Ingrid Wessel Livres

Since the fall of Suharto in 1998, violence has dominated Indonesia's political landscape. The anti-Chinese riots of May 1998 foreshadowed the chaos in East Timor following its independence vote on August 30, 1999, where the Indonesian military and paramilitary militias perpetrated widespread atrocities, including mass rape and murder. Reports of violence in regions like Maluku, Aceh, and Irian Jaya raised critical questions about Indonesia's image as a harmonious society. Concurrently, this turmoil sparked intense academic interest, leading to a conference titled “Conflicts and Violence in Indonesia” at Humboldt University in Berlin. The conference aimed to explore local and national factors contributing to violence, rather than discussing global theories or essentialist views. This volume compiles diverse papers from the conference, offering various perspectives on violence, its manifestations, and the socio-political contexts that generate it. Contributors analyze how violence is produced, represented, imagined, and addressed, providing a comprehensive understanding of its complexities and implications for prevention and punishment.

Since 1998, which marked the end of the 32-year authoritarian regime under Suharto, there has been a dramatic change in the direction of electoral democracy in Indonesia. The Era Reformasi was accompanied by great hopes but failed to make a fundamental break with the past, and since 2001 the reform process has faltered. New and old elites used patronage networks and money politics for getting influential positions through elections. This book examines some of the issues affecting the democratisation process and the challenges facing Indonesia since 1998. The analyses refer to institutional changes in the political system (elections, political parties, the parliament, new laws and decentralisation), to the legacies of the New Order (the role of the military, the relationship between power and big business) and to regional conflicts (especially in Aceh). The analyses of civil society and the actions taken to deal with the events of 1965/66 demonstrate that the new freedoms in the sphere of public life are being used by academics and NGOs to try to bring about democratic changes.