ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to originate from a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, published in December 2012, supplemented with several new contributions. It illustrates the pattern of conquest and consolidation in his detailed study on Dutch nineteenth-century colonial warfare in Aceh, Sumatra. The Dutch leadership called them ‘police actions’ to signal that they regarded the Indonesian conflict as an internal matter of law and order. Colonial warfare and colonial-era thinking about the use and justification of mass violence are also an indispensable background for understanding the violence perpetrated—by either side—during the decolonization war. The book focuses on the earlier campaigns in the 1870s and 1880s shows that the military and civilian administration developed a form of environmental warfare to destroy the region’s infrastructure of dwellings, fields, irrigation and drainage works, food stores and livestock.
