The Cultural Dimension of Peace

‘Reconciliation came rather naturally (secara alami), when we became aware of the disastrous effects of the conflict and the need to restrengthen our culture, our adat, and our identity (budaya, adat, dan jati diri).’ This was the tenor of the many Moluccan villagers I spoke to during fieldwork in post-conflict Maluku. At the same time, the quotation expresses a broader trend in a much broader field: the emerging cultural turn in peace research. The cultural turn implies the increasing importance peace studies as well as national and international peace organizations attribute to ‘culture’, ‘the local’, and ‘local ownership’ for peacebuilding — the cultural dimension of reconciliation. To elucidate why this paradigm shift did (and had to) come about, this chapter first introduces two concepts closely related to current international discourses on peace-building: reconciliation and transitional justice. Transitional justice mechanisms are intended to be a means to build (sustainable) peace, which is a prerequisite for long-term reconciliation. Throwing a critical light on key terms in those debates such as justice, truth, and liberalism — concepts that are greatly determined by Western political sciences jargon — helps to explain the so-called rise of the local and the increasing integration of traditional justice into transitional justice packages.

During the more than three decades of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime in Indonesia, the so-called Orde Baru (New Order, 1966–1998), there was seemingly no need for any official discussion about reconciliation and peace. Conflicting opinions and emerging tensions — in particular conflicts based on ethnicity, religion, race, or class (Suku, Agama, Ras, dan Antargolongan, SARA) — were vehemently suppressed. Reconciliation and peace took on new meaning after a leadership change in 1998, when the political sphere opened up, local polities and institutions were (re)empowered, and people publicly began demanding for justice, truth, and peace. The radical political transformation, the massive waves of violence that ran through the country after 1998, and the fact that culture was the only means available to local people to reconcile in places such as Maluku make Indonesia a most interesting case to illustrate how the cultural turn was (and had to be) introduced into peace research. Decentralization was not the cause for the recent violence, which instead had its main roots in the structural injustices and marginalization policies of the Suharto era and its legacies, such as the poor performance of the security forces and the absence of an effective judicial system.

Both Moluccan conflict and peacebuilding were multi-sited, developed different dynamics in different areas and localities, and involved a multitude of actors at various levels. Nonetheless, both also had major themes in common: the conflict being mainly interreligious and the revival of tradition figuring prominently in peacebuilding. This chapter first provides insight into ongoing tensions in Maluku and an overview of the conflict dynamics. In trying to find an explanation for why religion could be successfully used to mobilize people to kill each other and why adat became such a prominent means to restore social relations, the chapter tracks the long and often turbulent relational history between Islam, Christianity, and adat. It then follows reconciliation in Maluku in space and over time, and traces and delineates the unfolding dynamics of the Moluccan peace scape. Chapter 4 then expounds how and why culture and tradition became such important ‘actors’ in Moluccan peacebuilding initiatives. Such an overview has, to my knowledge, not been produced yet and is direly needed in order to reflect the complexity of the peace and reconciliation process in Maluku. Due to the long duration of the process (in fact, it is still ongoing), its multidimensionality, its taking place in so many different localities, and the fact that people from so many different social strata, from inside and outside Maluku, were involved, it cannot and does not claim to be exhaustive. It prepares the ground for the ethnographic in-depth studies on the ‘revival for peace’ in chapters 5 and 6 and various other related publications of mine.

The revival, restrengthening, and reconstruction of traditional institu-tions are at the core of the reconciliation process in Maluku. Irrespective of the success or failure of top-down or mid-range initiatives, most peo-ple I talked to in the villages were convinced that they did not bring about peace. Reconciliation and restoration of social relations occurred rather naturally (secara alami), from the bottom-up, by drawing on local resources and institutions, cultural capital, and social ties.¹ Given that religion played (and still plays) a decisive role in Moluccan daily life, but could nonetheless become the grounds for people killing each other, adat appeared to be the only seemingly neutral means readily available to all Moluccans. In the first few months after the outbreak of hostili-ties, adat and religious leaders had frequently met to swap ideas on how to stop the violence. Many (including students) appealed to people to remember the traditional Muslim-Christian alliance system (pela) and use it to bring about peace. This became even more relevant given the government’s prolonged failure to end the violence and restore order in Maluku and its more general refusal to enforce justice and truth in the various conflict settings throughout the country.² The new national leg-islation on autonomy and decentralization does legitimize and enforce the revival of local traditions and structures.

Traditional village heads or raja are key symbolic figures in local tra-ditional structures and the center of attention in decentralization and peacebuilding discourses in Maluku. In 2008, Ambon City became the stage for a gathering of traditional village heads from all over the Moluccan Province — all dressed in their traditional clothes. In the city’s major community hall, Baileo Siwalima, a council called Latupati Council Maluku (Majelis Latupati Maluku, MLM) was established with pomp and glory. The MLM is supposed to be an overarching adat insti-tution, apolitical and independent from the government, and meant to unite the more than 500 traditional village heads of Maluku Province. Considering the vastness of the Moluccan archipelago, this is quite a revolutionary and unique project. The MLM was clearly born out of a marriage of the Moluccan conflict and the implementation of the decen-tralization laws of the post-Suharto era that were meant to re-empower local political structures and traditional leaders. It is supposed to act as a cultural means for reintegrating the ideologically divided and scattered Moluccan society.

Current debates on decentralization and revitalization in Indonesia are closely linked to discourses on individual and cultural human rights: local or indigenous people claiming rights based on their cultural roots, migrants claiming equal individual human rights as Indonesian citizens, and refugees referring to both their human right to protection and their cultural right to return to their ancestral land. Individual human rights and their collective counterpart, cultural rights, will be two of the hardest touchstones for the cultural turn in peace research and are the central theme of this chapter. The contrasting claims of indigenous people, migrants, and refugees in Maluku clearly show the dilemmas arising out of the granting of, on the one hand, cultural rights — one important outcome of decentralization and the adoption of an international discourse on collective human rights in Indonesia — and the granting of individual human and equal citizenship rights, on the other. Whereas every Indonesian citizen can claim the latter, only some can claim collective rights for local polities, which results in multiple citizenship, the essentialization of culture, and the exclusion of cultural outsiders.

What do the cases of Indonesia and Maluku tell us about the emerging cultural turn in peace studies? What are the main lessons learned and how can they help us to understand the ‘paradigm shift’ in this interdisciplinary field of research better? This final chapter sums up the main argument and the contributions this book is meant to make.