Assessing Indonesia’s Capacity for Preventing Mass Atrocities

Abstract

With the pervasive violations of human rights, including mass atrocities, which happened during the authoritarian New Order administration, the literature on human rights in Indonesia has often been highly critical of the regimes’ human rights record. Indonesia’s regime change in 1998 brought in a more optimistic outlook; successive regimes have shown a stronger commitment to respecting human rights. However, the government still faces challenges in protecting such rights, and in acknowledgement and resolving past gross human rights violations. Consequently, future mass atrocities may not be readily avoided. This study aims to explore Indonesia’s capacity for avoiding future atrocities by evaluating three relevant factors: the influence of the interest-based arguments of the central government elites, the extent to which the idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ has spread among Indonesian governmental institutions, and the role of non-state actors. All of these factors shape Indonesia’s capacity to respond to and prevent any occurrence of mass atrocities in the future.