ABSTRACT
Gerlach introduced the concept of the ‘extremely violent society’ to describe a society in which different population groups fell victim to mass physical violence perpetrated by different social groups – sometimes in cooperation with official bodies, sometimes not – for a range of reasons. From this perspective, Indonesian society in the first phase of the revolution can be described as ‘extremely violent’, with the caveat that it did not involve a single state, but competing parties fighting for state power.
