Les virtuoses de la violence. Remarques sur la privatisation du maintien de l'ordre en Indonésie contemporaine

Since the fall of President Suharto in 1998, Indonesia has been undergoing a political liberalisation blemished by numerous cases of social violence, such as intercommunity clashes and increasing village lynches. This article aims at clarifying a fundamental sociological aspect from an ethnographical history of political violence standpoint : it examines the existence, within the State apparatus, of a « professional violence » group specialised in the exercise of physical coercion. It shows that the mechanism of « State privatisation » favours the introduction of a militia model and furthers the criminalizing of public institutions and of the political field.