The Threat of Small Things: Patterns of Repression and Mobilization against Micro-sized Groups in Indonesia

Why do very small groups become targets of mobilization and repression? Given their economic and political insignificance, most theories of ethnic and religious conflict expect groups that are less than 1 percent of the population—what I call micro-sized groups—to be ignored. Yet, micro-sized groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eastern Europe and the Baha’i in Iran have been targets of high levels of state repression and collective mobilization. I argue that the threat of micro-sized groups is linked to fears about group boundaries in flux. When micro-sized groups challenge the institutions, routines, and practices that form the foundations of group belonging through the marking of public space (“visible constitutive threat”), it is seen as a danger to the larger group’s continued existence. Micro-sized groups thus become seen as a perceived threat to the larger ethnic, religious, or national group when: 1) they present a visible constitutive threat; and 2) political entrepreneurs are incentivized to amplify these visible constitutive threats for their own interests. Using archival data, a geo-coded events dataset, and over 135 interviews collected over 17 months of fieldwork, I develop my argument through a study of the Ahmadiyah sect in Indonesia. I show that Ahmadis were a constitutive threat to Muslims in Indonesia because their practices challenged those that allowed a diverse people to belong to a single category. However, Ahmadis were only seen as threatening when these constitutive challenges were publicly visible. When electoral reforms increased the relevance of local clientelist networks, political entrepreneurs were incentivized to exploit and amplify the Ahmadiyah threat. Rates of anti-Ahmadiyah activity consequently multiplied. By identifying why and how micro-sized groups come to be seen as threats, my work challenges longstanding assumptions about the necessary material dimensions of threat. It instead suggests that threat construction and perception is not just driven by concerns around access to resources, but is shaped by a group’s public visibility. Broadly, understanding how visible constitutive threats operate can shed light on political phenomena that appear to be costly, inefficient, and irrational. Finally, my work speaks to the burgeoning literature linking clientelism to conflict.

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