Socioeconomic perspectives on violent conflict in Indonesia

Focused around the greed and/or grievance theses, a large part of the economics of conflict literature concerns itself with civil war. This article provides socioeconomic perspectives on contemporary conflict in Indonesia. Three categories of violent conflict in the country are separatist violence, ethnic/sectarian violence, and routine violence. We argue that two elements of the grievance argument, namely relative deprivation and horizontal inequality, are particularly useful for analyzing the Indonesian case. In contrast, the greed hypothesis does not appear to provide as strong an explanation of violent conflict events in Indonesia.