Abstract
The act of welas asih or mercy is a necessity to create peace and harmony within Indonesia's multiculturalism. This article attempts to develop the concept of welas asih aiming to forgive the unforgivable which often occurred during the multicultural conflict as well as enhancing intercultural competence. The article overviews the face negotiation approaches in intercultural dialogue as a non-formal learning environment. The dialogue covers cultural conflict resolution in Indonesia, with a goal of intercultural competencies and building a better intercultural friendship. The research uses qualitative method and literature review analysis of related articles such as ethnicity conflict, face negotiation and forgiving. The result of this study shows that communication’s facework strategies in face negotiation are the best predictors in developing the act of welas asih. Total forgiveness after transgression is well accepted for establishing a better friendship-relationship. This discourse shows that the usage of face negotiation is essential in creating harmony, understanding cultural difference and eliminating prejudice within college students’ friendships
Highlights
Indonesia’s intercultural conflict does not happen recently, but since late 1990s, the country had suffered from intercultural conflict (Bertrand, 2004) and is still ongoing especially between ethnicity, religion, race and inter-group relations (SARA)
The five steps (Cresswell, 2012) used in this research are: 1) authors identify key terms in search for the literature consisting of articles and books related to welas asih, face negotiation, friendship, cultural conflict, and intercultural competence; 2) locating the literature in which the authors attempted to distinguished different ideas from each article and databases to be used in the article; 3) critically evaluate and select the literatures that are related to the article; 4) organizing the literature and last; 5) writing a literature review to be included in the article
Welas asih is obtained through total forgiveness
Summary
Indonesia’s intercultural conflict does not happen recently, but since late 1990s, the country had suffered from intercultural conflict (Bertrand, 2004) and is still ongoing especially between ethnicity, religion, race and inter-group relations (SARA). This intercultural conflict is often based on racism, prejudice and controversial history resulting in social discrimination, violence and segregation (William & Johnson, 2011) and Indonesia is no exception. The rise of SARA-based conflicts shows that the peaceful atmosphere in Indonesia is still far from being realized (Abdilla et al, 2019) For this reason, efforts are needed to form an understanding of conflict reconciliation based on Bhinneka Tunggal Ika and intercultural competence through intercultural dialogue
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