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RECONCILING INDONESIA: Grassroots agency for peace. Asia's Transformations. Edited by Birgit Bräuchler. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. xxi, 239 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$135.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415- 48704-7.
Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots agency for peace draws together an impressive range of material about local approaches to dealing with conflict in a variety of Indonesian contexts. Bräuchler, the editor, establishes a framework in the introduction that links conflicts not usually examined together, by focusing on how local actors at the grassroots level use traditional approaches to reconciling their differences. She critiques the conventional forms of reconciliation, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, for their tendency to position grassroots actors as passive recipients of processes led by state elites or outside actors. The central arguments of the book are that the most effective means of reconciliation are grounded in extensive knowledge about local history and culture and that closer attention needs to be paid to the ways in which local actors draw on their own indigenous practices and frameworks to reinterpret and resolve their problems.
A key strength of Reconciling Indonesia is the diversity of cases it considers. Most of the prominent areas of conflict in Indonesia,...