Problems of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv, 309 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 9781316518977.
Over the last two decades or so, the study of riots has generated a body of knowledge that has advanced our understanding of a recurring phenomenon in many parts of the world: civilian groups clashing with killing intent. Sometimes one of the groups is aided, or alternatively ignored, by the police, civil administration, and/or political elites. And there are other times when government agencies, even if they earnestly try, are unable to preserve order.
This newer body of scholarship is marked by two features that distinguish it from what generally came earlier: the idea of variation and the focus on subnational units. Earlier studies of group violence generally derived theories by either studying a gruesome riot or two, or by studying commonalities across several episodes of rioting. They also tended to focus on national characteristics such as state capacity, the nature of political institutions, levels of inequality, and historically entrenched intergroup animosity (a reappearing phenomenon). In contrast, the newer research has been asking why riots take place in some places, not others, and at some points of time, not others, while holding institutions or animosities constant, clearly understanding and stating that a constant factor cannot explain a variable outcome.
Along this newer tradition arrives this excellent book by Risa Toha, with its focus on subnational variation in group violence in Indonesia. Much of the early work in the new variation-based and subnationally focused scholarship has come from India. As riots in India declined and tore apart Indonesia and Nigeria, the geographical focus of research on riots moved there as well.
Toha’s study focuses on Indonesia from 1990 to 2012. Other than the intertemporal and interspatial variation in violence, this period is also marked by the fall of the more than 30-year-old dictatorial Soeharto regime in 1998, followed by a democratic transition, as another system-altering political decentralization. In a formerly unitary polity, the latter created a third tier of government, “a big-bang decentralization that transferred political and fiscal autonomy to districts and municipalities” (109).
Toha argues that riots represented the desire of the previously excluded ethnic elites to make demands for political inclusion, and once these demands were substantially met, rioting declined. Riots were furious for roughly five years after Soeharto’s fall, but only in certain parts of the country, and rioting precipitously declined afterwards. Why were the riots, when they raged, locationally specific, not countrywide, and why did they decline after 2004 to 2005? That is what Toha seeks to explain.
The core of the book’s analysis has both a quantitative component and a qualitative one. The former relies heavily on two datasets I helped co-create: the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Reconstruction (UNSFIR) with Mohammed Zulfan Tadjoeddin and Rizal Panggabean (“Creating Datasets in Information-Poor Environments,” Journal of East Asian Studies, September 2008) and the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) at the World Bank, with Patrick Barron and Sana Jaffrey (“When Large Conflicts Subside,” Journal of East Asian Studies, August 2016). Using the former, supplemented by some of her own additions, Toha shows that districts that were “prone to outbreaks of ethnic violence” (141) were where Soeharto’s Golkar party—even after the democratic transition—was firmly entrenched and barriers to entry were very high.
Statistically, the correlation between elite exclusion and violence is clear. To understand the mechanisms that produced this correlation, Toha then engages in an in-depth qualitative analysis of two pairs of cities, one very violent, the other not so violent or entirely peaceful: Ambon and Maluku Tenggara in Maluku and Poso and Banggai in Central Sulawesi. This comparison establishes the cause as a decline of Christians and rise of Muslims in the local administration of Ambon and Poso in the later years of Soeharto generated violence.
What comes next is a very creative part of Toha’s analysis. She combines the NVMS dataset and an examination of the ethnic composition of district-level power structures to show how, after decentralization, the previously excluded groups were included and violence declined. Among the most important mechanisms was the creation of new districts out of the old ones. “Administrative units that were previously marked by violence (were) subdivided into smaller units to create more ethnically homogeneous territories. After the splits, the new units also invariably elected an executive of the (new) majority ethnic or religious group” (228). Thus, the need to use violence to make demands disappeared.
While persuasive and meticulously reasoned, Toha’s argument does raise a couple of questions. First, though more statistically thorough, in what ways is her argument substantively different from Patrick Barron’s When Violence Works: Postconflict Violence and Peace in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019). I can imagine the differences myself, but it would have been better for Toha to address them squarely. Second, and more importantly, how does the argument apply to one of the biggest episodes of collective violence when the Soeharto regime was collapsing: the horrific anti-Chinese Jakarta riots of May 1998.
Benedict Anderson famously described Chinese Indonesians as economically privileged but politically excluded under Soeharto (“Old State, New Society: Indonesia’s New Order in Comparative Historical Perspective.” In Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Cornell University Press, 1990). Were the riots, then, an expression of Chinese political exclusion, or an attack on their economic privileges? If the concept of exclusion for Toha is political, the former should be the explanation for the Jakarta riots. But that is not what any interpretation has suggested thus far. Was it not a majoritarian pribhumi (nativist ethnic) attack on a politically excluded minority, however economically privileged it was? Toha does not focus on Jakarta riots, but a critical conceptual question is involved here. Were Jakarta riots not about how majoritarianism can be a driver of anti-minority violence? Majoritarian violence is not a conceptual category for Toha; her analysis is all about political exclusion.
No book can explain every puzzle relevant to its domain. Toha’s analysis, especially the relationship between decentralization and violence, is an impressive addition to the literature on riots. It should be widely read.
Ashutosh Varshney
Brown University, Providence