Jeroen Adam

In the Name of the Father? Christian Militantism in Tripura, Northern Uganda, and Ambon

Although armed groups and political violence referring to Islam have attracted increasing attention since the start of the global war against terror, one particular religion can hardly be described as the main source of inspiration of what is commonly referred to as “terrorist acts of violence.” Faith-based violence occurs in different parts of the world and its perpetrators adhere to all major world faiths including Christianity. As such, this article treats three cases of non-state armed actors that explain their actions as being motivated by Christian beliefs and aimed at the creation of a new local society that is guided by religion: the National Liberation Front of Tripura, the Lords Resistance Army, and the Ambonese Christian militias. It analyzes the way by which they instrumentalized religion against respective backgrounds of conflict rooted in social change, the erosion of traditional identities, imbalances of power, and widening communautarian faultlines.

Questioning the state-rebel divide in Mindanao: A comparative analysis of North Cotabato and Compostela Valley province

This article challenges the pervasive notion of rebel groups in the southern Philippines as non-state actors opposing the penetration of the state. Instead, through a historically informed analysis of local politics in two Mindanao provinces with a presence of Muslim and communist armed insurgents, respectively (North Cotabato and Compostela Valley), it will be demonstrated that particularly since the end of the Marcos martial law regime and subsequent democratisation and decentralisation efforts, local state and rebel structures have become increasingly intertwined. On the one hand, this observation can be explained with reference to particular historical-institutional trajectories, which led to the establishment of the local state as a vital instrument for accumulation and for political legitimation. On the other hand, the current situation can only be fully understood when considering the wider set of social structures that cut across the state-rebel divide, prime amongst which those defined by kinship.

Downward social mobility, prestige and the informal economy in post-conflict Ambon

This article illustrates how a religious conflict that started in 1999 on the island of Ambon in combination with an overall Indonesian financial crisis brought about the downward social mobility of many autochthonous Ambonese. In particular, the Ambonese employed in formal waged labour were forced to take up income generation strategies in insecure, informal economic sectors, which before the conflict had been dominated by the lower-class Muslim migrant community. This process was further encouraged by the spatial transformation during which these Muslim migrants became locked up in Muslim areas and Christian Ambonese took over their businesses in the Christian parts of the island. In a similar vein, the flight of many ethnic migrants to places outside Ambon stimulated Ambonese Muslims to penetrate these informal economic sectors in the Muslim parts of the island. As autochthonous Ambonese do not want to leave these jobs even since the violence has ended, competition at the lower-class bazaar level of the economy has vigorously intensified.

Informal conflict management in exclusivist political orders: some observations on Central Mindanao

In the past decade, a range of international and national NGOs have pointed to the need to complement national-level negotiations with a support for alternative, informal institutions of conflict management in order to reach a sustainable peace in the conflict-affected regions of Central and Western Mindanao. This argument is based on emerging insights into the multi-layered conflict ecology in the region and the fact that classic statist diplomacy can only deal with this complexity to a limited extent. Based on an analysis of existing conflict management practices in the region, we would like to challenge some of the basic premises underlying this ‘alternative’ and informal approach. Our core argument is that in the case of Mindanao, assuming a rigid distinction between formal and informal actors and practices of conflict mediation is flawed and may actually be counterproductive, as it obscures how informal practices dominate purportedly formal mediation procedures. Moreover, it tends to underestimate how the local executive embodying state power plays a key role in allegedly ‘informal’ conflict management mechanisms.

How ordinary folk became involved in the Ambonese conflict: understanding private opportunities during communal violence

Traditional accounts of the eruption of communal conflict between Christians and Muslims on the Indonesian island of Ambon point to religiously framed struggles to access a patrimonial state and the emergence of specific threats and opportunities after the fall of Suharto in May 1998. Whilst this thesis will be upheld, it does not wholly account for why so many ‘ordinary folk’ with little chance of ever accessing the state bureaucracy became involved in this conflict, which lasted from 1999 until 2002. In order to better grasp the incentives of engaging in communal violence in Ambon, this article posits the explanation that people had exceptional opportunities to take over land when the first Christian-Muslim riots broke out in the town of Ambon. This was particularly the case in those instances where institutional arrangements to access land were already being contested before 1999. These private opportunities were not the reasons which instigated the initial riots in the town of Ambon but became a rationale during the conflict, hereby effecting the displacement of whole communities.

A Comparative Analysis on the Micro-level Genealogies of Conflict in the Philippines' Mindanao Island and Indonesia's Ambon Island

Through a comparative micro-level study of conflicts in the Indonesian island of Ambon and the Philippine island of Mindanao, the article will show how the master narrative of a Christian–Muslim cleavage obscures the prominence of localized sub-identities in shaping the escalation of conflict in both places. Whilst in Ambon communal violence erupted between Muslims and Christians from 1999 until 2004, armed conflict on the island of Mindanao is generally understood as a decade-long struggle between Muslim armed groups fighting for autonomy against a Christian-dominated Philippine state. Yet, despite these different types of armed struggle, in both cases, everyday tensions about resource access became incorporated in a complex conflict dynamic. These localized tensions are linked to sub-identities within the general Christian versus Muslim dichotomy, thereby creating alternative fault lines and alliances. In conclusion, this article puts forward a renewed understanding of armed conflict as a dynamic and transformative process, producing new opportunities, alliances, contradictions and narrative frameworks.

Bringing Grievances Back In: Towards an Alternative Understanding of the Rise of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines

Over the past 10 to 15 years a pertinent critique has been formulated against the dominant framing of violent conflict in Muslim Mindanao as a mere struggle for autonomy or independence by a Muslim minority against the Philippine nation-state. This critique demonstrates how a wide range of coercive organizations compete over gaining access to rents, and how this competition is the main source of violent incidents. Furthermore, it is discussed how this violent competition over rent access has a clear subnational, intra-Muslim character. This article argues that, despite its obvious merits, this literature has come to overestimate the greed-related features of contemporary conflict in Muslim Mindanao and the coercive qualities in the build-up of political authority in the region. As an alternative, we wish to bring grievances and ideology back in, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of conflict and politics in the region. This will be done by illustrating how the spread of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front ( MILF ) as a legitimate and morally just alternative against injustices and inequalities within Muslim society has been crucial to the organization’s extraordinary growth in recent decades.

Genealogies of the colonial present: the rediscovery of the local in conflict management interventions in Mindanao, the Southern Philippines

Abstract This article argues that the current attention on indigenous institutions, and the ‘local’ more generally, in peace-building and conflict management bears similarities with colonial and post-colonial attempts at pacifying volatile borderlands. This will be illustrated through a historical case study of the Southern Philippine island of Mindanao, which has witnessed a recurring Muslim insurgency throughout different phases of its history. In an attempt to cope with these violent uprisings, both the American colonial authorities and the authoritarian Marcos regime, as well as a range of contemporary international NGOs, have endorsed traditional institutional avenues of informal mediation. The argument for the deployment of the local in state reconstruction and peace-building as propagated in current literature on hybrid peace should therefore be reframed as a reinvention of colonial governance techniques of indirect rule. It will hereby also be argued that the underlying rationale for this current deployment of local/traditional institutions of mediation and governance confirms and builds further upon a colonial framing of the non-Western other as incapable of modern, liberal democracy.