Good Governance And Conflict Resolution In Indonesia

This monograph is the result of my field research, as the part of my master program research, about the separatism conflict between Aceh Independent Movement or GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) and the Government of Indonesia. I have conducted a field research during 2008 to understand the practice of conflict management in Indonesian governance during 2003–2007. The separatism conflict in Aceh was a very long process of peace effort. Aceh is a region with its strong relation with the state of Indonesia since the region and its society had contributed very big to the state.

This book is the first to analyse the practice of governance to resolve conflict in the case of Aceh in Indonesia. Combining theoretical discourse on conflict, democracy, and governance, it draws from original field research on the separatist conflict, utilizing a social constructivist approach in collating observations and interviews with political elites from both the Government of Indonesia and the Aceh Independent Movement (GAM). The conflict was an intractable one in which thousand civilians were killed between 1976 and 2006. The author zooms into the 2003 and 2007 period, against the broader context of the political landscape of Indonesia under the Suharto regime. In doing so, the book tackles the challenges presented by intrastate conflicts relating to ethno-religiosity, land use, and separatism. It unpacks the Indonesian political system’s shift from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one, and demarcates the prevalence of state violence in managing conflicts, as exemplified in the Aceh separatism conflict. Relevent to political scientists and scholars in peace, conflict and development studies, this co-published book presents novel sociological insights into Indonesia’s historical, and contemporary, political landscape.

Based on the 2006 Indonesia Update Conference held at the Australian National University, 2006.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited volume examines the policies and practices of rising powers on peacebuilding. It analyzes how and why their approaches differ from those of traditional donors and multilateral institutions. The policies of the rising powers towards peacebuilding may significantly influence how the UN and others undertake peacebuilding in the future. This book is an invaluable resource for practitioners, policy makers, researchers and students who want to understand how peacebuilding is likely to evolve over the next decades.

local conflict and unemployment, inequality, natural disasters, changes in sources of incomes, and clustering of ethnic groups within villages. The institutional variables indicate that the presence of places of worship is associated with less conflict, while the presence of religious groups and traditional culture (adat) institutions are associated with conflict. The authors conclude by suggesting future areas of research, notably on the role of group inequality and inference, and suggest ways to improve the measurement of conflict in the village census. This paper-- a product of the Public Sector Governance Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network-- is part of a larger effort in the network to evaluate decentralized/local governance and service delivery"-- World Bank web site.

Key messages Mediation is a conflict resolution mechanism that has emerged in countries with lots of conflicts related to land and industrial tree plantations. Its application on the ground, however, has yet to show satisfactory results.Mediation can be seen as a part of conflict transformation as it aims at reaching a long-term solution acceptable to all parties.There are many approaches to mediation in Indonesia, depending on legal processes and the status of mediators. In turn, this opens the door to mediation through the courts with certified mediators.The emergence of mediation and its recognition by the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry is closely linked to the acknowledgment of the presence of ‘conflict’ within the forest domain, which is opposed to the ‘violation of the law’ terminology that was traditionally used.Research of a case that stakeholders deemed a success in Jambi province in Sumatra, shows the challenges surrounding the application of conflict mediation, which can be fragile with the possibility of unsustainable outcomes if it does not fulfill its role as a means for conflict resolution.The limitations inherent in mediation should not prevent stakeholders in Indonesia from promoting it as an alternative approach in conflict management, from building a legal framework, or from developing experiences and a dynamic mediator network.

In the last two decades, Indonesia has seen a dramatic proliferation of environmental disputes in a variety of sectors, triggered by intensified deforestation and large scale mining operations in the resource rich outer islands, together with rapid industrialisation in the densely populated inner island of Java. Whilst the emergence of environmental disputes has sometimes attracted political repression, attempts have also been made in recent times to explore more functional approaches to their resolution. The Environmental Management Act of 1997 created a legal framework for the resolution of environmental disputes through both litigation and mediation. This book is the first attempt to analyse the implementation of this framework in detail and to assess the effectiveness of litigation and mediation in resolving environmental disputes in Indonesia. It includes a detailed overview of the environmental legal framework and its interpretation by Indonesian courts in landmark court cases. The book features a number of detailed case studies of both environmental litigation and mediation and considers the legal and non-legal factors that have influenced the success of these approaches to resolving environmental disputes.