Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde, v. 285; Power and place in Southeast Asia. v. 3. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013. x, 214 pp. (Tables, maps, graph.) US$103.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-24483-2.
A Few Poorly Organized Men provides a rich, nuanced account of one of the most protracted violent conflicts accompanying Indonesia’s democratization in the aftermath of President Suharto’s May 1998 step-down following more than forty years of authoritarian rule. Central to this careful, detailed study of the unfolding dynamics of violence that racked Poso district in Central Sulawesi province from 1998 to 2007 is the analysis of a division of labour that was repeatedly refigured throughout the violence but in which, consistently, a small group of “loosely organized” core leaders and combatants played a dominant part in shaping the conflict in interaction with other social actors and the inevitable contingencies of warfare and daily life in Indonesia’s uncertain post-Suharto years.
Throughout McRae pays close attention to how the lived experience of conflict inflects and rearranges the priorities of social actors. In this way the book departs from several other studies of communal conflict in post-Suharto Indonesia that assume a priori the instrumentalist motivations of elite political actors in fostering violence. In contrast to a narrow focus on the onset of violence, the book analyzes changes in the forms and intensity of violent conflict over time through close scrutiny of its organization and shifting modalities. Each chapter addresses a distinct form of violence, engaging the relevant theoretical literature, as the book unfolds chronologically across four overlapping phases of violence identified by the author.
In a clear and helpful introduction McRae begins to lay out his argument regarding the crucial role of a division of labour in the dynamics of conflict and the importance of attending to violence’s distinct manifestations through a discussion of some of the main literature on communal conflict in Indonesia but also, for instance, South Asia. Chapter 2 introduces the enabling context in Poso for the onset of violence, and especially its protracted duration. Relevant is the pervasive climate of uncertainty forming part of Indonesia’s profound political transition, but also the anxieties of Christians concerning their place in Poso, the relative demographic parity of the district’s Muslim and Christian communities, and the longstanding history of competition between them which meant that violence subsequently more easily developed along religious lines. Chapter 3 describes the first phase of violence in which from the start a small group of men played a crucial part as organizers of riots by mobilizing large crowds and circulating rumours of violence perpetrated by the religious other. Violence during this initial phase of “politics by other means” (17) engaged rival local political patronage networks, was staged for political effect and, generally, did not see people targeted due to their religious identity alone.
In light of the escalation of violence following the initial riots of April and May 2000, chapter 4 further develops the argument concerning the centrality of a crucial division of labour in the conflict, showing how a small group of Christian combatants not only were key instigators of violence during this second phase, but responsible for the majority of killings. In demonstrating how most people implicated in communal violence are not themselves drawn to kill others, that “neighbor did not kill neighbor” (70), this counts as one of the book’s most important contributions. Rather, in situations of violence such as that of Poso, McRae argues that a small group of combatants—who enjoy broad community support, can rely on the ad hoc mobilization of community members, and have the space in which to operate with impunity due to the absence of state intervention or other deterrents—can effectively carry out massive killings. As elsewhere, the author is attuned to the contribution of complex human motivations such as the experience of loss and feelings of retribution on the part of men who themselves or whose families suffered losses in the earlier riots.
Only in chapter 5 does McRae write in terms of “religious violence,” understanding it as emergent in the conflict’s unfolding dynamics rather than somehow given beforehand. The arrival on the scene of mujahidin or members of Indonesia’s jihadist networks during the conflict’s third phase abetted the emergence of a new form of violence in which the religious identities of participants came to define a long phase of two-sided violence. Besides aiding fellow Muslims, a crucial motivation for mujahidin was an explicitly religious agenda according to which local Muslim youth received both military-style training and religious instruction. A last phase
of diminishing violence corresponded to the establishment of Muslim military dominance and the belated if critical intervention of the Indonesian state in the form of the Malino peace agreement. The very fact of this agreement and the ensuing improved security meant that violence increasingly took place as occasional unilateral attacks carried out by mujahidin groups and their main backers, a de-escalation that went along with a “narrowing” of the forms of violence (157). Over time the conflict’s division of labour was such that only a small core of Muslim combatants remained responsible for sporadic violent attacks that continued until 2007.
The book’s final chapter addresses the significant negative role of the Indonesian state in Poso’s protracted violence. Important throughout was the state’s repeated deferral of intervention into the conflict and the demonstrated importance of such intervention when it did occasionally occur. Once again, a crucial factor here was human agency or the misrecognition on the part of state authorities of their own capacity to quell the violence. Not only did the central government’s will to intervene fluctuate but, following an especially subtle argument, such fluctuation depended on an assessment of relative crisis: once “an invisible psychological line was crossed,” (160) the state would turn to harsh intervention; inversely, when the sense of crisis passed the state withheld significant pressure.
In sum, A Few Poorly Organized Men is a thoughtful contribution to the study of communal violence generally and to that of Poso and Post-Suharto Indonesia specifically. If I have one minor complaint it is that the detail of description threatens at times to overwhelm the book’s otherwise significant contributions.
Patricia Spyer
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
pp. 898-900