We now know enough about the major episodes of ethnic violence around the end of the New Order to bring some intellectual rigour to the task of understanding them. Earlier essentialist (primordialist) views on the ethnic driving force have in the international literature given way to more...

Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 1999) has attracted much attention with his historicising model of the trajectory of African politics. The most fertile innovation in Mamdani's work is to speak of the typical African state as 'bifurcated'. He generalises South Africa's apartheid system to the whole of...

The conflictual aspects of ethnic relations will concern us most in this chapter. Until 1998, Indonesia was not among the nations that sprang to mind in studies of ethnic conflict. But when the authoritarian New Order regime collapsed in May 1998, ethnic conflict became the biggest unpleasant...

West Kalimantan (West Borneo) has a history of violent communal conflict. It also has extensive forests that have been looted for decades. The argument will be that these two are linked, but not by the grievances of the forest dwellers. Except in its first few days, the two main episodes of 1997...

Asia’s middle classes are in the news. The story is bewitching. Not only are their numbers said to be shooting up towards half the total population, they are democratic and market-friendly. Indonesia’s middle class too, according to this story, has exploded in the ten years from 1999–2009....

Indonesia has about 200 provincial towns with populations between 50,000 and a million, yet they have attracted far less scholarly attention than the nation's few megacities. Recent democratization and decentralization have brought to light patterns of communal and localist mobilization in these...