Routine-Everyday Violence

Contemporary violent conflicts in Indonesia can be broadly categorized into episodic and routine. The episodic ones consist of secessionist and ethnic violence; both have been examined in Chapters 3 and 4. The episodic nature of these types of violent conflicts relates to the concentration of their incidents according to both timing and location; the incidents peaked at the beginning of the democratic transition and demonstrated a clear pattern of regional concentration. This chapter is about the other category: routine violence, which is essentially a residual category of violent conflict. If the episodic violence is highly concentrated in few regions outside Java, the routine type is common to almost all districts in the island of Java. Routine social (or group or collective) violence does not have either the explicit political aim of overthrowing the state as in the case of civil war, or the emasculation of a rival group as in the case of ethno-communal violence. It is also not simply crime, although it could have criminal dimensions. In short, it refers to regular group violence that is not episodic in nature. The two most important variants of everyday social violence are vigilante violence and group brawls. The theoretical underpinnings for routine violence are similar to those utilized to explain mass political violence short of internal war postulated by Hibbs (1973).