ABSTRACT
This article examines Henk Schulte Nordholt’s assertion that typifies the Netherlands East Indies as ‘a state of violence’. To that end, the article analyses the manner in and extent to which military violence was used during the build-up and consolidation of the colonial state. It discusses the military strategies that the colonial army developed from 1816 to 1941, as well as the military ethics underlying the army’s actions, both in theory and in practice. It concludes that the colonial military authorities tried to avoid a war against the population, a guerrilla war, by means of a ‘strategy of awe’. Despite these efforts, on several occasions during the conquest of the Indonesian archipelago, bloody guerrilla wars ensued, for which the Dutch developed three strategies: slow, violent occupation; a campaign of destruction; and—around 1900—a strategy that combined targeted (long-range) pursuits with a rigid military administration. Whichever strategy the colonial army employed, exemplary violence was integral to it. Prior to 1914, the colonial state was founded on an inseparable combination of violence and fear. The use of fear as a strategic weapon was also of great influence on the military ethics that the army developed, in addition to the colonial perception of the enemy and the development of the international laws of war after 1870, which expressly excluded colonial warfare. Although it was expected in the Netherlands that the colonial army would apply the international laws of war wherever possible, in practice it often acted more harshly and less humanely when necessary. Using exemplary force was the only way it could bring and keep the population under the authority of the colonial state.
