Cities and villages in the religious conflict circle: Socio-demographic factors of communal and sectarian conflict in West Java, Indonesia

This article analyses the forms of religious conflict in cities (urban areas) and villages (rural areas) in Indonesia. The main locus of this study is in 11 regencies and cities in West Java, a province with the highest ranking of violations of religious freedom in Indonesia for the last two decades (2000–2020). These regencies and cities include: Bekasi Regency, Bekasi City, Bogor Regency, Bogor City, Tasikmalaya Regency, Bandung Regency, Bandung City, Kuningan Regency, Garut Regency, Cianjur Regency and Cimahi City. The study confirms that the sociological characteristics of urban and rural areas influence the tendency of different forms of conflict in both areas. On the one hand, heterogeneous urban social conditions tend to have an impact on the forms of conflict between religious communities – Muslims and Christians. On the other hand, the homogeneous rural social conditions affect the forms of conflict that are internal to religious communities or fellow Muslims. This study shows that religious conflict in a region cannot be generalised because each region has different socio-demographic conditions. Therefore, knowledge of differences in socio-demographic conditions in each region is very important because it will determine the form, causes and the ways to handle the conflicts in each region.Contribution: This study contributes to mapping the different sociological characteristics of religious conflict in cities and villages in West Java. It can be used as an illustration for other regions in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Transnational Corporations and Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland

This chapter examines the case of Northern Ireland and shows how engaged transnational corporations can help move a country from violence to peace when domestic firms lack either the strength or the will to do so. The sectarian conflict, which dates back hundreds of years, has always had economic roots and consequences. It makes sense then, that corporations, as the main drivers of modern economic exchange, would be a large part of the answer. The chapter looks at how companies like Fruit of the Loom, Allstate, and Seagate Technology have helped create the economic opportunities that are necessary to help Northern Ireland maintain a peaceful future.

Survival Mechanism of The Shia Community Post-Shia–Sunni Sampang Conflict in 2012

The purpose of this article is to discuss the mechanisms that the Shia community of Rusunnawa Puspa Agro Sidoarjo adopted to survive the sectarian conflict of 2012. This research uses a qualitative approach, using a snowball sampling technique with key informants, Ustad Tajul Muluk and Ustad Iklil. Data collection techniques include in-depth interviews. The result is indicative of the fact that the Shia community took three approaches to survive the sectarian clashes. First, the Shia community attempted to reduce its daily expenses to the most urgent needs. Second, the Shia community members used an alternative subsystem of working as coconut shelling labor, farming the surrounding land, and raising goats and chickens to help meet their daily needs. Third, the Shia community members got a governmental network in the form of jadup money,[1] in the form of the patron-client relationship. This research also shows that the Shia community needs to get social support because material assistance is not enough [1] - Jadup is the acronym of jatah hidup, and Jatah is a financial help which is either provided by the government, or parents, or even one’s boss, but not because one has done something, but rather, because it is part of one’s right.

Community relations

Irish nationalists imagined the rural farming community as a model of the nation, as most famously articulated by Eamon de Valera. But the literary version of social reality yield images of much less harmonious, homogenous, and integrated communities. There is the vicious class stigma of sexual promiscuity and illegitimacy, as seen in Mary Lavin’s story ‘Sarah’, and in Tom French’s long poem ‘Pity the Bastards’. The closed-in world of John B. Keane’s The Field and Sam Hanna Bell’s tightly knit Presbyterian neighbourhood in December Bride give a sense of the varying distinctiveness of separate communities. Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish language novel Cré na Cille vividly renders the intensely competitive internal dynamics of his Connemara locality, while Eugene McCabe in his Fermanagh Trilogy evokes the intimate enmities of country neighbours under the pressure of sectarian conflict.

Sectarian Conflict in Elite Newspapers of Pakistan: A Peace Journalism Perspective

Mass Media occupies a significant place in contemporary era of volatile changes and in a country like Pakistan, which is hovered by internal and external conflicts since its inception, it turns pivotal. The geo-strategic depth and ethno-political structure of the country has highlighted the sensitivity of media reporting and its implications on a wider scale. The ingrained private media outlets in 2000 have grown mature over the past 20 years. Yet the reporting dilemmas haunt the underdeveloped nation. The present study aims to explore the emerging sectarian unrest in the country and its coverage in elite English newspapers Dawn and The News over the years 22019, 2021 using census technique to examine the existence and frequency of war and peace frames by John Galtung, and thus finds the role of media escalatory in nature.

Conflict Dynamics in Post-2003 Iraq: A Security Dilemma Perspective

A decade and a half since the U.S. invasion, Iraq remains affected by complicated and increasingly changing uncertainties. Intrastate division and lack of social stability are expressed in ethnic and sectarian hostilities. In view of different reasons, 16 years after establishing the new Iraq, this paper asks: why has Iraq been marked by instability, transformation, and inability to maintain stability and peace? This paper explains the ethno-sectarian interactions in Iraq with the help of the theory of security dilemma and explores the derailment of Iraq's transformation process and the beginning of a new period of confrontation from a security dilemma viewpoint. The findings suggest that the security dilemma and ethno-sectarian conflict are further intensified by Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni groups attempting to assess the threats posed not only by enemy militias but also by the presence of all groups in close proximity.

Syria’s Sect-coded Conflict: From Hezbollah’s Top-down Instrumentalization of Sectarian Identity to Its Candid Geopolitical Confrontation

This article surveys Hezbollah’s sectarian mobilization to justify its early engagement in Syria’s civil war for what was an intervention in a geopolitical confrontation to implement its agenda in coordination with its regional allies. Generally speaking, sectarian relations can be driven from both above as well as below. The article first argues that Hezbollah is a sectarian party whose timing of emergence paralleled with the rise of the Shia in Lebanon and the adjoining region. It contends that Hezbollah instrumentalized its sectarian identity and adopted a sectarian mobilization policy ahead of its engagement in Syria’s conflict. However, as its fighters were expanding across the country, Hezbollah’s sectarian discourse altered to a more politics-centric discourse. Therefore, this article concluded that the falsely framed sectarian conflict in Syria is sect-coded, Hezbollah adopted a top-down politicization of sectarian identity, and its primary aim was to prevent the regime’s collapse, which would have tilted the regional balance of power in favor of its rivals rather than seeking religious truths on Syria’s soil.

A “Hair-Trigger Society” and the Woman Who Felt Something in Anna Burns's Milkman

This article responds to debates about the “big, ambitious novel” and “hysterical realism” by challenging several prevailing scholarly orthodoxies about large-scale fiction: that whole world-building precludes the rendering of a single, feeling human; that mimesis and “hysterical” traits, like absurdity, are mutually exclusive; or that a whole-world view requires third-person narrative omniscience. The analysis centers on Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a novel set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland that connects a young woman's experience with gendered and sexual power to the behavior, prejudices, and tacit understandings that undergird a society locked in sectarian conflict. The article argues that the novel's form—a first-person, past-tense narration—lends the character-narrator unique credibility as a teller because she has both firsthand experience and the critical distance of hindsight. To avoid postures of certainty and authority that come with both political power and narrative omniscience, the narrator uses irony and self-consciousness to critique storyworld power dynamics and expectations of literary realism. Burns's big, ambitious novel reveals that conveying a whole world and portraying a single, feeling human are in fact mutually constitutive aims. Moreover, the digressive and often absurd narration is precisely what makes the storyworld a persuasively plausible, if not verisimilar, rendering of Troubles-era Northern Ireland. By linking nationalism to problems of gender and sexual politics at the time, Burns's novel issues a warning about the reactionary postures and polarization in the contemporary moment surrounding Brexit, the #MeToo movement, and surging violence in Northern Ireland.