Overview

Between 1999 and 2000, sectarian fighting fanned across the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. What began as local conflicts between migrants and indigenous people over administrative boundaries spiraled into a religious war pitting Muslims against Christians and continues to influence communal relationships more than a decade after the fighting stopped. Christopher R. Duncan spent several years conducting fieldwork in North Maluku, and in Violence and Vengeance, he examines how the individuals actually taking part in the fighting understood and experienced the conflict. Rather than dismiss religion as a facade for the political and economic motivations of the regional elite, Duncan explores how and why participants came to perceive the conflict as one of religious difference. He examines how these perceptions of religious violence altered the conflict, leading to large-scale massacres in houses of worship, forced conversions of entire communities, and other acts of violence that stressed religious identities. Duncan's analysis extends beyond the period of violent conflict and explores how local understandings of the violence have complicated the return of forced migrants, efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation.

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9780801451584

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Reviews

Duncan ... has extensive experience in this understudied part of Indonesia, including local language ability, and so is able to penetrate down to a very fundamental level in telling the story of what happened and what it means. Unlike many analysts, he is most interested in the specifically religious cast of the confrontation as voiced by local people. -Choice (March 2014) ...Violence and Vengeance makes an immense contribution to our understands of the ways in which religion shapes local understandings of violence...Violence and Vengeance succeeds brilliantly in accomplishing this important task. - Shane J. Barter, SOJOURN (July 2014) Violence and Vengeanceis the best description we have of the post-New Order communal wars from the viewpoint of the participants ... In aiming thus to go beyond causation (p.7), Chris Duncan has done the field a service. -Gerry van Klinken,Contemporary Southeast Asia(August 2014) In Violence and Vengeance, Christopher R. Duncan adds a new dimension to the analysis of communal conflict in Indonesia and beyond, showing how the way in which participants come to understand a violent conflict, given biases and limited information, is likely to reflect long-standing tensions or divisions in a society. However, Duncan does not reduce the conflict in North Maluku to a primordial religious antagonism. Instead, he shows under what conditions this conflict came to be seen as religious despite its origins as a conflict between indigenous people and migrants over the way in which redistricting affected their claims to power. He shows how the religious understanding of the conflict blossomed and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is a must-read for scholars interested in ethnic and religious conflict and NGO activists who work in the field of conflict resolution. -Elizabeth Fuller Collins, Ohio University, author of Indonesia Betrayed: How Development Fails Violence and Vengeance is a wonderful book, grounded in fine-tuned, careful, and empathetic ethnography that foregrounds the experience and concerns of ordinary people in the unfolding of religious violence in North Maluku. This book will be most welcome in a field dominated by studies that privilege elite interests in violence's production and proliferation and for its acute attention to how the religious terms in which the conflict was played out became memorialized postconflict in monuments made to commemorate its perceived victims and heroes. -Patricia Spyer, Leiden Universit Violence and Vengeance is an important and unsettling book. Uncompromising in its analysis but deeply humane, it presents an account of one of the bloodiest conflicts that accompanied Indonesia's democratic transition. Challenging interpretations that emphasize elites and their machinations, it views violence from the perspective of ordinary people and shows how religion was central to the ways in which violence was manufactured, understood, and remembered. Christopher R. Duncan has produced a book of great significance for all who seek to understand the dynamics and meanings of communal conflict. -Edward Aspinall, Australian National University

<p> In Violence and Vengeance, Christopher R. Duncan adds a new dimension to the analysis of communal conflict in Indonesia and beyond, showing how the way in which participants come to understand a violent conflict, given biases and limited information, is likely to reflect long-standing tensions or divisions in a society. However, Duncan does not reduce the conflict in North Maluku to a primordial religious antagonism. Instead, he shows under what conditions this conflict came to be seen as religious despite its origins as a conflict between indigenous people and migrants over the way in which redistricting affected their claims to power. He shows how the religious understanding of the conflict blossomed and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is a must-read for scholars interested in ethnic and religious conflict and NGO activists who work in the field of conflict resolution. Elizabeth Fuller Collins, Ohio University, author of Indonesia Betrayed: How Development Fails

Author Information

Christopher R. Duncan is Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies and in the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University. He is the author of Violence and Vengeance and editor of Civilizing the Margins, both from Cornell.

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