Potentials of Multicultural Education in Communal Conflict Areas

This study focuses on understanding communal conflicts in Indonesia, which are triggered by stereotyping. Indonesians have undergone communal conflicts, especially in the late 1990s. The conflicts were mainly religious and ethnic, suggesting serious tensions in stereotyping between religious and ethnic groups. In this case, the paper seeks to underline the importance of multicultural education in the school context. Education is considered having a strategic role in building positive circumstances among people. Multicultural education is expected to minimize the possibility of building negative stereotyping of one person against another, which could cause conflict. This qualitative study incorporates a literature review of multicultural education and communal conflicts in the Indonesian context.

Identity, Ethnic Conflict and Communal Conflict in Sub- Saharan Africa

Ethnic identity is one of the most significant types of identities. Meanwhile, some researchers have recently begun to criticise the term ‘identity’ as being too excessively associated with political ideologies, lacking operational power and being difficult to define precisely. Simultaneously, attention has been drawn to what can be referred to as ‘ethnic revival.’ Ethnic identity is created based on the opposition between what is ‘one’s own’ and what is ‘foreign.’. Even though the category of ‘the Other’ or the ‘foreign’ always appears in the context of identity, it has a special significance in the case of ethnic identity. By such means, the belonging to a particular ethnic group is emphasized, while simultaneously one is cut off from other groups. Conflicts between clans, tribes and ethnic groups have occurred throughout the ages and in all civilisations. There is no single opinion among researchers about how ethnic conflict should be defined. Increasingly, in recent literature of the subject, the distinction between ethnic conflicts and communal conflicts has come to be applied. The article aims to analyse the identity problems expressed in ethnic and communal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is based on the critically reviewed literature of the subject, as well as the author’s conclusions from many years of research on the problem of state dysfunctionality, conducted in Sub-Saharan African countries.

The Social Construction of Kandhamal’s Violence

This chapter talks about Paul Brass, who has argued against the academic inclination to seek the “causes” of riots in his book The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India from 2003. It discusses the causal explanations of riots that are always overly simplistic and do not take into account the fact that all kinds of violent actions take place under the cover of the discourse of communalism. It also suggests that analysts should focus instead on the forms of violence and on the specific question of who is served by communal conflict. The chapter identifies the groups that benefited from the riots in Kandhamal which supported the Sangh Parivar's project of religious homogenization. It outlines the significant effects of riots on the religious landscape of Kandhamal.