Impunity from below: Vigilantism and the state in democratic Indonesia

Scholarship on impunity for collective violence mostly focuses on explaining those conflicts where political battle lines are clearly drawn, such as ethnic riots, electoral clashes, terrorism and civil wars. Those who get away with horrific acts of violence are often influential individuals, protected by powerful elites.

Increasingly, however, ordinary individuals in developing democracies are getting away with a more quotidian form of violence: vigilante attacks against suspected thieves, blasphemers, sexual deviants and a host of other offenders. Long understood as the public’s reaction to inadequate provision of order by the state, two contemporary features of vigilantism warrant a new explanation. First, the use of mob violence to punish a widening scope of offenses is increasingly observed in states that have undergone rapid state-building in recent years. Second, vigilantism has evolved from society’s way of occasionally bypassing the state into a form of violent lobbying that seeks to reform it.

This talk examines the rise of vigilante violence as a function of ordinary citizens' ability to acquire impunity for highly public acts of violence. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence from contemporary Indonesia, the talk shows how vigilantes develop collusive relationships with street-level police, amid the rapid expansion of the national police force. Contrary to existing explanations that explain impunity as the consequence of power, this talk of everyday vigilantism shows how provision of impunity as a discretionary resource by the state's minor functionaries can help ordinary people acquire political capital. Finally, the talk contends that vigilantism across the developing world is flourishing not because the state is absent but because its growing presence can be leveraged by vigilantes, to protect them from the risks of engaging in mob violence.

Speaker & chair biographies

Dr. Sana Jaffrey is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University’s Department of Political and Social Change, and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC. She previously led the implementation of the National Violence Monitoring System (NVMS) data project at the World Bank, Jakarta (2008-2013) and served as the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), Jakarta (2021-2022). Her research on violent conflict and the challenges of state-building in Asia has been published in Terrorism and Political Violence, Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development and Journal of East Asian Studies. She has a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation on vigilantism in Indonesia was awarded the 2020 prize for best dissertation fieldwork by the American Political Science Association.

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Iqro Rinaldi on Unsplash

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