Imperial Violence in Indonesia

This paper offers a conceptual and historical framework to think about violence as a contextually and socially conditioned phenomenon, arising from multiple factors and actors. One of the central periods to analyze this topic in Indonesia is European colonization. This system spread in Asia to expand the authority of that continent during the 19th and 20th centuries. However, the most important thing to highlight is that colonies and empires were sustained by the constant exercise of various types of violence.

The analysis of violence tends to emphasize the different categories of analysis that can be subject to different interpretations according to the period or theoretical perspective. In this paper, the term violence will be problematized according to the postcolonial perspective. To do this, three different types of violence will be considered: structural violence, focused on the economic and political structures of the colony; physical violence that involves direct damage to bodies, and symbolic violence which includes different “invisible” means to establish relationships of domination, inequality and power through language, art, customs, laws, among others.

This paper has two objectives: The first is to describe and analyze the three types of violence considered for this research and the second is to recognize the purpose and prevalence of these violence in two historical stages: the Dutch colonial period (1816-1941) and the occupation Japanese (1942-1945). The purpose is to rethink and compare the legacy of these periods in the institutional formation of the current Indonesian State.