Creative Peacebuilding and Resistance in Indonesia

Abstract

Official spaces for peacebuilding, reconciliation and coming to terms with the past are still very limited in Indonesia, giving the matter of creative peacebuilding and resistance enormous urgency. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, authors in this special issue look at the creative ways in which the Indonesian grassroots deal with continuing and new crises, including resource exploitation and the neglect of indigenous rights, communal violence and the exclusionary character of the revival of tradition, and increasing radicalisation and changing security landscapes. This article introduces some key concepts, including peacebuilding and creativity, moral imagination and transformative justice, and the main pillars of creative peacebuilding discussed in this special issue, namely culture and tradition, arts and media, and deradicalisation.

Keywords:

• Culture and Arts
• Peacebuilding and Resistance
• Creativity and Moral Imagination
• Deradicalisation and Security
• Media
• Indonesia

Introduction

This special issue looks into ways that people at the community level in Indonesia creatively endeavour to maintain or restore peace and to resist challenges to their local livelihoods and social order in the absence of state initiatives. In 2021, more than two decades after President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order ended, official spaces for peacebuilding and reconciliation remain limited in Indonesia. There are still no government-led attempts to come to terms with Indonesia’s violent past, be it more recent communal violence or the anti-communist mass killings of 1965/66 that marked the beginning of the New Order. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Law passed in 2004 was abolished in 2006 and has yet to be revived. Such lack of functioning national tools of reconciliation and the often limited success of international conflict management and peacebuilding interventions in Indonesia were major issues identified in the 2009 volume Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots Agency for Peace (ed. Bräuchler 2009b), and little has changed since then. The contributors to that volume looked at how people and local communities affected by past and more recent mass violence have taken the initiative, often in the face of an inactive state, to restore social relations and foster reconciliation. In their analyses, the authors had to go beyond established notions of reconciliation pivoting on state actions and normative and legalistic approaches. These approaches simply did not exist in Indonesia or, when brought in from the outside, were short-term and superficial.

As was pointed out in that volume, reconciliation and peace mean different things to different people in different circumstances, whether victim groups, refugees, women or village communities affected by mass violence, and this diversity requires a close look at the sociocultural dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding and at local notions of justice and reconciliation. Such local or community-level anchoring of peacebuilding is essential to create longer-lasting peace and a more just society. Little has been done to officially acknowledge the importance of such local knowledge and potential; for example, reflected in the fact that indigenous rights have still not been explicitly translated into national legislation and the government continues to disregard indigenous peoples’ rights to culture, land and a healthy environment. Spaces for resistance to the government have slowly but noticeably been opening up over the last two decades, but there have also been backlashes. For example, the current Covid-19 pandemic has provided Indonesian security forces with a good excuse to suppress protests, but, in turn, it has given radical Islamists room to mobilise and recruit (as security forces are busy enforcing Covid-19 restrictions) and has raised popular discontent with how the government is managing the crisis (Chew 2020; Levenia & Sciascia 2020).

Given the continuing absence of state-led initiatives and the importance of involving people who are the actual peacemakers or those who have to maintain peace in the long run, there is an urgent need for new approaches, and for this reason questions of creative peacebuilding and resistance have enormous promise and urgency. This special issue provides insights into current grassroots and community-level peacebuilding in Indonesia; addresses continuing tensions in allegedly peaceful post-conflict areas (e.g. Bräuchler 2019; Trihartono & Viartasiwi 2015); and highlights novel issues that have gained prominence over the last decade, such as the increasing polarisation in politics and rising intolerance towards all forms of difference, including religious minorities. Building on key concepts like creativity in peacebuilding, moral imagination (Lederach 2005) and transformative justice (Gready & Robins 2014), the papers in this special issue analyse a number of initiatives that represent creative and performative aspects of peacebuilding within the transformative space opened up in the post-Suharto era. All the ethnographic cases are grounded in fieldwork, where authors consider creative ways in which the Indonesian grassroots deal with crises, both continuing and new. These include cases of resource exploitation and the neglect of indigenous rights, communal violence and its association with the exclusionary possibilities of the revival of tradition, and increasing radicalisation and evolving security landscapes.

A broad range of actors and creative responses in facing ongoing conflict and tensions are represented here: gangsters (preman) reinventing themselves as social workers in Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Java (Laurens Bakker and Ahmad Karim); activists reconstructing memories of conflict through the arts (Birgit Bräuchler); villagers reinventing traditions to integrate migrants in Maluku (Simona Sienkiewicz); an online community working to depoliticise social media as outlets of hate speech (Seto Ario); deradicalising Muslim militants in Bima (Muhammad Sila and Greg Fealy); and resistance against government policies through the creative activities of Zine culture on Bali (Sophie Anggawi).

‘Creativity’ is broadly conceptualised to include arts and media, the reinvention of tradition, and the imaginative transformation of thugs, radicals and former combatants. Art is conceptualised as media through which messages and ideas can be conveyed and negotiated. Media are conceptualised as deeply ingrained in people’s everyday lives and closely entangled with culture and politics. Exploring these different forms of creative peacebuilding and resistance, authors identify key activists and mobilisers, providing a diversity of lessons to apply in other settings in Indonesia and beyond. Due to the limited space available, we are well aware that we are silent about other important perspectives such as the crucial role of women’s creativity in peacebuilding (see, for instance, for Maluku and Sulawesi, Bräuchler 2015, 98–100; Subagya 2009; Trihartono & Viartasiwi 2015, 120–121; Useem 2017).

This article first introduces the key concepts that underlie the arguments in this volume and then discusses the main pillars of creative peacebuilding that we focus on in this issue: culture and tradition; arts and media; deradicalisation, including the reintegration of former combatants and radicals and the transformation of vigilante groups; and inter- and intrareligious dialogue.

Peace, Imagination, Transformation

Key to the conceptual framework of this volume are peacebuilding initiatives as creative and transformative processes. Peace does not imply the absence of conflict but rather the effort to engage in joint deliberations on difference and disagreement as an essential part of political engagement and peaceful transformations (Mouffe 2004; Söderström, Åkebo, & Harstad 2021). We see peacebuilding as a continuing process to restore or maintain social order, which is deeply ingrained in people’s everyday lives, and a process that goes beyond fixed-term peace interventions such as peace talks, peace agreements, truth commissions or courts (Bräuchler 2015). We conceptualise peace as something that cannot be imposed from the outside but needs to be locally rooted, owned and maintained (Lederach 1997). Post-conflict communities require long-term engagement and timescales to deal with the legacies of past violence and injustice (Kent 2019).

Contributors to this volume look at bottom-up peacebuilding and resistance, paying close attention to local perceptions of, and initiatives towards, justice, peace and the violent past. Sustainable peace, with its reduced chances of the resurgence of violence, needs more than ‘negative peace’, understood as the absence of physical violence (Galtung 1969). Successful peacebuilding needs to strive for social justice by addressing structural inequalities and the tensions that underpin conflict (Gready & Robins 2014). In many places in Indonesia the violent past is present in projects striving for sustainable peace, social justice and a future that is open for dialogue. Peacebuilding efforts must be long-lived in order to re/integrate increasingly heterogeneous societies, and their specific initiatives must be rooted in people’s everyday lives (Mac Ginty 2014). Such initiatives may be far removed from notions of a Western-biased ‘liberal peace’, including the idea that the successful promotion of democracy and a liberal market economy will automatically produce peace (Chandler 2010). Peacebuilding is a far more complicated process that above all needs to take place at the local level in communities. The authors in this volume are not seeking interventions that aim to enforce consensus or efforts to ‘homogenise’ and erase difference in post-conflict societies. Rather, authors highlight the manifold negotiation and deliberation processes, often facilitated through their creative engagement, on the way to a desired peaceful society. They require longer-term engagements with local settings in which relationships can transform and change.

Creativity plays an important role in everyday efforts to maintain peace (e.g. Rush & Simic 2014). By creativity, some authors in this volume deal with the role of cultural performance and the arts in peacebuilding—but also in resistance, for instance, to oppression through government or large-scale investment plans (Anggawi and Bräuchler). Other papers take a broad understanding of creativity, seeing creativeness in the ways social agents imaginatively reinvent themselves, their traditions or the technologies they use to promote a more harmonious and peaceful society (Ario; Bakker and Karim; Sila and Fealy). Relationships can be restored and relational peace built and maintained through culture and the arts, as well as through transformative justice (Bräuchler 2019; Lederach 1997; Söderström, Åkebo, & Harstad 2021). The cultural practices and performances discussed in this volume illustrate Frederik Barth’s (1969) point that culture is not an essential given but is relational and evolves through dynamic negotiation. We see such negotiated cultural evolvement as a form of creativity.

Creativity and the dynamic nature of culture are relevant to another important concept for understanding processes of transformation towards more peaceful societies: moral imagination.

Moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence. (Lederach 2005, 5)

Creativity, culture and artistic expression and performance are crucial in bringing people into ‘pregnant moments of the moral imagination’ (Lederach 2005, 35)—moments that enable actors ‘to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist’ (Lederach 2005, 29); in the case of peacebuilding, a creative intervention that is key to the restoration of relationships and the envisioning of a joint and peaceful future. Such creative innovations do not initiate quick solutions but facilitate a transformative journey and a sense that we are all human (Lederach 2005, 153–154).

The dominant practices of transitional justice are top-down and focus on statebuilding, legalism and truth. Contra to this, Paul Gready and Simon Robins (2014, 2017) have put forward the notion of transformative justice, ‘transformative change that emphasizes local agency and resources, the prioritization of process rather than preconceived outcomes and the challenging of unequal and intersecting power relationships and structures of exclusion’ (Gready & Robins 2014, 340). It is a future-oriented approach to the past, re/made in everyday lives. Practitioners focus on an understanding of social relationships and actions through the eyes of those affected by violence or injustice, and look to local agency and local needs to initiate change for a more peaceful future. Such change is not necessarily only forged through unity but also through disagreement and continuing activism for change. Such continuous negotiation processes and the discursive re/construction of identities draw on creativity, including artistic practice (Mouffe 2007, 2–4) that gives voice to the silenced and provides the means to build bridges between regions, religions, ethnicities and generations. Such imaginative, future-oriented practices do not imply relinquishing or dissolving one’s identity but revising it in ways that can acknowledge ‘the legitimacy of the other’s narrative without necessarily fully agreeing with [it]’ (Kelman 2004, 119). The articles in this volume contribute to the understanding of local practices of transformative justice in Indonesia, providing ‘thick(er) descriptions and assessments of transformative justice in relation to specific groups … and geographical settings’ (Gready & Robins 2014, 361) that encompass culture and tradition, media and arts, and processes of deradicalisation.

Culture and Tradition

Culture, in the anthropological sense of a shared yet constantly renegotiated and contested ideational system, shapes the way that social actors perceive and conceptualise conflict, peace, reconciliation and justice; and seek to terminate violence (Avruch 1998; Bräuchler 2015). Peace research as an academic discipline uses terminology that has developed in a Western scholarly setting; cognate words for key concepts like ‘reconciliation’ or ‘peace’ may not exist in local settings. However, there are often expressions for ‘restoring relationships’ and ‘reintegrating the community’ that may have implications for the kind of means and methods to be applied (Bräuchler 2015, 43). The implementation of administrative decentralisation in Indonesia from 2001 onwards provided villages with an incentive to restore customary political structures and to revive local conflict resolution mechanisms (Davidson & Henley 2007). This ‘revival of tradition’ in many ways helped empower people, particularly indigenous people constantly facing marginalisation, resource exploitation and the depoliticisation of their culture through the actions of the Indonesian government. In exploring the role of adat (tradition and customary law) in Moluccan peacebuilding, however, I found that the revival of tradition was not always positive (e.g. Bräuchler 2015). The celebration of adat as a tool for conflict resolution mechanisms can be important as a foundation for peacebuilding initiatives, but these are challenged by the scale of mass violence; the involvement of outside actors or provocateurs; underlying structural violence; and the misuse of these initiatives by elites such as the military (e.g. Avonius 2009; Telle 2009). Strengthening customary practices brings challenges, most notably the exclusion of cultural outsiders or migrants (Bräuchler 2010, 2017a).

Hartoyo, for instance, describes how Muakhi, a notion of brotherhood in customary or village groups, had been limited to Indigenous communities in Lampung but was extended to include immigrant groups with different religious and cultural backgrounds to strengthen interethnic relations. However, this was not without challenges as exemplified by the hesitancy of migrants to subscribe to the expensive ceremonies required for Muakhi (Hartoyo 2019). In his research on the peace process in Tobelo, North Maluku, Christopher Duncan (2009) explored the role of the hibualamo, traditional ceremonial houses symbolising local adat communities that were once used as places of mediation, which had disappeared decades ago. When communal violence broke out in the area in 1999, people in North Maluku turned to adat, and members of the two communities in dispute founded the Hibualamo Adat Council to mediate and reunite people in Tobelo. This local initiative could not prevent the violence and in 2007 a hibualamo larger in scale and size than the previous ones was opened, supported by the district government. Supporters of this reinvented tradition emphasised that the concept of hibualamo includes everyone living in the Tobelo region, irrespective of ethnicity or religion. This inclusiveness was presented in community festivals showcasing indigenous as well as migrant communities’ cultural performances. Similar kinds of ‘social engineering’ in the sense of participatory and deliberative cultural reconstruction processes are taking place in Maluku (Bräuchler 2017b; Pariela & Soumokil 2003). In another example, a province-wide council of traditional leaders was established to anticipate future conflict, but this had mixed outcomes. For some, these traditional leaders had the required knowledge to represent their people and resolve local conflicts, for others the council was co-opted by the government to win over villager votes (Bräuchler 2011). Other initiatives included the construction of adat ceremonies to enable the return of refugees, which were successful as they drew on adat elements that both sides could identify with and were thus able to re-establish the refugees as adat people on their land (Bräuchler 2009a); and the plan to reform pela alliance systems that traditionally bind a number of villages together irrespective of their religion to help in times of need, and extend these alliance systems to non-Indigenous people (Ohorella 1999). This has resulted in the establishment of inter-school and inter-university pela on Ambon (Alaidrus 2016). Moral re/imagination (Lederach 2005) and the transformative potential of communication (Gaertner & Dovidio 2000) play key roles in these cases but can also face limitations when moral imagination does not go far enough, as in the Muakhi case, or when confronted with broader power politics, as in the traditional leader council.

Sienkiewicz’s paper in this special issue addresses the Pukul Sapu ceremony on Ambon and traditional resource protection mechanisms in West Seram as case studies of ways that local adat can be transformed into an inclusive force, in these cases through ritualised performances intended to integrate indigenous people and migrants. These endeavours also attempt to involve youth, not only traditional elders as is often the case in ‘revival of tradition’, through complementary art events. In addition, Sienkiewicz analyses the role of intrafaith dialogue—as opposed to the interfaith dialogue officially promoted after the 1999 violence (Manuputty 2017)—as a prerequisite for building interethnic relations in a peaceful Moluccan society. The cross-fertilisation between cultural traditions and the arts is a broader trend in the area. In Ambon City, for instance, local tradition also informs the emerging creative arts scene in which traditional art forms such as kapata rhymes included in HipHop music and circulated via social media became important means for youth to engage in peacebuilding and in the struggle for a broader social justice.

Arts and Media

In independent Indonesia, culture and the arts have been important tools to ‘domesticate’ and integrate Indonesia’s diverse regions into the nation-state and to attract tourism and foster economic development. Under Suharto’s New Order, authorised versions of artistic expressions including cultural performances were selected from among the regions’ diverse groups but were decontextualised and manipulated in a way that matched the government’s moral, aesthetic, language and content requirements (Acciaioli 1985; Yampolsky 1995, 704–705). A heavily censored media landscape played an important role in Indonesian nation-building (Lindsay 2008; Sen & Hill 2000). However, such policies did not prevent culture and arts becoming effective means for protest and resistance (e.g. Adams 2006; Glazebrook 2004; MacLeod 2011). In the post-Suharto period especially, new art forms, new media and borrowings from global repertoires of protest aesthetics, networks and strategies are taking this to new levels (e.g. Lee 2016; Werbner, Webb, & Spellman-Poots 2014).

Studying the nexus of art and peacebuilding, Nilanjana Premaratna and Roland Bleiker (2016) suggest that arts can broaden peacebuilding by addressing the emotional legacies of war, providing context-specific solutions, and highlighting alternative voices that are often ignored in formal peacebuilding models. Artistic production and performance draw from society but simultaneously change perception and values. Embedded in everyday life and local practice, theatre, music, visual art and traditional ceremonies and rituals express the agency of local community members and potentially empower them. Furthermore, artistic engagement can express the complexity of lived realities and enable the transformation of relationships and the co-creation of inclusive narratives and potentially fundamental peacebuilding activities that formal peacebuilding strategies and the notion of ‘liberal peace’ commonly neglect (Premaratna & Bleiker 2016; Shank & Schirch 2008). Artistic expression can provide the space for ‘moral imagination’ and assist in questioning rigid identity patterns, enabling participants to imagine their common humanity through changes in communication patterns and symbols (Cohen 2003; Ellis 2006; Kelman 2004). ‘Art can make the unimaginable happen’, said the curator of the Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) in West Java (Manggiasih 2020, 10, translation BB).

Both traditional and emerging art forms have become outlets for community aspirations and socioeconomic development in settings from Sumatra to Timor (although scholarly attention is mainly on Java and Bali). Art has been used to prevent and mitigate violence; to provide participation and empowerment for vulnerable groups; to attract tourism; to freely express diversity and disagreement; to raise awareness and voice concern about environmental and human rights issues; and to reposition one’s community nationally and internationally in cultural hubs and art spaces (Eka, Maharani, & Manggiasih 2018). In Aceh, art became a weapon in the struggle for independence. Moreover, after the 2004 tsunami that cost many Acehnese lives and after the Indonesian government and GAM signed a peace agreement in 2005, arts at the community level were significant in restoring social relations and building morale and helping overcome trauma towards developing a peaceful vision for the future (Kartomi 2009, 2014; Setiabudi 2010, 421). This history resonates with current developments in both Maluku and Bali (see Anggawi and Bräuchler, this issue). Press freedom was restored in the post-Suharto reform era, but the current government has introduced new laws to restrict use of media technologies and to track down activists and ban art works or events, in particular those related to the 1965/66 killings. These new laws have also criminalised blasphemy. Today, certain right-wing Islamist groups in civil society aiming to enforce public morality pose threats to freedom of expression, for example by lobbying for an anti-pornography law in 2006, or banning films like Garin Nugroho’s ‘Memories of my Body’ (2018) about a male dancer exploring his sexuality and gender identity (Dirgantoro 2018; Harsono 2019; Lindsay 2008).

Bräuchler in this volume explores these trends beyond Java and Bali, focusing on under-explored art spaces in outer islands, in particular on how media and art have contributed to building a sustained peace in Maluku, assisting people and communities to come to terms with a violent past and reintegrate society, and to engage in struggles for social justice (i.e. transformative justice). Artistic expressions have facilitated changes in communication and the development of a shared identity that draws on established Moluccan traditions, creatively developing them further through youth culture. This process has ensured peacebuilding is part of the lived reality of youth, which has snowball effects on the wider society. Artistic engagement in Maluku has drawn on national and international arts scenes and has assisted Moluccans to develop ‘context-specific solutions’ in accord with the needs of a post-conflict society.

Worldwide, arts and other forms of media provide channels to express non-violent protest and resistance (Hallward & Norman 2015; Werbner, Webb, & Spellman-Poots 2014). From the late twentieth century, the thriving field of community and alternative media has provided ordinary Indonesians access to media production, distribution and consumption (Jurriëns 2013, 9). The rise of the Internet, mobile telephony and social media has led to increasing ‘social interactivity, connectivity, conviviality, and DIY [Do-It-Yourself] culture’ (Jurriëns 2013, 10–11), which provides means for raising awareness about human rights issues, mobilising solidarity and resistance, and leveraging local cases onto national and global platforms (Anggawi; Bräuchler, this issue). Performative modes of resistance can trigger moral imagination and initiate moves towards transformative justice. Video advocacy has been a prominent tool for community empowerment since the early 1980s. The rise of mobile connectivity now allows grassroots participation in video production and for the material to be widely distributed, online and offline. Thus local groups can exert direct influence on public perception and, in an ideal world, key decision makers (KUNCI Cultural Studies Center & EngageMedia 2009). Also in the 1980s, inspired by international activist art like Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ or ‘a Brechtian notion of the role of theatre in educating people for social change’, people’s theatre (teater rakyat) became a tool for breaking the silence, raising awareness (for instance, about land rights issues), creating solidarity and mobilising supporters (Bodden 2010, 60). Music can similarly provide weapons of protest and resistance (Bodden 2005). It can open up alternative, transformative and inclusive spaces for young people, even engaging with groups one would normally avoid (including across ethnic or religious divides), to build emotional empathy, common interests and identities. This has been the case in Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Indonesia (Balandina 2010; Pruitt 2011). This is important not only for post-conflict reconciliation but also, importantly, to avoid losing youth to the radicals (Oezerdem & Podder 2015, 210, 217).

Activists commonly use a combination of protest art and media for mobilisation. An intriguing example is Taman 65 or 65 Park, inaugurated by Balinese youth in 2005 to commemorate victims of 1965/66 in creative ways (Wardana & Hutabarat 2012), at a time when the Indonesian state still refuses to acknowledge this violent past (Leksana 2009). Taman 65 has provided a place to share their stories and make suppressed memories public, providing a catalyst for bridging differences. Taman 65 members use a range of creative projects to reach a younger generation, including: photo and art exhibitions; the recovery and publication of writings by former political prisoners; gathering testimonies of 1965/66 survivors; and the composition of songs and organisation of rock and punk concerts (Dwyer 2015a, 2015b). To initiate broader transformative justice processes, awareness raising soon went beyond the 1965/66 case. From 2013, for instance, park members became involved in one of the most outspoken protest movements ever seen on Bali, the Tolak Reklamasi (Resist Reclamation) movement, directed against a government-supported investor’s plan to open up artificial islands for additional tourism infrastructure in already over-saturated south Bali. The movement mobilised large parts of the population through Hindu rituals and adat, and music, visual arts and punk rock culture to engage youth (Bräuchler 2018a, 2018b). Anggawi (this issue) focuses on an under-documented aspect of creative resistance: Zine DIY culture. Rooted in the local punk and art scenes that flourished in post-Suharto Bali, zineing opens up uncensored spaces for critical arts, in this case protesting against the land reclamation plans. Focusing on the punk community Denpasar Kollektif, she examines the zines’ content, circulation and archiving as a creative form of protest and critique to foster long-term political change.

Social media have become integral to arts, activism and advocacy. But increasing reliance on social media leaves out parts of the population who do not have access due to lack of Internet access or skills, or out of choice (cf. KUNCI Cultural Studies Center & EngageMedia 2009, 68; Manggiasih 2020, 16–17). In Indonesia, the Internet contributed to the revolution that caused Suharto to fall (Hill & Sen 2005). Internet platforms and social media play important and empowering roles in activism across Indonesia such as in Maluku (Bräuchler 2018a, 2019) and West Papua (Chesterfield 2011). However, denial of access; the rise of ‘fake news’; the misuse of the Internet for surveillance tactics; and its use in proliferating hate speech, sectarianism, trolling and racism mean it is not by nature a democratising tool. Uses of the Internet for such undemocratic ends, which also include the recruitment of militants in Indonesia and many other parts of the world, demand we take a nuanced and critical look at the uses of (social) media (e.g. Bräuchler 2013, 2018a; Castells 2001; Marshall 2020; Morozov 2011; Tapsell 2015; Udupa, Gagliardone, & Hervik 2021). Ario Seto, in this issue, examines how an Indonesian Facebook group finds strategies to deal with what they see as misuse of the Internet for political and religious polarisation, and thereby contribute to deradicalisation. Seto follows the Agus Brotherhood Indonesia Facebook group (AABI), whose members share the popular name Agus. Tired of online hate speech, AABI members agree to maintain peaceful conversations in their online/offline environments, censoring political conversations, jokes and memes. Seto terms this ‘the rebellious language of silence’, meant to disrupt the flow of elite-driven political conversations, which comes at a price as it suggests a false dichotomy between politics and peace; the avoidance of politics and embrace of self-censorship recalls the New Order approach to media and civic activism.

De/Radicalisation

Initiatives such as AABI’s to embrace a sense of national unity are important in a setting that has experienced increasing radicalisation over the last few years and has challenged Indonesia’s image as a majority Muslim country, where Muslims practise a moderate version of Islam. In this radicalisation, religious antagonism was instrumentalised to fuel communal conflicts in places like Maluku and Sulawesi in the early 2000s, but there has also been rising intolerance towards ideas, values and beliefs that are presumed to differ from the majority population, notably religious minorities such as Christians, the Ahmadiyya movement (Harmakaputra 2016; Lindsey & Pausacker 2016) and also Shia Islam. In some recent instances, conservative Islamists challenged President Joko Widodo’s re-election in 2019; a Muslim family perpetrated a suicide bombing against churches in Surabaya in 2018; and the Chinese-Christian background of Jakarta’s former governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (or Ahok) was instrumentalised by his Islamist opposition. This resulted in accusations of blasphemy against him and a ‘religiously charged rally that drew hundreds of thousands to central Jakarta in December 2016’, resulting in Ahok’s arrest in 2017 (Sheany 2018) and subsequent conviction. Online platforms and social media have become significant arenas for hate speech and extremism, including recruitment of mostly young people for fighting a ‘holy war’ in places like Palestine and Syria (Search for Common Ground 2018, 5). This is a major setback in a country which in 1999 celebrated a democratic transition. Moreover, the Indonesian government’s campaign for an undifferentiated repression of Islamists threatens to ‘erode(s) human rights, undermine(s) democratic values and could well lead to a radical backlash against what is seen as growing state antipathy towards Islam’ (Fealy 2020).

The government provides very little infrastructure and resources for rehabilitation and deradicalisation programmes. With only a few examples of government rehabilitation programmes in prisons (Muluk, Umam, & Milla 2020; Schulze 2008), there is a high risk that ex-combatants and -prisoners will return to violence (Ismail 2014). Militants’ children are at risk and there are few programmes to deradicalise them (Beech & Suhartono 2019). Search for Common Ground and other international organisations have worked with students and teachers of Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) to counter intolerance and radicalism through the production of radio programmes and short films. They aim to counter ‘stereotypes of pesantren as producers of Islamic terrorists’ and to disseminate ‘values of tolerance and peace in their communities’ (Ismah 2014, 18). Noor Huda Ismail founded the lnstitute for lnternational Peace Building in Jakarta in 2008 where members and participants use digital technology and offline discussion events and self-produced films, including ‘Jihad Selfie’ (2016), ‘Pengantian’ (The Bride, 2018) and ‘Seeking the Imam’ (2020), to counter radical narratives and give voice to reformed jihadists who warn others not to make the same mistakes. The films are screened in Indonesia and overseas, at film festivals and in schools and universities (e.g. Ibrahim 2018; Ridhoi 2020). Another creative project initiated by Noor Huda’s team is Dapoer Bistik, a restaurant in Solo, Java, run by people formerly involved in terrorism and extremism. It provides training for drop-out students as potential targets for recruitment by radical groups (Chandra 2017, 36; Ismail 2012, 2016).

This special issue explores deradicalisation initiatives, including terrorist rehabilitation programmes; the transformation of vigilante groups; and the promotion of inter- and intrareligious dialogue. Sila and Fealy report on ethnographic research on deradicalisation in Bima, Sumbawa—an area that has received little attention in debates around de/radicalisation. They argue that disengaging militants from violent extremism is long and complex, requiring creativity and cultural sensitiveness. Family circles and local civil society organisations, and radio programmes promoting both multi-faith dialogue and moderate exegesis of the Scriptures, play important roles. Bakker and Karim (this issue) deal with another kind of deradicalisation: the transformation of preman (thugs) or vigilantes from troublemakers to peacekeepers. Vigilante leaders and groups have long been co-opted by the colonial regime and the modern Indonesian state (including notably the New Order) to maintain their authority (Kloos 2014, 63; Wilson 2006). State-sanctioned vigilante groups were mobilised under the banner of Islam to ‘maintain security’ (facilitate the continuance of powers) during the sensitive transition in 1998. The FPI (Front Pembela Islam or Islamic Defender Front) was notorious, inter alia, for attacks on student protestors and religious minority groups, as well as ‘seamy’ business establishments from whom they raised payments (Sidel 2007, 137–140). The implementation of the decentralisation of political authority, from the centre to the districts after 1998, has been associated with the emergence of extra-legal security groups throughout the country to deal with a perceived rise in crime and fill gaps in security, justice and employment where the state was deemed to have failed (Wilson 2006). These groups must constantly reinvent themselves in changing socio-political climates. Vigilante groups on Lombok, for example, incorporated traditional conflict resolution mechanisms into their charters to legitimise their actions and their existence (Telle 2009). The deployment of village-specific adat into settings that crossed village boundaries increased tensions and conflicts, as the vigilante groups’ interests collided with those of adat authorities or when people did not approve of the misappropriation of adat by groups whose moral legitimacy they doubted. Bakker and Karim (this issue) take a critical look at the ambivalent role of preman and their apparent transformation from gangsters to social workers and peacebuilders (cf. Aspinall 2009). They argue that these groups, paradoxically, have found creative means to reinvent themselves to play relevant roles in maintaining everyday peace in local society. Bakker and Karim analyse the qualities of both violence and resulting peace that underlie their influence and the contributions they make to sustaining local order.

Religion plays a role in most of the cases discussed in this volume, and inter- or intrareligious dialogue commonly figure as a means to restore peace and achieve the related aim of deradicalisation. The instrumentalisation of religion has led to instances of communal violence in post-Suharto Indonesia, while adat that is assumed to precede the arrival of world religions has been celebrated as an important bridge-builder. Given the close relationship between adat and religion and given the influential role religion plays in people’s daily lives, interfaith dialogue has been identified as another important means for sustainable peacebuilding (e.g. Bräuchler; Sienkiewicz, this issue). This was the case in Maluku, where religious leaders founded an interfaith institution that initiated activities that were influential in restoring social peaceful relations (e.g. Manuputty 2017). In Minahasa, Sulawesi, leaders of all major religions have worked together to prevent the eruption of communal violence (Henley, Schouten, & Ulaen 2007, 313, 325); and Student Interfaith Peace Camps have been held in Yogyakarta to deconstruct prejudices, foster social pluralism and build stronger peaceful relations (Jonathan, Widjaja, & Husein 2018). Given the various streams within Islam and the radicalisation of certain groups, interfaith dialogue also requires intra-faith dialogue (Harahap 2014, 243). Intrareligious dialogue between Muslims with different ethnic backgrounds is relevant in Maluku to smooth the integration of migrants into Indigenous communities (Sienkiewicz, this issue), for the deradicalisation of terrorists in Bima (Sila & Fealy, this issue) and to raise awareness that the majority of Muslims in Indonesia still practise an Islam that is peaceful and tolerant (Adeney-Risakotta 2014, 81).

Creative Peacebuilding and Resistance

For a long time, research on Indonesia had a strong focus on conflict, which is not surprising given the long-lasting and repressive regime under President Suharto, incidents like the Bali bombings, and interreligious and interethnic violence in post-Suharto Indonesia. It is also not surprising given the lack of initiatives by the Indonesian government to foster reconciliation and cope with the aftermath of violent events, both past and present, and the increasing radicalisation and polarisation in Indonesian society today. This underlines the urgency to search for alternative means to restore social order and build peace. What is needed is an openness to new approaches, as promoted in this special issue, that build on local cultures, global and traditional arts, social relationships and mutual respect. These approaches focus on ‘moral imagination’, ‘transformative justice’ and the creative reinvention or reconstruction of social relationships within cultural, religious, artistic, political and media spaces.

The contributions to this special issue further promote this search by analysing ethnographic cases and providing answers to the following questions: What kinds of conflicts and structural inequalities do local communities face and who are the stakeholders? How do they conceptualise peace, justice and social order? What creative means do local actors come up with to restore peace or resist challenges to local livelihoods and social orders, and who are these actors? What local traditions, media or global ideas are they drawing on? What challenges do they face? What role does the government play in these dynamics, if at all? What kinds of moral reimaginings or transformations take place, and what limits are there? What kind of social formations are emergent? How do these developments sit in relation to the larger trends of peacebuilding and resistance in Indonesia and beyond? Bringing together experiences from diverse regions and communities that were exposed to a range of past and ongoing conflicts, this special issue hopes to become part of that transformative space in Indonesia where creative and performative aspects of peacebuilding and resistance are increasingly taking place; to allow for cross-fertilisation between the cases and lessons for other settings of conflict and social injustice in Indonesia and beyond; and to make innovative contributions to research on creative and performative aspects of peacebuilding more generally.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback, Kathy Robinson for her input and for helping to shape this special issue, and the TAPJA Editorial Office for organising the review and editing process.