SpringerBriefs in Political Science

This book is the first to analyse the practice of governance to resolve conflict in the case of Aceh in Indonesia. Combining theoretical discourse on conflict, democracy, and governance, it draws from original field research on the separatist conflict, utilizing a social constructivist approach in collating observations and interviews with political elites from both the Government of Indonesia and the Aceh Independent Movement (GAM). The conflict was an intractable one in which thousand civilians were killed between 1976 and 2006. The author zooms into the 2003 and 2007 period, against the broader context of the political landscape of Indonesia under the Suharto regime. In doing so, the book tackles the challenges presented by intrastate conflicts relating to ethno-religiosity, land use, and separatism. It unpacks the Indonesian political system’s shift from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one, and demarcates the prevalence of state violence in managing conflicts, as exemplified in the Aceh separatism conflict. Relevent to political scientists and scholars in peace, conflict and development studies, this co-published book presents novel sociological insights into Indonesia’s historical, and contemporary, political landscape.

This book offers a cross-civilizational and interdisciplinary approach to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) research to mitigate the problematiques of extant literature. Instead of employing conventional lenses of geo-political, geo-economic and geo-strategic analyses that are predominant, this book offers fresh perspectives that venture into other civilizational and disciplinary territories while critically seeking integration without falling into romanticizing or essentializing any notions. Due to epistemic inadequacies and other conceptual limitations of existing approaches, this book argues that a heuristic framework drawing from the negotiation between Western and Chinese perspectives as well as integration of anthropological-international relations conceptualizations can provide greater potency in unravelling the intricacies of BRI studies.  This book is a timely contribution to the ameliorating of the rising tensions between US and China over the recent years. An interdisciplinary toolkit for researchers in BRI-related research, as well as those in government organizations, policy-making bodies, think-tanks, trade and industry sectors, the book presents a paradigmatic shift from a predominantly hegemonic Western thinking about the BRI and its role in the region, and within academic dialogue.