糖心TV

Scholarship on impunity for collective violence mostly focuses on explaining those conflicts where political battle lines are clearly drawn, such as ethnic riots, electoral clashes, terrorism and civil wars. Those who get away with horrific acts of violence are often influential individuals, protected by powerful elites. Increasingly, however, ordinary individuals in developing democracies are getting away with a more quotidian form of violence: vigilante attacks against suspected thieves, blasphemers, sexual deviants and a host of other offenders. Long understood as the public鈥檚 reaction to inadequate provision of order by the state, two contemporary features of vigilantism warrant a new explanation. First, the use of mob violence to punish a widening scope of offenses is increasingly observed in states that have undergone rapid state-building in recent years. Second, vigilantism has evolved from society鈥檚 way of occasionally bypassing the state into a form of violent lobbying that seeks to reform it.

This talk examines the rise of vigilante violence as a function of ordinary citizens' ability to acquire impunity for highly public acts of violence. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence from contemporary Indonesia, I show how vigilantes develop collusive relationships with street-level police, amid the rapid expansion of the national police force. My research shows that contrary to existing explanations that explain impunity as the consequence of power, this study of everyday vigilantism shows how provision of impunity as a discretionary resource by the state's minor functionaries can help ordinary people acquire political capital. Finally, I contend that vigilantism across the developing world is flourishing not because the state is absent but because its growing presence can be leveraged by vigilantes, to protect them from the risks of engaging in mob violence.