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Of Social Imaginary and Violence: Responding to Islamist Militancy in Indonesia
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Abstract:
In the early 2000s, Indonesia witnessed a proliferation of Islamist paramilitary groups and terror
activity in the wake of Suharto’s downfall. Having said this, over the years since Suharto’s
downfall, the dire threat predictions have largely failed to materialize at least strategically. This
outcome raises some interesting questions about the ways in which Indonesian policy-makers
responded to the security threat posed by Islamist militancy. Drawing on Temby’s thesis about
Darul Islam and negara Islam Indonesia and combining this with Colombijn and Lindblad’s
concept of ‘reservoirs of violence’, the following paper establishes that persistent and excessive
punitive action by the state is potentially counter-productive in the long run. On its own, punitive
action fails to address effectively the conditioning factors underlying militancy and its different
social imaginary. If over-utilized, it runs too high a risk of antagonizing and further polarizing
oppositional segments of the population by perpetuating a ‘ghettoized’ sense of enmity and
alienation amongst them towards the state and wider society. This paper argues that a more
nuanced approach that both supports and utilizes various preventative measures is also critical for
addressing complex and deeply rooted types of insecurity. By situating localized responses to the
problem in historical context, this paper underscores the importance of charting a course between
strategic and human security concerns to counter the specific imaginary of extreme thinking and
limit the conditions under which Islamist militancy reproduces in Indonesia.
Description:
Date:
2016
Authors:
Paul J. Carnegie
Publisher:
Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
