Three Approaches
Behaviourism was popular in social science work on violence at the time that the Indonesian events occurred. Its instinct that violence arises from the irrationality of the crowd found vindication in the nightmarish quality of the atrocities being committed there.
The accounts written under its influence speak of ‘extraordinary popular savagery... mainly along the primordial lines', and of ‘a nation running amok... the mob on the one hand, and the army on the other'.[766] Exotic Asian emotions were part of the picture. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hughes wrote of ‘the sudden boiling over of resentment against the Communists'.[767]Samuel Huntington soon after this drew a recommendation from the spectre of a society breaking down into anomic violence: ‘the soldier as institution-builder'.[768] Hobbes's epigram - ‘when nothing else is turned up, clubs are trumps’ - summed up the 1960s and 1970s argument for prioritising strong state institutions over social mobilisation. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, this argument came under pressure from a human rights perspective. As New Order militarism went on to unleash one wave of human rights abuse after another - against East Timorese, Acehnese, Papuans, left-wing students, fundamentalist Muslims, and even common criminals - the view that ‘1965’ was the nation's originary case of state violence became increasingly commonplace. This is the perspective that has carried the subject into the genocide studies community, with its emphasis on state responsibility. Recent studies of 1965 have only tightened the net around the military.
As the human rights perspective overtook the ‘amok’ studies, however, the question of ‘the relative importance of army initiative and local tension’ came little closer to a solution. One recent attempt to bridge the gap came from a comparative scholar new to Indonesian studies.
Societies are not inherently violent, Gerlach wrote in his chapter on Indonesia in 1965, but they can become extremely violent at certain moments. Mass participation in violence, driven by multiple motivations, produces tempestuous violence at such moments that spreads to other groups besides the announced target group. ‘Neither state violence controlled and manipulated by the military, nor popular rage, nor the organization imparted by political party machineries and religious groups alone can explain the power of the 1965-66 killings; what was crucial was the combination of all three.’[769] Once the interests of the various parties to the violent coalition began to diverge - from January 1966 onwards - violence declined. Gerlach was inspired by Michael Mann’s idea that twentieth-century ethnic violence was intimately linked to the rise of political participation in state processes.[770] In Indonesia, the PKI had been at the forefront of a massive mobilisational surge over the two decades preceding 1965. It brought millions into politics for the first time.Recognising the modernity of the moment was a great step forward. Nevertheless, merely seeing a ‘link’ between social mobilisation and violence is not the same as understanding the social mechanisms that laid it. Like many other historians of 1965, Gerlach begins his narrative on 1 October 1965. On that day, a small group of left-wing conspirators abducted and eventually killed six right-wing generals in Jakarta. Seizing on the pretext that the Communist Party had betrayed the nation, General Suharto seized the army command and, helped by civilian allies, launched a military operation to suppress the PKI, with the results described above. The most shocking atrocities began to occur almost immediately after this date. But beginning a story at its climax is not usually the best way to tell it. To unravel the social processes that led to this moment, we need to go back in time to the point at which the contention began to escalate.
At that moment, about two years earlier as we shall see, key elite actors perceived fresh opportunities and threats, launched new strategies to respond to them, and in doing so developed the sharply polarised identities that came to underlie the violence.Murder on such a scale cannot easily be analysed with conventional institutional political science tools. It crosses the boundary separating normal, contained political action and grossly transgressive modes of action. A third approach known today as contentious politics focuses on both kinds of action, by all the key collective actors involved. They can range from a well-established military hierarchy or a political party, to an ad hoc, temporary local militia or an occasional pact among religious leaders. All are engaged in strategic action; none can be sure of success. Political contention has been likened to an argumentative conversation, which likewise cannot be easily reduced to the intentions of any of the participants.[771] The analyst will want to identify who is making claims, and why; who they say they are, and why; and what forms their claim-making actions take, and why.
Contentious politics looks for explanatory mechanisms that lie at the middle level, in between the grand narrative of a single explanation and the irreducible multiplicity of the newspaper account. It breaks a series of events (known as an episode) into a limited number of analytical elements called social mechanisms or social processes. Such elements are robust enough to serve an explanatory function because they are found in many different types of contention. An example of a social mechanism is brokerage, which brings previously unconnected collective actors into a relationship. This can cause contentious coalitions to expand.
Some of the best work on ‘1965’ was done with such a contentious politics approach before it acquired the name. Geoffrey Robinson’s study on the mass violence in Bali dispensed with ahistorical and apolitical anthropological accounts that focused on long-standing cultural beliefs.[772] Instead, it attributed violence to contemporary contestation within the state. State institutions had been riven with factional conflict since independence. Local government leaders had to build alliances with local capitalists and with national political groups, for patronage and for protection. PKI sympathisers also took part in this struggle for the state. They exacerbated internal bureaucratic conflicts by using state resources to stimulate class consciousness. Dynamics such as these could be found all over Indonesia at the time, as the following account will demonstrate.