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Between 1999 and 2000, sectarian fighting fanned across the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. What began as local conflicts between migrants and indigenous people over administrative boundaries spiraled into a religious war pitting Muslims against Christians and continues to influence communal relationships more than a decade after the fighting stopped. Christopher R. Duncan spent several years conducting fieldwork in North Maluku, and in Violence and Vengeance, he examines how the individuals actually taking part in the fighting understood and experienced the conflict.Rather than dismiss religion as a facade for the political and economic motivations of the regional elite, Duncan explores how and why participants came to perceive the conflict as one of religious difference. He examines how these perceptions of religious violence altered the conflict, leading to large-scale massacres in houses of worship, forced conversions of entire communities, and other acts of violence that stressed religious identities. Duncan's analysis extends beyond the period of violent conflict and explores how local understandings of the violence have complicated the return of forced migrants, efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation.
Christopher R. Duncan is Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies and in the School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University. He is the author of Violence and Vengeance and editor of Civilizing the Margins, both from Cornell.
"In Violence and Vengeance, Christopher R. Duncan adds a new dimension to the analysis of communal conflict in Indonesia and beyond, showing how the way in which participants come to understand a violent conflict, given biases and limited information, is likely to reflect long-standing tensions or divisions in a society. However, Duncan does not reduce the conflict in North Maluku to a primordial religious antagonism. Instead, he shows under what conditions this conflict came to be seen as religious despite its origins as a conflict between indigenous people and migrants over the way in which redistricting affected their claims to power. He shows how the religious understanding of the conflict blossomed and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This book is a must-read for scholars interested in ethnic and religious conflict and NGO activists who work in the field of conflict resolution."—Elizabeth Fuller Collins, Ohio University, author of Indonesia Betrayed: How Development Fails
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