by Mark Woodward* Since March 15 Indonesia has experienced another wave of bombings, including a suicide attack on the Az Zikro mosque located in a police compound in Cirebon, Central Java. The bomber struck during Friday prayers. Other targets have included a book bomb mailed to Ulil Abshar Abdallah, the leader of Jaringan Islam Liberal [...]

by Mark Woodward More than a decade ago hundreds of thousands of Indonesians, most of them young people, came to the streets demanding the end to a dictatorial regime that had lasted for more than three decades. Today we see much the same in Egypt. We see also see the same reaction in Western media, [...]

by Chris Lundry President Barack Obama concluded his brief visit to Indonesia yesterday, fulfilling his promise to travel there despite having cancelled three prior trips to the land where he spent time as a young boy (between 1967-71). The cancellations had provoked much discussion there and among those who study Indonesia, some of whom were [...]

by Steven R. Corman Readers of this blog will be interested in an article by Mark Woodward (a frequent contributor to this blog) and his colleagues Inayah Rohmaniyah, Ali Amin and Diana Coleman in the most recent issue of Perspectives on Terrorism.  The paper, based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, challenges the popular [...]

by Steven R. Corman, Jeffry R. Halverson, and Chris Lundry This is the second of a four-part series of posts on foreign reactions to recent anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S. In Part I we looked at the Park51 project, also known as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and found concern over growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. There [...]

by Chris Lundry Indonesian police have charged Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Basyir with supporting terrorism for his role in the the Jemaah Islamiyah training camp in Aceh. He has been accused of participating in planning and funding the project and ordering others to commit terrorist acts, and police reported finding progress reports and videos from [...]

by Chris Lundry While in Singapore for the ICA conference with colleagues from the CSC, interesting news kept coming in from Indonesia concerning its ongoing fight against terrorism. It was quite a contrast to what appeared to be the biggest story in Singapore: the conviction of a foreigner who spray-painted a train, a story that [...]

by Steven R. Corman The Consortium for Strategic Communication has released a new white paper by Mark Woodward, Ali Amin, and Inayah Rohmaniyah entitled Lessons from Aceh Terrorist De-Radicalization.  The full white paper can be downloaded here. The executive summary is as follows: Although the International Crisis Group’s reports on radicalism in Indonesia are extremely [...]

by Chris Lundry Indonesian police have continued to make arrests of those with suspected ties to terrorism, including 14 people in the last week. Remarkably, many of those arrested have direct ties to firebrand cleric Abu Bakar Basyir and the organization he founded in 2008, Jemaah Anshoru Tauhid (JAT, the Supporters of Monotheism). According to the [...]

by Chris Lundry The International Crisis Group has issued another report on terrorism in Indonesia, concerning the recent arrests and killings in Aceh, Indonesia (the report is available here). As with most ICG reports, it is thorough and informative, and includes much detailed description obtained through extensive interviews. The report emphasizes some important elements of [...]