Few things have shaken perceptions of Indonesia as much as the violence that raged in the country in the five years following the resignation of President Muhammad Soeharto in May 1998. Of course, violence is not new to this continent-sized country. Indonesia's war of independence was accompanied by adventurist criminality as well as anticolonial heroism. The Darul Islam movement (1948–62) was the bloodiest Islamist rebellion of the mid-twentieth century. The New Order regime emerged in the aftermath of the anticommunist killings of 1965–66. By the end of Soeharto's New Order, however, Indonesians and Indonesia analysts had become so accustomed to blaming political violence on the all-powerful Soeharto that many imagined that once he was gone, civic peace would ensue.

Among nongovernmental organizations and democracy activists during the 1990s, this earnest but naive hope was reinforced by a populist theoretical credo that the single most important thing for making democracy work...

You do not currently have access to this content.