Education, Democracy and the Legacy of Conflict: Prospects and Challenges of History and Civic Education in Indonesia

Countries coming out of conflict are often characterized by deep ethnic and/or religious divisions. While in recent years, an increasing amount of research has focused on the role of education in contributing to overcoming these societal divisions, the question of whether, when and how to deal with a country’s legacies and histories of conflict within the educational system remains poorly understood and researched. In order to address this important academic and policy void, the current project aims to investigate and analyse how Indonesia is dealing with the legacies of past conflicts and violence in its educational system, and to what extent the educational system is being used to foster civic and/or democratic attitudes among young people. Indonesia is an academically intri- guing and potentially illuminating country to conduct this type of research, because it has been confronted with a range of violent local conflicts in its recent history, which allows for an in-country comparative analysis that holds the overall educational system constant, while providing important contextual variation at the local level.