Field Research in Acheh, Indonesia “Don’t Disturb the Peace”

This past August, thanks to a collaborative research grant from the Center for Consciousness and Transformation at George Mason University, I found myself sitting in a bamboo shelter on the edge of a small Acehnese village. During armed conflict between the Indonesian military and the Free Aceh Movement, this village became a place of violence and trauma, with men and boys “disappeared” and women and girls subject to military interrogation and sexual abuse. Women told me of watching their daughters raped, nursing the wounds of their sons, and struggling to make a living when access to fields and markets was blocked by combat. Peace came to their village in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster made it impossible for the government to continue to bar outside access to the province. But the hope of these women that the violations inflicted upon them would be addressed, and that their needs as widows, mothers, and economic actors would be fulfilled, had not come to fruition. They said they had not been touched by the waves of aid that flooded tsunami-affected communities with reconstruction projects, and they had been told by their government that speaking about what happened to them during armed conflict, and how the effects of war still constrained their lives, would be disloyal to their communities and dangerous for a fragile peace process. The elite parties to the conflict – including former rebels now in power – preferred to move on from the past, attracting outside investors to Aceh’s new political stability. “‘Don’t disturb the peace,’ that’s what they tell us,” one woman said to me. “‘Just don’t think about that anymore.’ But we cannot forget, especially when our lives are still filled with struggle.”

When teaching theory, I tell my students how very much our analytical frameworks matter. They are not just abstract “academic” constructions, but models – implicit and explicit – for action in the world. Positive peace, gender sensitivity, structural violence, transitional justice: how one imagines and enacts such ideas has intense material impacts. After the tsunami, which led to 110,000 deaths, 700,000 displacements, and an estimated US$4.4 billion in property damage, Aceh became a kind of laboratory for humanitarianism, with hundreds of organizations at work in the area. Most Acehnese acknowledge that this international attention was in large part responsible for the signing of an historic peace agreement bringing an end to decades of combat. However, donors overwhelmingly failed to focus on the fact that Acehnese were suffering not only the effects of natural disaster but the “unnatural disaster” of military occupation. Less than 10% of donor aid was allocated for post-conflict projects, exacerbating social imbalances. Grievances about histories of human rights abuses, continuing structural inequalities, and questions about whose definitions of “development” prevail have often been dismissed by political elites by making references to the fragile status and future promise of “peace.” The stories of those whose needs have been forgotten help remind me to listen, to question, and to commit to research as the link that spans theory and practice.