Vernacular Security

Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling
Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds
NILS BUBANDT*
Department of Anthropology, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a

variety of global, national and regional inflections, this article argues
for the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘vernacular security’.
Entailed by this concept is a proposal to treat ‘security’ as a socially
situated and discursively defined practice open to comparison and
politically contextualized explication, rather than merely an analytical
category that needs refined definition and consistent use. While the
ideas and politics of security associated with the rise of global
governance are built on late-modern ideas about what it means to be
safe, global governance is not seamless in its extension. The apparent
universalism of the ontology and politics of global security therefore
breaks down into a more complex pattern upon closer inspection.
Based on material from Indonesia, the article suggests that the ‘onto-
politics’ of security have global, national and local inflections, the
interplay of which requires re-examination.
Keywords Globalization • political imagination • security •

ontological uncertainty
Introduction
T
HIS ARTICLE DEALS WITH THE POLITICAL imagination in
Indonesia by analysing the contradictions within and interplay
between global, national and local discourses on security.1 Through a
political–ethnographic analysis of the rhetorical and institutional changes to
the concept of security in Indonesia during the last three decades, I make
three claims. First, I argue that the cultivation of the ‘soft side’ of security that
characterizes the current political focus on global human security is not new.
1
The article was initially presented at a workshop organized by the research network ‘From Inequality to
Insecurity: The Place of Crime and Violence in Development Thinking and Action’, held at the Danish
Institute of International Studies in Copenhagen in January 2004. I would like to thank the workshop
participants, in particular Finn Stepputat, for critical and incisive comments. I also thank the editor of
Security Dialogue and two anonymous reviewers for providing a set of helpful and challenging comments
of both an empirical and a conceptual nature. Any remaining misconceptions are naturally my own.
© 2005 PRIO, www.prio.no

SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.com
Vol. 36(3): 275–296, DOI: 10.1177/0967010605057015
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276 Security Dialogue vol. 36, no. 3, September 2005
In Indonesia, the New Order regime (1967–98) turned a political obsession

with order and stability into a ‘total social fact’ through a nationwide and
tightly woven web of ideological and institutional means. Political stability
and social order in a ‘statist’ but socially all-encompassing interpretation of
security became a central tenet of New Order rule, which suffused daily life
in the majority of Indonesian communities from the early 1970s, long before
the ‘securitization’ of social life had become a global concern. Second, I use a
brief ethnographic account from eastern Indonesia during the New Order
to show that the institutional implementation of this ideological notion of
security at the local level was never straightforward. The reason for this was
that the implementation of the statist idea of security encountered local uni-
verses containing ontological notions of safety and uncertainty that often
accommodated and undermined the security project of New Order rule in
unexpected ways. My third and final argument takes the history of security
in Indonesia into this millennium and the engagement with notions of
security in current global politics. After the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998,
Indonesian politics was swept up in both localism and a new form of global
governance that emphasized ‘human security’. I demonstrate how local
political entrepreneurs in the eastern Indonesian province of North Maluku
employ the rhetoric of global governance to promote their own version of
security.
All three arguments converge, I believe, on the following overall point:
When the global concept of security is contextualized in terms of local
political histories, it becomes apparent that ‘security’ as a political problem
is neither unchanging nor semantically homogenous. Complex processes of
accommodation, rejection and reformulation take place in the interstices
between global, national and local representations of the problem of security.
These processes, in turn, are related to the political history of the local onto-
logical ways in which danger, risk and (in)security are defined.
I propose to call the contradictory outcome of these processes ‘vernacular
security’. The notion of the vernacular is inspired by recent anthropological
studies of global modernity (Appadurai, 1996; Knauft, 2002; Piot, 1999; Rofel,
1999). This research reveals a perhaps self-evident but nevertheless para-
doxical fact: global modernity is always site-specific. The project of global
modernity, itself emerging out of an ‘indigenous’ Euro-American tradition
that from the very beginning lost its monopoly on it, is in other words plural
because in every local site modernity is brought into social existence in a
tension-filled relationship between local concerns and global forms of dis-
cursive and institutional power (Pieterse, 2000).
The idea of ‘multiple’ or ‘vernacular’ modernity has been the object of
criticism from two fronts. On the one hand, the concept of ‘multiple modern-
ities’ has been blamed for leading to an ‘easy pluralism of alternative
modernities’ that carried the political dangers of a new kind of relativism:

Nils Bubandt Vernacular Security 277
modernities were essentially different, and therefore by implication incom-

parable (Mitchell, 2000: 12). On the other hand, the idea of vernacular or
multiple modernities has been taken to task for positing a plethora of ‘local’
and ‘cultural’ modernities that were nevertheless measured against a ‘univer-
sal’ and implicitly European kind of ‘real’ modernity (Englund & Leach, 2000).
The response to these two points of critique has been to look for frameworks
for analysing vernacular modernities that both are comparative by default and
do not imply the existence of one ‘real’ version of modernity. Foster has
proposed a comparative analysis of cultural–political constructions of trust
and (un)certainty as one such framework (Foster, 2002; see also Douglas &
Wildavsky, 1982). A comparison of vernacular forms of modernity and secu-
rity, in other words, can be based on the premise that the sense of threat and
insecurity is socially constructed (see Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde, 1998: 12).
I argue that it makes comparative sense to analyse the idioms of uncer-
tainty, order and fear, as well as the forms of social control associated with
particular discourses on security, whether these discourses are ‘global’,
‘national’ or ‘local’. Extending from the suggestion that security is a speech
act that posits a new situation, a special kind of politics (Wæver, 1995), I
suggest that securitization is a discursive device for community-building, for
the rhetorical evocation and political realization of imagined communities at
various scales (see Anderson, 1992). My argument is not a relativist assertion
that there are multiple cultural constructions of security. Rather, ‘vernacular
security’ is a convenient term for the analysis of different scales of creating
imagined communities through a comparison of different but constantly
interpenetrating political forms of management of threat and (un)certainty.
This article therefore aims to trace the political processes that seek to conjure
up ‘safe, imagined communities’ at the mutually dependent levels of the
global, the national and the local.
As Tsing (2000: 120) notes, the global, local or national scales are not
neutral levels of magnitude. Scales have to be proposed, practised and made
self-evident. The idea of ‘the global’ has thus only recently become a self-
evident kind of scale (see Bubandt, 1998). Scales are contested political
projects – political kinds of fact-making. Security is in this sense a particular
kind of fact- and scale-making. I suggest that security as a political way of
dealing with the ontological issue of uncertainty produces these different
scales. ‘Ontological uncertainty’ may here be defined as the socially con-
structed anxiety that shapes pertinent kinds of danger, fears and concerns for
a particular community at a particular time. Uncertainty is ontological
because, as Giddens (1991) suggests, it is an existential feature of the human
condition; and yet it is always socially expressed because different societies
have different ways of socially producing it, discursively portraying it,
symbolically representing it and politically managing it. Uncertainty is in
other words ‘onto-political’. It is ontologically grounded, yet always related

to a politics of certainty. In late modernity, this politics is associated with the

notion of risk and freedom that produces the ‘global’ as an arena for a life
politics of security (see Hier, 2003). But ‘national’ security or ‘local’ senses of
certainty are similarly produced, and here I suggest that Giddens’s concepts
of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’ are too homogenous to capture the interplay
between ‘global’, national’ and ‘local’ politics of security (see Argyrou, 2000).
Because they interact symbolically, politically and historically, these
ontologies of uncertainty and politics of security are open to analytical
comparison. Vernacular security is thus an attempt to combine a critical, dis-
cursive analysis of security with an anthropological approach to the study of
ontological uncertainty that does not reduce local ontologies of uncertainty
to current political (and political science) conceptualizations of security. In
particular, I will argue, this entails a break with the universalist pretensions
of the concept of ‘human security’.
Creating ‘the Global’ as a Security Concern
Although security was a crucial concept also during the Cold War, the
political use of ‘security’ has recently shifted from a focus on the interstate,
military problem of maintaining territorial borders to the social and global
problem of maintaining ‘life’ across borders (Duffield, 2004).
As such, security has emerged as a master trope for the so-called post-
development age, along with concepts like ‘participation’, ‘partnership’,
‘democracy’ and ‘autonomy’. It has, however, all the definitional vagueness
of all other truly powerful discursive phenomena. In its conventional forms,
‘security’ may be defined as ‘freedom from danger and risk’, as freedom
from ‘care, apprehension, or doubt’, as well ‘the precautions taken to guard
against theft or sabotage’ (Webster’s Dictionary, 1994: 1290). Security, in
other words, deals with the problem of order and disorder, being both the
ontological condition of order, in the sense of an absence of doubt, danger,
risk and anxiety, and the political means of ensuring that order. The political
obsession with security during the 1990s, and in particular after 9/11, has to
do with this ‘onto-political’ duality. ‘Securitization’, the rhetorical evocation
of security as a political exception (see Wæver, 1995), is intimately related to
the governmental idea of governing through freedom (Steinmetz, 2003). The
liberal project of governing through freedom entails, however, as Dean
(2002: 56) suggests, ‘divisions between both populations and individual
subjects, in such a way as to require authoritarian or despotic government in
a wide variety of instances’. The disciplinary control through security is in
other words what establishes the open spaces of governmental freedom by
maintaining that it protects them.

Security is simultaneously a political means and a political ideal: both a

model for and a model of the new political imagination that has taken centre-
stage in the global risk society (Beck, 2002). A quick scan of the academic and
policy-oriented literature reveals how a wide variety of domains have
become objects for security concerns. Within development research, there
are discussions about ‘food and nutrition security’, ‘household livelihood
security’, ‘information security’, ‘social security’, ‘employment security’,
‘energy security’ and ‘environmental security’ – all encompassed by one
of the new buzzwords of UN speak: ‘human security’ (UNDP, 1994). The
problem of security is not only multi-thematic – a relevant concern in all
areas of the social body – it is also multi-scalar. There is global security,
regional security, national security and community security, as the magis-
terial three-volume treatise by Dewitt & Hernandez (2003a,b,c) on the topic
in Southeast Asia highlights. Global in extension and requiring minute
consideration in a growing number of areas, security, I would argue, is an
attempt to tame uncertainty by constructing its absence as a variety of
‘freedom’. As I will show, these attempts at taming uncertainty constantly
reproduce their own forms of subversion.
The all-embracing and governmental tendencies of the concept of security
are perhaps most clearly marked in the latest manifestation of the concept,
namely that of ‘human security’. Human security is defined as the absence
both of threat and of ‘sudden and hurtful disruptions in the pattern of
everyday life’ (see Paris, 2001: 89). Coined on the basis of a legitimate critique
of a narrow militaristic definition of security, the concept has colonized
all areas of social life, making ‘it difficult to determine what, if anything,
might be excluded from the definition of human security’ (Paris, 2001: 90).
Proponents of the concept see this definitional vagueness as one of the con-
cept’s main strengths (UNDP, 1994: 24). Strictly speaking, the proponents are
right. The ‘all-encompassing’ and ‘integrative’ qualities of human security
make it an apt policy concept – a productive policy tool for the management
of uncertainty in the global risk society (see Beck, 2002). As a risk-handling
device suitable for all domains of life, it establishes governmentality ‘all the
way down’.
The same definitional vagueness also surrounds the broader concept of
security.2 This makes ‘security governance’ inherently paradoxical: the
concept of security has gained immense discursive power on the global,
political scene at the same time as even its proponents struggle to define its
essence.3 Anthony Burke (2002) discusses this ‘onto-political’ paradox of
2
See, for instance, the debate between Thomas & Tow (2002) and Bellamy & McDonald (2002) in previous
issues of this journal.
3
Ironically, there has been considerable contestation with security studies about whether security qualifies
as a contested concept; see, for example, Buzan (1991); Booth (1991); Baldwin (1997).

security as a global political technology through an interesting use of Jacques

Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’. Aporia is one of Derrida’s many concepts to
describe the inherent contradictions that emerge when language is assigned
the function of representing reality, an insertion of doubt into the very
reality that a term is supposed to point to.
The central contradiction, or aporia, in the discourse about security is that
the politicization of security entails the constant manufacture of uncertainty
(see also Beck, 1998: 134). The security discourse thus shapes particular
forms of sensible political actions, but in doing so also inserts constant doubt
into the very project of making life ‘secure’ by making oblique but constant
reference to the idea of insecurity. Paradoxically, then, the discourse of
security constantly reproduces insecurity (see also Dean, 1999). The promise
of security, Burke (2002: 20) argues,
breaks down when we consider that, because ‘security’ is bound into a dependent
relationship with ‘insecurity’, it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images
of ‘insecurity’ in order to retain meaning.
From this perspective, an ‘ontology of insecurity’ is constantly being evoked

and reproduced in the new global security paradigm. As we shall see,
‘national’ and ‘local’ forms of security contain similar, if differently con-
ceived, contradictions. The contradiction within the global form of security
is especially important, however, because it has significant political conse-
quences.
The aporia of security thus produces a constant state of emergency
(Armitage, 2002; Steinmetz, 2003). This sense of crisis is onto-political: crisis
is the ontological by-product of the political concern with security. Concerns
about security, whether in the form of global threats like terrorism or in
more localized forms like the ‘new wars’, have in turn made development
‘political’ in a new and much more intense way. This includes ‘a new will-
ingness to countenance a level of intrusion and a degree of social engineer-
ing hitherto frowned upon by the international community’ in the name of
security (Duffield, 2002: 1050).
Far from embarking on the path of ‘post-development’ prophesied by some
in the early 1990s (see, for instance, Escobar, 1995), the reinvention of
security has become an integral part of the new paradigm of development
and global governance, and it is as such that the concept reached the shores
of Indonesia after 2002. The political response to the Kuta Beach bombs
in October 2002 and the bomb at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta a year later
initiated an Indonesian version of the ‘quiet revolution in security govern-
ance’ that began globally after September 2001 (see Lippert & O’Connor,
2003: 331).
Nevertheless, security has a long, contradictory history in Indonesia, and it
was within this history that recent changes to the meanings of security have

come to make sense. Asian security structures are, as Buzan (2003) argues,
unique to the region for a number of historical and geopolitical reasons.
These regional peculiarities are also likely to have repercussions on the scale
of nations. If China can be said to have its own ‘security concept’ (Baiyi,
2001), so perhaps can Indonesia.
The history of the Indonesian vernacular concept of ‘security’ was heavily
influenced by the recent shift in ‘global’ security from a disciplinary concern
with control to a governmental concern with freedom. But, as I shall argue,
‘security’ was in Indonesia used as part of a political discourse to conjure up
the imagined nation that in many ways foreshadowed the global cultivation
of the ‘soft side’ of security. While human security established ‘the global’ as
a scene for the reproduction of ‘insecurity’, the Indonesian political rhetoric
about ‘safety’ (keamanan) constantly reproduced the nation-state as a scene
susceptible to recurrent ‘social chaos’ or ‘madness’ (keédanan), and that
played upon an ontology of harmony (rukun). This difference, I will argue,
was more than a difference of words. The political speech acts about safety
played upon, but were also constantly undermined by, an ontology of (un)-
certainty that was peculiar to the relationship between state and community
in Indonesia.
The History of the ‘Safe Nation’ in Indonesia
Security is not a new concept in Indonesia. Rather, its genealogy can be

traced back to the preoccupation of the late colonial state in the Dutch East
Indies with ‘peace and order’ (rust en orde) (Anderson, 1990: 119; Cribb,
1994: 1).
Taught a lesson from the heated and divisive politics of the 1950s during
Indonesia’s brief fling with democracy (Geertz, 1995), the New Order regime
that came into being in 1967, when President Suharto formally seized power
from Sukarno, accommodated the colonial idea of statist security and made
‘safety and order’ (keamanan dan ketertiban) the basis of its high-modernist,
neopatrimonial rule (Langenberg, 1986; Robison & Hadiz, 2004). Although
the legitimacy of the New Order state was supported by US Cold War
policy, and much of the bureaucratic structure of the military that formu-
lated New Order security concerns was directly borrowed from the political
thinking at Berkeley (Tanter, 1990a; Robison & Hadiz, 2004: 40), ‘security’
was given a unique political role and formulation under President Suharto.
In the political imagination of the New Order, the state was the true repre-
sentative of ‘the people’ (rakyat), which by nature was apolitical. Security and
order were maintained to the extent that society conformed to the societal
ideals of the state, while disorder was defined as a politics outside of state

control (see Tsing, 1993: 24). ‘Security’ was thus more than anything else a
bureaucratic attempt to calculate the threats and dangers from within civil
society to the state (as the true representative of the people). As a conse-
quence, the state had to maintain constant vigilance (waspadai) on behalf
of the people against the ‘subversive forces’ from ‘certain quarters of
society’ that threatened the safety and order of the state (see Barker, 2001;
Bourchier, 1990). These imagined forces – which were often equated with
crime or communism but remained vaguely defined as ‘certain quarters’
(pihak tertentu) – served an important political function as legitimization for
the maintenance of a rationalist form of ‘political paranoia’ (Bubandt, forth-
coming; Lindsey, 2001).
The rationalist paranoia was institutionalized in a number of ways. The
dual function of the army (dwifungsi), established at independence in 1945
and only partly dismantled in the post-Suharto era (Rinakit, 2004), was one
such way. The dual function stipulated that the army (ABRI) had both a
military role as a defender against foreign enemies and a ‘socio-political’ role
as a protector of society. A truly ‘total social institution’, the mandate of
this socio-political role covered ‘the ideological, political, social, economic,
cultural, and religious fields’ (Army Doctrine from 1965, cited in Crouch,
1978: 25). The army took this socio-political role seriously, and a system of
army officers was set up to mirror the hierarchy of the civilian political
system at all levels of government, right down to the non-commissioned
officer, the babinsa, who was the military complement to the village head but
answered directly to the district commander (koramil). The main role of the
babinsa – as reflected in the last two syllables of the acronym (binsa) – was to
act as a political ‘guide to the village’ (pembina desa). The babinsa was to
ensure the political stability of the village by providing the district com-
mander with lists of ‘any formal or informal social or political or cultural or
economic organisation or grouping’ in the village and by reporting ‘unusual
social conditions’ (Tanter, 1990b: 225). At the same time, he was expected to
encourage people to partake in the development efforts of the government.
In the uniformed body of the babinsa, in other words, security and develop-
ment were united as the main political ideals of the patrimonial state.
This did not mean that New Order security was managed in a homogenous
or predictable way. The surveillance instructions of the babinsa, for instance,
were tailored to the specific security concerns of each region in the country.
In ‘volatile regions’ such as East Timor, the panoptic tasks of the babinsa
were more detailed than in more ‘safe’ regions (Tanter, 1990b: 244). In addi-
tion to this regional heterogeneity, state intentions were constantly under-
mined by the very social forces on which the babinsa was supposed to report.
In the process, the Indonesian security project was imbued with its own kind
of aporia or doubt. The personal integration of the babinsa into local condi-
tions on which he was supposed to provide objective ‘security’ lists meant

that state security interlaced with local concerns. An example will illustrate
this.
In the early 1990s, at the height of New Order rule, I conducted anthro-
pological fieldwork in a coastal fishing village of some 700 people on the
island of Halmahera in North Maluku. In many ways, this village resembled
other marginal villages in the Outer Islands of Indonesia. Villagers spent
most of their time carrying out the fishing and horticultural chores of their
subsistence economy, while local concerns about sorcery and witchcraft cast
an occasional sombre shadow on the normally gay tone of daily life. The
New Order state, however, was present in numerous ways, most of which
were related to the state ‘security’ project of ensuring political stability and
social order. The village had a small school built with funding from a special
presidential grant (inpres); a village leader (kades) was ‘chosen’ every
four years through a careful political selection process; and a variety of com-
munity-development programmes were initiated without ever becoming
truly popular among the villagers. In 1992, a babinsa was stationed in the
village. A man in his forties from a neighbouring ethnic group, the babinsa
began his assigned task of ensuring that people showed up to political
speeches by the district mayor, partook in collective work tasks and traded
in old superstitions for enthusiasm about the developmentalist plans, from
which he also expected to earn hidden kickbacks. The Ambonese wife of the
babinsa became a leading figure in PKK, the family educational programme
that arranged lectures for the women of the village on hygiene, nutrition and
the national moral philosophy of Pancasila. Intended to act as an instrument
of panoptic surveillance and first line of defence against political subversion
from ‘certain quarters’, the babinsa in this particular village, however, became
deeply socialized into village life during the ten years he stayed there. He
divorced his wife when he impregnated a young local girl half his age,
taking up residence briefly with the girl’s parents. The low point in his
efforts to develop the village came one night when the girl, in hysterics over
the persistent and eerie calls of a kokók (a local evil spirit associated with
witchcraft) from a large mango tree in the centre of the village, persuaded
him to try to shoot the evil spirit. He emptied the full magazine of his 9-mm
semi-automatic into the treetop, but the witchcraft did not go away. On the
contrary, it made him seriously ill. In 2001, he let himself be persuaded by
neighbours in the village that witchcraft was to blame for the illness that
killed his adopted teenage son. Frustrated, the babinsa left the village and
today lives in the district capital, where he has been reunited with his first
wife from Ambon.
This all-too-brief account of one particular babinsa provides an instance of
the ways in which state dreams of social order may be undermined by the
vicissitudes of social life.4 As Dove & Kammen (2001) have argued, the
4
See Holston (1989) and Scott (1998) for more detailed elaborations of this point.

difference between official development discourse and the ‘vernacular’ prac-

tices of Indonesian officials explains not only natural resource mismanage-
ment but also the eventual collapse of the New Order. A similar relationship,
I argue, pertains between official security ideology and security practices.
Here, however, it is important not to exaggerate the internal weakness of the
New Order regime, which after all dominated Indonesia for over three
decades. Despite the often limited success of the regime’s ‘street-level
bureaucrats’, the New Order was generally successful in establishing its
doctrine of ‘social order’ as the political ideal. The relative success of this
political ideal was probably due less to the popular resonance of the regime’s
modernist techniques of rational guidance (pembinaan) and supervision.
Rather, the ideological success of the New Order was due more to the fact
that the regime was able to equate its notion of political order with cultural
concerns about being secure (aman or tentram) (Sairin, 1996). The post-
colonial preoccupation with security (keamanan) in Indonesia succeeded in
becoming a dominant political goal not only because of a colonial legacy
that made rational social order an administrative canon: state order also
resonated with cultural ideas about the significance of stability, harmony
(rukun) and safety (Mulder, 1998: 121). The political ideal of keamanan, one
might say, appealed to a spiritual ontology of kerukunan. Often, however, the
spirits of this ontology worked to undermine the political ideal – whether
those spirits grew out of local ideas of witchcraft or were politically manu-
factured.
During the New Order, cultural concerns with safety were politically nur-
tured by the ideological maintenance of fearsome images of social disorder.
Thus, New Order historiography highlighted the alleged attempted coup of
30 September 1965 and the violent purges that followed as the epitome of
‘disorder’, while also asserting that communism remained a constant threat.
The politically maintained fear was that a subversive force from within
society would destroy the harmony of the ‘people-state’ and bring about a
return to a time of ‘mad’ disorder (edan) (Anderson, 1990; Heryanto, 1999;
Mackie & MacIntyre, 1994). ‘Social madness’ (keédanan) was the constantly
reproduced threat to political safety (keamanan); together with the constant
but unintended social undermining of the security project, this constituted
the aporia of the New Order security project. It was this politically
reproduced doubt that undermined the New Order security project at the
same time as it provided a raison d’être for the political management of
security.
The many political changes that followed after the fall of the New Order in
May 1998 and the implementation of the decentralization programme in
2001 included an attenuation of the socio-political role of the army and
its function of policing society and ensuring ‘security’. Despite the fact
that the territorial structure and the position of the babinsa have remained

largely intact,5 two factors – the rise of localism and neotraditionalism on the
one hand, and the enrolment of Indonesia in the global fight against terror-
ism on the other – have meant that the monopoly of the military on main-
taining a ‘safe’ society has been both challenged and reconfigured.
Associated with the new politics of decentralization, these two trends have
opened up for the emergence of local forms of vernacular security that do
not seek to reproduce the Indonesian ‘nation’ but are geared toward the
establishment of ‘local’ imagined communities.
The Transformation of State and Security Imaginaries

After Suharto
Recent changes in the vernacular concept of security in Indonesia occurred

in the wake of financial crisis and political reform, on the one hand, and as a
result of the new global politics of post-9/11, on the other. While the first set
of events has undermined the legitimacy of the state and led to a process of
decentralization, the second has established a platform for the reassertion of
the state vis-à-vis secessionist and Islamicist groups, and thus led to the re-
initialization of a statist process of keeping the nation safe. Both processes,
however, have been full of contradiction. Thus, decentralization has to some
extent opened up for new forms of political imagination that see localism
and tradition, rather than national citizenship, as the basis for legitimate and
safe political rule. But, rather than weakening the nation-state, decentraliza-
tion has instead meant the enculturation of bureaucratic neopatrimonial
politics at the micro level (Ferrazzi, 2000; Törnquist, 2000). The tough stance
against secession and terror has also been a double-edged sword that
President Megawati had to wield carefully during her term in office (2001–
04) in order not to lose her Muslim constituency or be seen as planning the
return of New Order centralism. In post-Suharto Indonesia, the state, as
Crouch (2003: 33) argues, is only weak ‘because it itself is made up of
powerful competing vested interests’.
The bomb explosions on Bali in October 2002 – and especially the bomb at
the Jakarta Marriott hotel in August 2003 – marked a turning point in post-
Suharto security politics. President Megawati, who was a staunch believer in
the unitary state, had for some time attempted to introduce a new terrorism
law that would bring the country into line with the US war on terrorism, but
5
According to a survey in 2000, Indonesians were more critical of the position of the babinsa than of any other
military rank, with 44% of respondents favouring the abolition of the babinsa. Proposals for the revision
of the military structure that have suggested the elimination of the lowest levels of the territorial
command structure have so far been rejected by the army (TNI), since this would severely curtail the
military’s socio-political influence and cut off the army’s access to a share in local and regional revenue
(Mietzner, 2003).

she had met with strong opposition from student reform groups and Muslim
organizations, both of whom feared this was a first step to a return to New
Order authoritarianism. The bombs changed this picture, and within a few
weeks the new law (No. 15/2003) had been passed in the parliament. With
the new law in hand, the Megawati government – suspected abroad of not
doing enough to stem Muslim fundamentalism and accused domestically of
abusing its power – took a new hard line against sectarian violence in
Sulawesi and Maluku, cracked down on political protest in Papua, and
started a military campaign against secessionism in Aceh in May 2003.
The anti-terrorist law was thus not just a response to the new global
project of ensuring security after 9/11. In Indonesia, popular support for the
law was boosted considerably by concerns that the state of Indonesia would
fall apart as a result of regional conflict and secessionist movements. In the
post-Suharto security complex, concerns about a slide into a time of ‘social
madness’ – which had been cultivated during the New Order but became
acute after 1998 in part because of frenzied press reports about the sectarian
conflicts (Spyer, 2002) – therefore continued to provide an Indonesian optic
through which the new global security structures were indigenized.
The discourse of securitization in Indonesia after 2003, which has con-
tinued during the current presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, still
revolves around imaginaries of the state and its ‘social’ enemies. But, the
figure of the ‘social enemy’ has become more problematic and contested.
During New Order rule, the main enemy had been the spectre of commu-
nism, supported by the US Cold War doctrine that Indonesia was the
linchpin in the fight against communism in Southeast Asia. The new global
project of security entailed the substitution of communism with radical
Islam as state enemy number one. In Indonesia, however, which remains a
strategic geopolitical site within US policy (Dibb, 2001; Gershman, 2002), this
entailed a problem.
Although radical Islam had been the target of political oppression in the first
few decades of Suharto’s rule, this had shifted dramatically in the early 1990s,
as Suharto, in a bid to renew his divide-and-rule tactics, had begun supporting
conservative Islamic groups (Hefner, 2000a; Liddle, 1996).6 In addition, politi-
cized Islam had become so engrained in Indonesian society in the previous
20 years that fundamentalist Islam could never obtain the status that com-
munism had enjoyed during New Order rule as an undisputed evil.7 Too
6
This cultivation of conservative Islam was to prove decisive for the spread of sectarian violence after
Suharto’s fall in May 1998 (Hefner, 2000b; 2002).
7
Part of the difficulty in making a national enemy out of radical Islam also lay in the success with which
radical Islamic groups like Laskar Jihad had portrayed themselves as defenders of the nation-state.
Subversion, epitomized by the secessionist movement or rebellious region, had thus remained the same
threat as it had been during the New Order. And because radical Islamic groups in Indonesia were
frequently fiercely nationalist and unitarian, they could successfully employ the ideology and rhetoric of
the unitarian state as a way to legitimize their armed engagements in Maluku, North Maluku and Papua
(see Turner, 2002).

many people in Indonesia, including many moderate Muslims, suspected that

Islam was the victim of a global US-led conspiracy and that the Megawati
government would employ security concerns to enforce a new kind of politi-
cal hegemony. As a result of this prevalent suspicion, security never came to be
the effective political tool of the state that it was during the New Order; and,
despite the new hegemony of the ‘hypermodern state of emergency’ that has
characterized politics after 9/11 (Armitage, 2002), the legitimacy of the state
was thoroughly weakened with the collapse of Suharto.
The collapse of the New Order and the consequent refiguring of vernacu-
lar security in Indonesia were, in other words, complex. On the one hand, the
fall of the New Order was precipitated by an undermining of popular belief
in the legitimacy of the state and its security project. When Suharto stepped
down, he left a power vacuum that made some analysts talk about the
failure of the state in Indonesia in almost Africanist terms (van Klinken,
2001a; Wanandi, 2002). On the other hand, the New Order patrimonial struc-
tures of bureaucratic governance remained in place and were even boosted
by the change from the ‘New Order’ to the ‘Reformation Era’ (era reformasi).
The system of bureaucratic rule did not collapse: it merely reorganized itself
in terms of the new political landscape of decentralization.
Thus, while the New Order emphasis on ‘safety’ went hand in hand with
Cold War concerns about military security, the post-Suharto shift away from
state-secured development towards community autonomy and security
reflects the demise of conventional development thinking and the rise of a
neoliberal global governance in which underdevelopment is itself a source of
danger (Duffield, 2001). As a result, the politics of security slipped beyond
the control of the state, and security became part of a governmentalist
politics that was global, but increasingly also local.
Across Indonesia, a paradoxical group of former bureaucrats with some
sort of ‘traditional legitimacy’ has taken advantage of this new politics by
politically cultivating localism. In North Maluku, this group has been led by
the local sultans. For these ‘traditionalists’, social order is not the result of a
rational calculation of social probabilities, which they see as a reinvention
of New Order centralism, albeit enveloped in the new rhetoric of ‘risk’,
‘democracy’ and ‘security’. Rather, they see the essence of democracy and
order to be contained in the divine sanction of tradition and customary
society. Against the rationalism of New Order security, these neotraditional
bureaucrats are constructing an alternative political imaginary in which
what they see as a truly democratic tradition ensures ‘ontological certainty’.

‘Local’ Tradition as an Alternative to Security:

Traditionalist Bureaucrats
Tradition had been marginalized as an icon of apolitical society during the

New Order (Acciaioli, 1985; Kipp, 1993). After 1998, however, tradition
achieved new political value, as Indonesian politics became suffused with
the discourse of NGOs and multinational organizations like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Crawford & Hermawan, 2002). For
these organizations, the democratization of Indonesia – which aimed at
establishing the basis for a new kind of socio-political security – had to pro-
ceed through decentralization, community participation and the devolution
of power (Ahmad & Mansoor 2002). This also entailed recognition of the
values and structures of local tradition. Ironically, it was New Order bureau-
crats who set about implementing this political reinvention of tradition, and
it soon came to be seen by many people as the cause not only for an increase
in corruption but also for the outbreak of sectarian violence. Instead of one
Suharto, decentralization was accused of giving Indonesia ‘many small
Suhartos’, each eager to maintain his own patrimonial dominion (see Schulte
Nordholt, 2003). Contending for local power in the districts, these low-level
bureaucrats who had been recruited into the administration in the first place
because they held traditional offices in the local communities (such as that of
raja or sultan) now criticized the legitimacy of the state model as a whole,
arguing that only a return to tradition (adat) could save the country from
corruption and conflict. In the place of an illegitimate state, they wanted to
put the traditional community, arguing that the traditional community
(masyarakat adat) was the true representative of civil society (masyarakat
madani). A return to tradition was, in other words, the real answer to the
problem of how to decentralize state power.
I have followed the four sultans of North Maluku, in particular the Sultan
of Ternate, through the devastating conflict in the region between 1999 and
2001 and into the various attempts by the Sultan of Ternate to regain the
political influence he had as the regional representative of the ruling Golkar
Party during the New Order.8 The revival of the Malukan sultanates is part
8
The conflict in North Maluku, which cost over 2,000 people their lives and forced several hundred thou-
sand out of a population of 800,000 into internal displacement, began in late 1999. The conflict was in
many ways a spin-off from the violence in Central Maluku and should be seen in the context of the
general political upheaval and socio-political divisions that grew out of the last few years of New Order
rule (Hefner, 2002). The conflict cannot, however, be reduced to elite politics in Jakarta. Rather than one
conflict with one singular cause, it was a series of clashes across the region that involved a variety of
socio-economic tensions (Bubandt, forthcoming; Duncan, forthcoming; van Klinken, 2001b). These
tensions were exacerbated by a general climate of political paranoia through which old traditional,
religious and ethnic labels took on political valency (Bubandt, 2001; 2004b). Among these, the sultanates
played an important role (Bubandt, 2004a).

of a country-wide trend in Indonesia after 1999 (van Klinken, 2004), and the
case of the Sultan of Ternate may therefore provide an example that, in
general terms if not in detail, indicates one of the directions that the local
politics of ‘security’ have taken in Indonesia after 1999.
Accused by his political foes of misusing ‘tradition’ for his own political
purposes, Mudaffar Syah, the 48th Sultan of Ternate, claims that only the
values and democratic structures of the North Malukan tradition (adat se
atorang), which he studied as part of his undergraduate degree at the
Indonesian University, can restore peace and stability to the country.
Tradition, in this sense, is his answer to the problem of security. In an inter-
view in 2000 he stated:
We still don’t know what our national values are. [The state philosophy of] Pancasila is
unclear and therefore does not perform a function. Therefore it is my principle to
uphold the traditional values of the local region. (Karni & Haryadi, 2000)
These values, which embrace the modern principles of openness, democracy,

power-sharing and transparency, are, according to Mudaffar Syah, best
suited for North Malukan society. These values, so the Sultan claims, have
full local legitimacy – unlike state doctrine, which has proven itself to be
socially divisive – because they are truly indigenous.
Against the charge that local tradition or adat discriminates against immi-
grants (see Acciaioli, 2001), the sultan and his staff claim that Ternatan
political rule has a history of tolerance that goes back to the 13th century and
that has always ensured political participation of outsiders through their
inclusion into the political structure of the sultanate. The sultanate has
legitimacy because it does not uphold a sharp distinction between society
and the state – bringing it in line with much current political thought (on this
new role of ‘civil society’, see Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999).
This new political unity of state and society is contained, so Ternatan
traditionalists claim, in the image of the dada ma dopo, the ritual presentation
of yellow rice. Formed in the shape of the Ternatan mountain Gammalama,
the ritual dish consists of a mound of yellow rice, on which a hard-boiled egg
is perched. In a play on the local political significance of the colours of
yellow and white, it is said that the yellow rice represents the people and the
white egg represents sultanate rule. Just as the yellow rice is white on the
inside, the white of the egg covers the yellow of the yoke. The sultan, so
the ritual offering of dada ma dopo proves, is in the heart of the people, just as
‘the people’ is close to the heart of the sultanate ruler. Divine sanction from
Allah and the ancestral spirits ensures that this remains the case: betrayal by
the people or by the sultan is punished by earthquakes, illness and death.
Thus, by divine sanction the democracy of tradition is upheld. It is the lapse
in beliefs in these values that govern traditional politics that, according to
sultanate staff, explains the legitimacy crisis of the modern state and the

ethno-religious conflicts that threatened the break-up of the nation. Their

rhetoric might be ‘traditionalist’, but they are adamant that traditional values
and political structures function as alternatives to modern participatory
democracy, social justice and peace. ‘Look’, an entrepreneur who simul-
taneous holds a ritual position in the Ternatan sultanate told me, ‘these days,
we are discussing in Indonesia whether to adopt a political system of
liberalism or of social communism, but the basic structures (pola dasar) for a
political system already exist in sultanate tradition (adat se atorang)’.
An elaborate philosophy, on which the Sultan of Ternate has published on
several occasions, supports this simultaneously social, political and cosmo-
logical imaginary (see, for example, Syah, 2001). It is advanced not as an
outdated, backward expression of feudal mysticism, but as a truly modern
form of governance – the realization of everything NGO discourse preaches.
For the initiated, there is thus a hidden divine form of intervention behind
the shift from New Order centralism to decentralization that has allowed
tradition to be recognized as the most fitting form of government for
Indonesia today. ‘The time for tradition has come’, as one man said,
suggesting that decentralization and the revival of tradition has been pre-
destined: after a time of socio-political upheaval, it is tradition, not the state,
that will provide political and cosmological stability in the future.
Drawing on the rhetoric of the new global forms of governance, but also
heavily inspired by Islamic Sufism, traditionalists in Ternate are proposing a
spiritual governmentality as a political alternative to New Order notions of
security. Although its rhetoric is heavily inspired by the language of global
governance and it claims to always have endorsed the values of democracy,
freedom and tolerance that global discourse has only recently begun to
espouse, tradition, by allegedly promoting the ‘safe, local community’, is
also a vernacular alternative to global human security.
What is interesting about this ‘spiritually sanctioned security’ is that its
proponents are not restricted to the villages of north Ternate. Its supporters
also include many one-time New Order bureaucrats with seats in the
local parliament; men who might be suspected of bad faith in their use of
traditional rhetoric, but who appear to be acting and speaking in good faith
and with complete conviction in the views they express. And they are not
alone. The return to political prominence of the traditional elite can be
observed throughout Indonesia (Bubandt, 2004a; Dwipayana, 2004; Schulte
Nordholt, 2003). Entailed by this neotraditionalism is an approach to
decentralization that claims to contain an alternative conception of security,
order and the state.

Conclusion: Security and the Imagined ‘Safe’

Community
This article has proposed a bottom-up, actor-oriented and comparative

analysis of the political creation of security. Security is conceptualized and
politically practised differently in different places and at different times.
These differences in thinking about and practising security are related, I have
suggested, to different historically sedimented ontologies of uncertainty.
While I thereby agree with Anthony Giddens’s idea that uncertainty is
always ontologically based and politically inflected, I suggest that the notion
of fear and uncertainty in the paradigm of ‘reflexive modernity’ remains too
Eurocentric. When Beck (2002: 46) asserts that ‘in an age where trust
and faith in God, class, nation, and progress have largely disappeared,
humanity’s common fear has proven the last – ambivalent – resource for
making new bonds’, he is therefore both right and wrong. Beck is right that
contemporary fears are associated with the creation and maintenance of
social bonds and, I suggest, with the creation of imagined, safe communities
at particular scales through speech acts that establish ‘security’ as a political
concern. He is wrong, however, to argue that humanity’s fears are somehow
common or becoming increasingly alike. Instead, I have suggested that a
comparative analysis of the ontological grounding and political management
of socially specific fears and uncertainties, as well as concerns about order
and stability, will provide a perspective on different ways of imagining and
institutionally maintaining political communities. Imagining community is
always, I suggest, an exercise in scale-making. As a result of global flows and
interaction, communities exist at particular, politically self-evident scales. I
have proposed to call the specific configuration of fears and notions of order
that go into the creation of imagined communities at a particular scale
‘vernacular security’. In this sense, vernacular security is the result of socially
specific speech acts that seek to establish imagined communities at the
‘global’, ‘national’ or ‘local’ level.
By treating security as a matter of shifting political imaginaries and prac-
tices, I have sought to demonstrate how security, far from being a stable or
universally homogenous concept, is contextually and historically linked to
shifting ontologies of uncertainty.9 These ontologies exist beyond the con-
ventional distinction between a Western, global and modern version of secu-
rity and society, on the one hand, and a radical, Muslim and traditionalist
9
In the process, I have ignored a wide variety of interesting areas where analytical aspects of security are
also at stake. I am thinking in particular of the ‘privatization’ of crime prevention through the rise of
security providers, such as traditional guards and security groups (satgas), as well as criminal militias,
formerly controlled by the military (Barker, 2001; Lindsey, 2001). The imaginaries and practices related to
the private provision of security are, however, part of the general trend I have discussed here.

worldview on the other. The article instead traces three varieties of vernacu-
lar security at the local, national and global level, arguing that they each con-
tain their own contradictions, but also that they – far from being isolated cul-
tural constructions – constantly interact with and affect each other.
The apparently homogeneous character of the global risk society and the
seemingly universal way of conceptualizing fear and politically managing
‘security’ associated with it break down into a more complex pattern upon
closer inspection. As this article has tried to show, the ‘onto-politics’ of
security have global, national and local refractions, the interplay between
which deserves detailed analysis.
* Nils Bubandt is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of

Aarhus, and has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia since 1991. Recent publications
include: ‘On the Genealogy of Sasi: The Transformations of an Imagined Tradition in
Eastern Indonesia’, in Ton Otto & Poul Pedersen, eds, Tradition and Agency: Tracing
Cultural Continuity and Invention (Aarhus University Press, 2005); ‘Genesis in Buli:
Christianity, Blood and Vernacular Modernity on an Indonesian Island’, Ethnology 43(3):
249–270; and ‘Violence and Millenarian Modernity in Eastern Indonesia’, in Holger
Jebens, ed., Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). Nils
Bubandt can be contacted at bubandt@hum.au.dk.
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Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling

Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds

Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a

Keywords Globalization • political imagination • security •

© 2005 PRIO, www.prio.no

In Indonesia, the New Order regime (1967–98) turned a political obsession

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modernities were essentially different, and therefore by implication incom-

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to a politics of certainty. In late modernity, this politics is associated with the

Creating ‘the Global’ as a Security Concern

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Security is simultaneously a political means and a political ideal: both a

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security as a global political technology through an interesting use of Jacques

From this perspective, an ‘ontology of insecurity’ is constantly being evoked

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The History of the ‘Safe Nation’ in Indonesia

Security is not a new concept in Indonesia. Rather, its genealogy can be

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difference between official development discourse and the ‘vernacular’ prac-

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The Transformation of State and Security Imaginaries

Recent changes in the vernacular concept of security in Indonesia occurred

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many people in Indonesia, including many moderate Muslims, suspected that

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‘Local’ Tradition as an Alternative to Security:

Tradition had been marginalized as an icon of apolitical society during the

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These values, which embrace the modern principles of openness, democracy,

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ethno-religious conflicts that threatened the break-up of the nation. Their

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Conclusion: Security and the Imagined ‘Safe’

This article has proposed a bottom-up, actor-oriented and comparative

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* Nils Bubandt is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of

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Beck, Ulrich, 1998. Democracy Without Enemies. Cambridge: Polity.

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Knauft, Bruce, ed., 2002. Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies.

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