The Social Life of Reconciliation: Religion and the Struggle for Social Justice in Post-New Order Indonesia

Abstract

Anthropologists of law have long studied reconciliation to understand how people resolve disputes. Studies on conflict resolution and on reconciliation examine a general process of reconciliation deployed to restore harmony and prevent retaliation. This role of reconciliation often becomes a significant part of the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) procedure that seeks to include local actors and local institutions in dispute resolutions. Studies of ADR often assume that reconciliation takes place between individuals or groups of individual over issues related to, among others, property, domestic violence or inheritance.

My research wants to bring the state back into the analysis of reconciliation by introducing the state, or those representing the interests of the state, as a party to the reconciliation process. The research sheds light on reconciliation as a discursive imagination, while still maintaining a general perspective that reconciliation is a method people use in or outside the courts to resolve disputes. The research investigates proliferations of reconciliation discourse as it enters national political space. The analysis of transnational proliferation of discourse relies on the notion of ‘critical disjuncture’ (Appadurai, 1996) to examine discursive shifts that produce a specific political and legal constellation to come to terms with the legacy of New Order violence. The research maintains that ‘critical disjuncture’ emerges when state apparatuses, human rights activists, public intellectuals and victims of violence resort to the transnational discourse of reconciliation to negotiate their engagement with the legacy or the memory of violence. This ‘critical disjuncture’ constitutes the social life of reconciliation that is the focus of my research. My interest rests less on analysing different forms of reconciliation than on following the processes that make reconciliation what it is, whatever form it takes.