Two decades after the humanitarian conflict struck Ambon, Maluku, the shadows of past trauma are still being inherited by the younger generation, even those who never directly witnessed the events. This anthropological fact came to light during an academic presentation titled “In Indonesia? The Messiness of Actual Peace Processes” by researcher Geger Riyanto. The critical presentation was delivered during the first batch of the 2026 UGM-CHSS Academic Writing Workshop held at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada (FIB UGM), Yogyakarta.
This international workshop is an initiative under the umbrella of the CHSS (Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences and Supporting Under-Represented Scholars of Asia) Project. The capacity-building program is funded by SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and mandated by the AAS (Association for Asian Studies) to UGM for three years (2026–2028). Under the leadership of Professor Wening Udasmoro as the Hub Lead, the project focuses on empowering young academics and lecturers studying conflict and peace issues, or those coming from post-conflict regions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, including Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea.
By raising the central theme of “Self Narration: Centralizing the Periphery,” the UGM-CHSS scholarly forum encourages researchers to focus on voices from the margins that have been underrepresented in local and global discourses. One of the peripheral studies dissected in depth was the post-conflict sociological dynamics in Ambon.
In his presentation, Geger Riyanto highlighted that peace on the ground is often complex and non-linear. The resolution process in various post-conflict areas of Indonesia—such as North Maluku, Maluku, Aceh, Poso, and West Kalimantan—involves strategies ranging from scapegoating external provocateurs, local political power-sharing, economic integration of former combatants, to collective voluntary work to rebuild the community’s social space.
Specifically in Ambon, the research captures a spatially divided urban landscape based on religious identity, where mosques and churches serve as visual markers of mass violence memories. The impact of this division is visibly passed down to the new post-conflict generation. Referring to a 2019 survey of 450 high school students in Ambon who did not experience the conflict directly, data showed that 89 percent of the students had heard conflict stories with narratives designed to protect them. As a result of this collective memory transmission, 50 percent of the students agreed to live in areas with the same religious majority. Deep psychological fear even makes some children feel anxious upon hearing the call to prayer (adzan) from a mosque. This inherited family trauma also perpetuates sharp stereotypes, such as the assumption in some Christian families that “Muslims cannot be trusted,” which is conversely echoed by the Muslim community toward Christians.
This grassroots reality in Ambon became a strong foundation in the UGM-CHSS forum to criticize the mainstream peace concept, namely “Liberal Peace,” which is often pushed by international agencies through top-down schemes (democratization, law enforcement, and free-market capitalism). The Western approach is considered to frequently mutate and fail at the grass-roots level because it ignores local restorative justice. Conversely, through the lens of “Peace from Below,” which refers to the thoughts of Johan Galtung, peace is positioned not as a static social formation, but as a dynamic process driven by the agency and creative actions of local communities themselves.
Through the UGM-CHSS Writing Workshop, critical research articles such as the peace dynamics in Ambon will be refined to break into national and international journal publications. This step simultaneously supports the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in providing equal academic access and regional networking platforms for young Asian researchers to voice local perspectives on the global stage.
Author: Humas FIB, Zaidan Abdurrahman
