Abstract
Many former colonial societies have experienced outbreaks of irregular violent conflicts. Weak state institutions allowed for the emergence of vigilante groups pursuing their perceived notion of justice through the extralegal use of (threat of) violence. The fluid boundaries between (counter)insurgency, common criminality and vigilante violence have proved especially vexing. Historiography has interpreted this intersection of state, anti-state, and criminal violence as a colonial legacy. A closer look at the formative years of the Indonesian Republic shows a different picture. Going beyond the conventional periodization of Indonesian decolonization (‘1945–1949’), Violence Strikes Root aims to demonstrate that in the making of the nation-state a postcolonial Frankenstein’s monster of state-sanctioned vigilantism emerged. We hypothesize that the incorporation of vigilante violence in Indonesian politics developed in three phases—1943-1946, 1946-1949, 1949-1955—each to be analysed by one postdoc. The monster did not appear from a colonial legacy, but was the product of a specific historical trajectory from populist mass mobilization, through violent collisions, to incorporation in the new nation-state. Violence Strikes Root is embedded in an international network of experts engaged in comparative projects investigating (anti-)state violence and vigilantism in the age of decolonization. This network allows us to differentiate between general phenomena and typically Indonesian traits. Violence Strikes Root also aims to address Dutch and Indonesian understandings of their shared histories of violence. In doing so, we intervene in public debates urging both nations to come to terms with the fact that violence and perpetratorship are central to both our histories.