00074918.2014.938413

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

A Few Poorly Organized Men: Interreligious

Violence in Poso, Indonesia

Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem

To cite this article: Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem (2014) A Few Poorly Organized Men: Interreligious Violence in Poso, Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 50:2, 299-300, DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2014.938413

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2014.938413

Published online: 30 Jul 2014.

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Book Reviews 299

institutional constraint on policy design and performance par excellence. And by implication too, Indonesia’s emergence as a developmental state had similarly little to do with the violence and subsequent political quiescence imposed under the New Order—conditions that some have seen as dissolving historical path-dependence and allowing the technocrats a free hand.

Geoffrey McNicoll

Population Council, New York

A Few Poorly Organized Men: Interreligious Violence in Poso, Indonesia. By Dave McRae. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. x + 214. Hardback: €79.00/$103.00

Post-Soeharto Indonesia continues to experience occasional episodes of violence.

The Indonesian Ministry of the Interior recorded 351 conlicts between 2010 and

September 2013, from clashes over matters of SARA—suku (ethnicity), agama (reli-gion), ras (race), and antargolongan (intergroup relations)—to terrorism. How do

we explain these conlicts? Many scholars (such as Jacques Bertrand, John T. Sidel,

and Gerry van Klinken) have analysed the power relations and structural reasons

behind such conlicts, especially those that have occurred since 1998, during the

country’s transition to democracy.

In A Few Poorly Organized Men, McRae aims not to contribute such an analysis

but to draw on the literature to examine the speciicity, in context, of commu

-nal conlict in Poso, Central Sulawesi, between 1998 and 2007—one of the most intense and longest-lasting conlicts in post-Soeharto Indonesia. In arguing that the context of Poso enabled the conlict rather than caused it, McRae considers how the conlict was produced and organised, and also describes its changing dynamics. He asserts that the organisation of conlict ‘is an evolving “division of

labour” in perpetrating violence between leaders and core combatants on the one hand, and ordinary community members on the other’ (p. 13). Such a division in Poso saw the level of violence escalate, even with only a few men at its core; in this organisation, a small number of combatants did most of the killing, while their leaders mobilised community members.

McRae discusses the shifts in the dynamics of the violence in Poso in four

phases. The irst phase, urban riots (a characteristic of political violence), resulted

from tension between local political elites. The second phase was widespread kill-ing, supported by the ad hoc mobilisation of community members, who partici-pated in the violence because their fear of being attacked shifted to a belief that

they would win the conlict if they also fought. The third phase was the pro

-tracted two-sided violence between Christians and the alliance of the mujahidin

and local Muslims, in which the mujahidin’s jihadist agenda was a motivation

for the prolonged conlict. The fourth phase involved sporadic attacks, the state’s intervention in which eventually ended the conlict. McRae elaborates each of

these phases by situating it in the comparative literature, highlighting the

distinc-tiveness of the Poso conlict compared with other communal conlicts.

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300 Book Reviews

The result of a decade of research during and after the conlict, A Few Poorly Organized Men is a comprehensive historical study distinct from other reports on

Poso, including those by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights and its National Commission on Women. The book will be a valuable source for readers seeking a deeper understanding of the Poso conlict and its participants. Yet, in my mind, it lacks a detailed discussion of two important aspects. First, as the National Commission on Women has made clear, the Poso conlict was dis -tinct in its targeting of women, in terms of both the identities of the victims and the forms of violence used. Women of the ‘enemy’ were not only raped and sexu-ally abused; there were also cases of mutilation. How can the division of labour analysis explain what happened to these women and why it happened? Second, McRae argues that the state was not a direct combatant in Poso, and that state

intervention in effect ended the conlict. Yet political will—in particular, the gov -ernment’s sense of crisis—was the main reason that it intervened. Explaining this would require a more macro-level analysis, but even until recently there have

been cases where the state has taken advantage of conlicts.

Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem

The Australian National University

The Sum Is Greater Than the Parts: Doubling Shared Prosperity in Indonesia through Local and Global Integration. By Harvard Kennedy School, Ash

Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Pp. xlviii + 274. Paperback: Rp 97,750. PDF: http://

www.ash.harvard.edu/extension/ash/docs/indonesia2013.pdf.

Is Indonesia’s economy growing fast enough to double its real income per capita over the next decade? What is the quality of growth? Is the growth sustainable? Is it equitable? And what strategies might Indonesian policymakers consider in view of the oft-stated goal of lifting the average rate of economic growth to at least 7% per year? This study by an interdisciplinary team from the Harvard Kennedy School Indonesia Program sets out to answer these questions.

The study’s central argument is that Indonesia’s economic outlook is discour-aging: ‘The growth rate is far below the level necessary to reach upper middle-income status by 2025, and this modest growth has been characterized by lack of job creation, declining competitiveness, and rising inequality’. In response to this mediocre performance the study suggests that Indonesia can take one of three approaches to development—reactive, proactive, or transformative. Only the transformative approach, it says, will move the economy onto a robust, sustain-able, and equitable development trajectory.

The Harvard team argues that Indonesian policymakers should address both domestic and international market problems; a ‘lack of attention to extending and integrating the domestic market’ has accompanied Indonesia’s failure to ‘exploit its dynamic comparative advantage abroad’. They see three ways of overcoming