Systems of Violent Social Control in Indonesia and the Philippines

How, why, against which forms of deviance, by which agents and with which level of legitimacy is violence employed as a means of social control? Which forms of violence are used in order to safeguard rule-following? How do those systems of violent social control evolve and change over time?

These are the fundamental questions we are interested in this project. Our fundamental hypothesis, which we will test by comparisons between several regions in Indonesia and the Philippines, argues that there are significant differences between those systems in various societies and that these differences can to a significant extent be attributed to differences with respect to three macro-variables:

To be sure, there are a huge number of other variables influencing the uses of violence for purposes of social control. However, we argue, that countries, regions or localities which differ in their historically evolved understandings of the dominant principles by which society is differentiated into groups and which have translated these differences into culture-bound cognitive and emotive patterns as well as into norm-based social practices should likewise differ with respect to the types of deviance sanctioned by employing violent means of social control, the agents which do the handiwork of violent social control, and the forms these acts of violent social control take, and the powerstructure reflected in the specific configuration of the system of violent social control.

From July to December 2008, this project was supported by the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders" of Frankfurt University.

From summer 2009, this project will be supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).