Violence and politics in West Kalimantan, Indonesia

This study sheds light on the history of the ethnic violence that has plagued West Kalimantan, an Indonesian Outer Island rich in ethnic heterogeneity and natural resources. These riots are considered by some among the world's most persistent. By constructing a thorough political history which stresses the region's complicated and evolving relations with central authority, I provide a substantive account of why this area has hosted a series of such violent affairs. In particular, a careful and detailed exploration of the early actions of the New Order army leadership in West Kalimantan reveals the genesis of the recurrent bloodshed.;Primordialist views on the subject, predominant among local and media accounts, and theory of the breakdown of in-group policing have little purchase on the origins of Dayak-Madurese strife, the two primary parties to the fighting. Instead, I posit that a historical institutionalist approach that emphasizes power asymmetries in institutional development, unintended consequences and pertinent critical junctures is best equipped to explain changing patterns of ethnic violence over the past few decades.;Patterns of ethnic conflict or cooperation in West Kalimantan date from the tumultuous mid-to-late 1960s when state institutions crumbled. The larger political scene informed by Cold War geopolitics and the then recent massacre of Indonesian communists on Java and Bali in 1965--66 facilitated the New Order army brass and local Dayak elites to construct rural Chinese as godless communists complicit with local communists and a fellow movement in Sarawak (Malaysia). This perilous politicization of ethnicity in area of, in fact, rather good social relations laid the foundations for the sparking of horrific violence. Starting in October 1967, thousands of Chinese were killed and some 60,000 were made refugees. This expulsion precipitated the first Dayak-Madurese riot as spoils of the expulsion were contested. An unintended consequence of the army's counterinsurgency operations, these little-known developments then fed succeeding episodes, wherein constructions of the Other and internalized notions of 'us' versus 'them' coalesced and solidified.