About
The 'State of Anxiety' project, a bi-lateral collaboration between Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Cambridge, began in November 2009. The researchers on the project, Laurens Bakker (Radboud) and Lee Wilson (Cambridge) will conduct a multi-sited ethnography of local security groups in Java, Bali, Kalimantan and Sulawesi. The project investigates the political influence these groups wield within their domains, their relationships with elements of the police and military as well local networks of criminality. A particular focus of the research is local conceptions of safety and threat, the ways insecurity figures in the affirmation of difference and processes of identification. How do these discourses of insecurity both facilitate political agency and exacerbate identity-based conflict between groups?
Under the rule of President Soeharto's New Order, 'security' was a central tenet of nationalist political imaginaries. While the New Order was able to forcefully maintain order, disorder and instability were its constant companions (Day 2002), a means of justifying violent intervention and oppression. Post New Order, decentralization and regional autonomy have facilitated the burgeoning growth of sites of non-state authority throughout Indonesia. Civil militias, community organisations and NGOs are just some of the many kinds of non-state agents whose authority contests or exceeds that of the state within their domains. Claiming to preserve the safety of their local communities, common to these sites of localised authority are familiar discourses of exclusion and territorial control that are often cited as the hallmark of sovereign relations in modernity. Custom and tradition, often linked to the issue of control of land and natural resources, are offered as principles of local governance and a countervailing force to the authority of the state.
Bringing into question the recent anthropological fascination with the homicidal tendencies of sovereign authority, with the 'state of exception' (Agamben 2005) as a paradigm for modern forms of government, a central theoretical question the team will address is to what degree are constellations of sovereign authority reducible solely to the capacity for the destruction of bodies? In exploring this question the team aims to establish the structural factors and processes of identification pertinent to the mobilization and manipulation of ethnic, religious or political identities in the respective field sites. The broader relevance of this research will be explored with respect to identity-based conflict elsewhere in Indonesia, and comparatively in other post-authoritarian contexts.
