens she brings to bear.

The seventh chapter brings together some heartening policy implications for those of us who study communal violence: namely, that these things are indeed highly responsive to change of policy or of institutional setup. Together, I see the book’s argument and the array of empirics as a major contribution to the study of communal violence in Indonesia and beyond. Indeed, it resonates rather like Wilkinson’s, Varshney’s, and Brass’s seminal works on India. I hope that subsequent scholarship engages it in the same spirited and rigorous way that these three scholars of India disagreed and also collaborated over a period of years. Risa Toha has given us a strong foundation of local dynamics combined with elegant theoretical argument from which to continue this line of inquiry, and the result is a book that is both commendable and likely to be influential outside Indonesia studies.