Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia

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.

Table of Contents:
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsA Note on Translation and Pseudonyms1. Religious Violence?2. Historical Preludes to the 1999–2000 Conflict3. From Ethnic Conflict to Holy War4. Massacres, Militias, and Forced Conversions5. Peace and Reconciliation? From Violence to Coexistence6. Managing Memories: Competing Notions of Victimhood in North Maluku7. Memorializing the Dead in Postconflict North MalukuConclusionAppendix A: The Bloody Sosol LetterAppendix B: Peace Declaration of the Tobelo Adat Community

About the Author :
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 editor of Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities, also from Cornell.

Review :
...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. (SOJOURN) 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. (Contemporary Southeast Asia) By focusing on narratives and perspectives of 'those who did the killing or witnessed the dying', and not the 'objective academic analysis based on media reports and interviews with regional and national elites' (8), Duncan makes a compelling argument of how religion influences people's violent actions in the North Maluku conflict...the book is no doubt a welcome edition for the studies of religious conflict and conciliation, not only in North Maluku or Indonesia but also in other parts of the world that are plagued by interreligious tensions. (Anthropological Forum) 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) The depth of knowledge and understanding of local dynamics displayed here, both pre- and post-conflict, sets this book aside from other works addressing the communal violence that ensued from the fall of the Suharto regime....Violence and Vengeance should become core reading material for anyone concerned with religiously informed violence (in Indonesia, Asia or elsewhere) as much as for scholars and students interested in methodological issues, whether as historians, political scientists or anthropologists. (South East Asia Research) [T]his marvelous ethnography about religion and communal violence in eastern Indonesia.... offer[s] a compelling corrective to those anthropologists, historians, and political scientists who have fetishized political economy at the cost of understanding religion only in instrumental terms. Christopher Duncan's Violence and Vengeance thus provides an invaluable contribution to understanding how people in eastern Indonesia turned to religion and religious difference as they imagined, perpetrated, suffered, survived, and memorialized communal violence. (PoLAR) In this marvelous ethnography about religion and communal violence in eastern Indonesia, Duncan provides an important corrective to... assumptions about violence and religion.... Christopher Duncan's Violence and Vengeance thus provides an invaluable contribution to understanding how people in eastern Indonesia turned to religion and religious difference as they imagined, perpetrated, suffered, survived, and memorialized communal violence. (Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review)