Dinner with an Ex-terrorist Bomber in Jakarta: Otherings and Conflicts in Indonesia

Abstract

Abstract “Indonesian Muslims need more Islam in our lives, not less, because Islam is what makes us who we are as Indonesians,” declared an ex-terrorist bomber from Jakarta. Indeed, as Chapter 3 reveals, distinctive forms of ethnoreligious nationalism remain integral to the conception of “Indonesianness.” Applying the ethnoreligious othering framework, Chaper 3 examines the conflicts involving Muslim and Christian communities in Indonesia by analyzing the emotive, symbolic, and perceptual mechanisms behind these events. It begins with a discussion of how the hostile emotions cultivated from ethnoreligious nationalism can rally the members into actions against other forms of identity and homeland. It then investigates how the securitization of ethnoreligious others reconstructs the security contexts enveloping the country’s pluralistic polity. The chapter concludes by explaining how the Indonesian Muslims’ successful implantation of their ethnoreligious substructures into the state’s security superstructures sacralizes their preferred version of “Indonesian” identity, homeland, and nation-state.