Development Strategies, Religious Relations, and Communal Violence in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

Indonesia’s development strategies since independence after World War II have varied across the archipelago, unevenly affecting local intergroup cooperation and conflict. This chapter concerns Central Sulawesi, a province on one of the large “outer islands,” where communal violence emerged after the resignation of President Suharto in 1998.1 Although the Poso district hostilities had complex local, national, and international political dimensions that have been discussed elsewhere (Aragon 2001, 2005, 2011, 37–54; Sidel 2006; Van Klinken 2007), the focus here is how regional development policies, particularly transmigration and the intensive mono-cropping of cacao, contributed to dramatic and violence-provoking changes in Poso’s demography, land tenure, and political dominance. The Central Sulawesi case provides a cautionary tale of how violence, displacement, and religious territorialization can follow as unintended side effects of regional development policies whose structural inequities intersect tragically with transregional stresses; in this case, the Southeast Asian fiscal crisis, national regime transition, global economy price shifts, and transnational Muslim-Christian distrust. This chapter begins with a chronological description of three periods of Central Sulawesi religious change and development, which are followed by an outline of Poso conflict dynamics, and results of the author’s interviews with people who experienced the Poso district hostilities.