Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. By John T. Sidel. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 304p. $57.95 cloth, $21.00 paper

In: Perspectives on politics, Volume 7, Issue 1, p. 161-163

Abstract

Indonesia is a country that seems to violate a number of widely held assumptions that comparative political scientists hold. For example, under Suharto's 30-year rule, corruption soared, but so did economic growth. In Riots, Pogroms, Jihad, John Sidel offers another false generalization for consideration, namely, that despite the rise of ethnic and religious violence in the world since 1990, the widespread religious violence experienced in Indonesia since the mid-1990s is not best understood as part of a global trend. Rather, he argues that "such broad-brush accounts offer little to illuminate the specific modalities of religious violence observed in Indonesia or to help examine the discernable but seemingly inexplicable shifts … in the forms, targets, processes of mobilization, and consequences of this violence in successive periods" (p. 11).