Educated but poor: Explaining localized ethnic violence during Indonesia’s democratic transition

A sudden outbreak of a series of ethnic violence in Indonesia is linked to the country’s critical juncture of embarking on the transition towards democracy and adopting a decentralized polity. While the critical juncture is experienced by the country as a whole, ethnic violence is locally concentrated. This paper looks at the ingredients of the deadly mixture at the district level by examining the grievance and greed explanations of ethnic violence. It conceptualizes and operationalizes across-district measures of relative deprivation. The empirical results show the presence of relative deprivation-related grievance, in the sense of ‘being educated but still poor’. Education raises people’s expectations about earnings and welfare. Failure to realize their expectations leads to a sense of deprivation. The study finds no empirical evidence that the greed of local elites competing for the expected future value of state resources at the local level leads to inter-ethnic violence.