TY - JOUR
AU - Meuleman, Johan H.
AB - book reviews 275 Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia By JACQUES BERTRAND (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 278 pp. Price PB £17.99. ISBN 0–521–52441–5. HB £45.00. ISBN 0–521–81889–3. Indonesia, often celebrated—rightly or wrongly—for the harmonious coex- istence of its many religious, cultural, and ethnic communities, has since the end of the 1980s shocked world opinion by becoming the arena of communal conflict and violence. Many different answers have been offered to the question of which factors have led to this generally unexpected development. Some have emphasized the role of elites at the central, i.e. Jakarta, level, whose ambitions ignited, through provocation and other strategies, conflicts in various parts of the archipelago. Other analyses have focused on the role of local elites of these various regions, whose competition for resources and power may have been the main cause of these multiple incidents. A third category of explanations has highlighted the general aspiration for economic and political reform. Yet other commentators have concentrated on tensions between religious or ethnic communities that go well beyond the individual incidents. Not satisfied with these diverse explanations, which are at best partial, Jacques Bertrand (who teaches political sciences at the University of Toronto) proposes an 
TI - Review: Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia
JO - Journal of Islamic Studies
DO - 10.1093/jis/eti150
DA - 2005-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/review-nationalism-and-ethnic-conflict-in-indonesia-dBxv8M0Oq0
SP - 275
EP - 277
VL - 16
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -