ABSTRACT
Why did violent communal conflict break out in Indonesia at the time that it did? Clearly it had something to do with the end of the New Order, which occurred a few months earlier (see Table 2.1), but what exactly? To be confident of the answer we need to examine the narrative of every occurrence in some detail, and we will do that in later chapters. But those narratives do not stand alone. They are part of a tangled web of countless other narratives that make up the context. To understand this interrelatedness of one story with many others is a theory-laden exercise. Is the resignation of a president in Jakarta really context for a fight between testosterone-charged youths thousands of kilometres away? What about a sudden drop in the value of the rupiah on the Jakarta Exchange? Or the slowly changing religious proportions in a population? Do previous episodes of fighting resemble this one enough to constitute a ‘culture of violence’?
