TRaNS special section on “Growing Religious Intolerance in Indonesia”

Over the past two decades, Indonesian society has seen an increase in Islamic conservatism. Beginning with growing expressions of Islamic piety – more Muslim men praying five times a day and more women wearing the Islamic veil (hijab) – this trend is increasingly being expressed in political terms. Such expressions can be seen in the passage of hundreds of new local regulations (perda) that mandate residents to follow certain Islamic principles, and in public protests such as the recent ‘defending Islam’ (Aksi 212) protests of 2016/17 which successfully demanded the prosecution of former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama for allegedly committing an act of blasphemy. More troubling, however, is the fact that these expressions of growing conservatism are often followed by acts of religious intolerance against minorities – from Muslim sects such as Ahmadi and Shi’a to Christians, Buddhists, and other religious minorities. The Setara Institute has documented a continuous rise in the number of incidents of religious freedom violations in Indonesia over the past few years – from 134 in 2014 and 196 in 2015, to 208 in 2016 (Lesthari 2017). The high frequency of these attacks and the inability of governments-both at national and local level-to stop such attacks and bring the perpetrators to justice have left a negative reputation for Indonesia both domestically and internationally. As much of the more violent incidents of religious intolerance (e.g. Muslim-Christian conflicts in Maluku and Poso) occurred during the early years of Reformasi (1998–2001), scholars tended to focus their attention on how to explain ‘large-scale communal violence’ incidences rather than ‘localized communal riots’ that while smaller inscale, these attacks on churches and Ahmadi mosques became more prevalent and pronounced long after these conflicts have subdued. Works by Bertrand (2004), Sidel (2007), Van Klinken (2007), Duncan (2013) and Tajima (2014) have analysed these larger conflicts and come with their different conclusions on what causes them that have enriched the literature on ethnic conflict and political violence, not just in Indonesia but also generalized globally. However, none of these works have dealt with smaller, localized communal riots that are often started with exclusionary or intolerant actions against religious minorities. While there is recent research that demonstrate the historical and institutional roots of growing Islamization and how it affects tolerance toward religious minorities in Indonesia both nationally and locally (e.g. Ricklefs 2007 and 2012; Menchik 2016; Buehler 2016), these works lack the combination of insights that help to put together a puzzle on why religious intolerant actions have become prevalent in contemporary post-Reformasi Indonesia, namely, macro-sociological changes in Indonesian society that result in contemporary intolerant actions against religious minorities, and the micro-level changes in the political structure that provides opportunities for hard-line Islamic groups to initiate intolerant actions against these minorities. The lack of scholarly attention to smaller-scale incidents of religious intolerance is a major omission in the study of communal violence, and we lack understanding of why incidents of religious intolerance continues to increase, not just in Indonesia, but also in other Muslim-majority countries elsewhere. We also need to understand better what are the political and socio-cultural mechanisms (both at the macro and micro-level) that lead to the occurrence of religious intolerance within a given community. Significantly, there is not enough understanding of why incidents of religious intolerance remains on