These essays investigate institutionalized violence in New Order Indonesia and the ongoing legacy Suharto's dictatorship has conferred on the nation. The collection includes papers on East Timor, Aceh, Biak, the police, and the Indonesian military, among other topics.

Jakarta, Sambas, Poso, the Moluccas, West Papua. These simple, geographical names have recently obtained strong associations with mass killing, just as Aceh and East Timor, where large-scale violence has flared up again. Lethal incidents between adjacent villages, or between a petty criminal and the crowd, take place throughout Indonesia. Indonesia is a violent country. Many Indonesia-watchers, both scholars and journalists, explain the violence in terms of the loss of the monopoly on the means of violence by the state since the beginning of the Reformasi in 1998. Others point at the omnipresent remnants of the New Order state (1966-1998), former President Suharto's clan or the army in particular, as the evil genius behind the present bloodshed. The authors in this volume try to explain violence in Indonesia by looking at it in historical perspective.

In the early morning hours of October 1, 1965, a group calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and executed six generals of the Indonesian army, including its highest commander. The group claimed that it was attempting to preempt a coup, but it was quickly defeated as the senior surviving general, Haji Mohammad Suharto, drove the movement’s partisans out of Jakarta. Riding the crest of mass violence, Suharto blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia for masterminding the movement and used the emergency as a pretext for gradually eroding President Sukarno’s powers and installing himself as a ruler. Imprisoning and killing hundreds of thousands of alleged communists over the next year, Suharto remade the events of October 1, 1965 into the central event of modern Indonesian history and the cornerstone of his thirty-two-year dictatorship. Despite its importance as a trigger for one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of mass violence, the September 30th Movement has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Who actually masterminded it? What did they hope to achieve? Why did they fail so miserably? And what was the movement’s connection to international Cold War politics? In Pretext for Mass Murder, John Roosa draws on a wealth of new primary source material to suggest a solution to the mystery behind the movement and the enabling myth of Suharto’s repressive regime. His book is a remarkable feat of historical investigation. Finalist, Social Sciences Book Award, the International Convention of Asian Scholars

This volume foregrounds the dynamics of displacement and the experiences of internal refugees uprooted by conflict and violence in Indonesia. Contributors examine internal displacement in the context of militarized conflict and violence in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, and in other parts of Outer Island Indonesia during the transition from authoritarian rule. The volume also explores official and humanitarian discourses on displacement and their significance for the politics of representation.

This book responds to the critical need of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars for current research on Indonesia.