A BRIDGE WHERE FAITHS MEET; Managing Conflict and Preventing Violence in the Inclusive Vision of Nasaruddin Umar

A BRIDGE WHERE FAITHS MEET

Managing Conflict and Preventing Violence in the Inclusive Vision of Nasaruddin Umar

Rahmat Taufik Sipahutar

Jakarta, Media NTB - From 17 to 27 August 2026, Phoebe Milliken, Director of the MA in International Peacebuilding at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, traveled to Indonesia as a guest of the Ministry of Religious Affairs for a series of peacebuilding seminars. She came carrying one simple idea that quietly changes the whole way we think about peace: conflict and violence are not two names for the same thing. "Violence is always wrong," she said, "but conflict is part of the human condition." This essay begins from that sentence.

For if we confuse the two, we will also get the task of the state wrong. If what we fear is difference itself, we will be tempted to suppress it, to flatten it, to silence it. But if what we prevent is difference escalating into violence, then difference is allowed to live, and can even be healthy.

The distinction Milliken brings stands on the shoulders of those who came before her, and that is where its strength lies. To define conflict, Milliken borrows from David Anderson Hooker, a peace scholar who calls conflict "two or more ideas or intentions sharing the same space." Hooker's definition matters because it strips the word "conflict" of its negative charge: two ideas sharing space may feel uncomfortable, but discomfort is not wrongdoing. It is a natural product of diversity.

The deeper root reaches back to Johan Galtung (1930 to 2024), the Norwegian sociologist widely regarded as the founding father of peace and conflict studies. Galtung gives us two tools we cannot do without. First, the difference between negative peace, merely the absence of open violence, and positive peace, the presence of justice and the absence of oppression built into the structure itself. Second, the three faces of violence: direct violence, visible and with a clear doer; structural violence, which has no single doer yet systematically denies some people their rights; and cultural violence, when elements of culture or religion are used to justify the first two. Through Galtung's frame, we understand that preventing violence is not only about stopping the blow, but also about dismantling the denial of rights hidden inside the rules.

Milliken voices it, Hooker defines it, Galtung provides the foundation. Together the three give us a lens for reading Indonesia.

The Indonesian Landscape

Monitoring data offers a picture we can read. The SETARA Institute's 2024 report recorded 260 incidents involving 402 acts of violations of freedom of religion and belief, a rise from the year before. The spread is uneven: West Java again sits at the top, followed by East Java, Jakarta, North Sumatra, and Banten. What is worth pausing on is that the provinces appearing most often on this list are the densest and most urban regions in the country.

From that pattern, I read a tendency: religious friction seems to harden precisely in the most modern and most bureaucratic spaces. This is a reading, not a ready-made figure, for the official data sorts violations by province and by actor, not by city and village. Still, the tendency invites a question: why are cities so often more vulnerable?

Part of the answer may lie in the anonymity of the city, in social ties that are formal and thin, without deep person-to-person buffers, so that differences of opinion are easily politicized. But we should be careful not to oversimplify. What matters more may not be anonymity alone, but the permit regime for houses of worship, the local majority to minority ratio, and local political mobilization. The city provides the stage; what raises the tension is often the rules and the numbers.

Custom as Wisdom

Here is where the customary communities of the archipelago hold a lesson. In many of them, theological differences clearly exist, and conflict is present, yet there are organic mechanisms that keep it from rotting into violence.

Among the Batak, the philosophy of Dalihan Na Tolu and the line of the clan (marga) come before the divide of religion. Differences of belief among siblings of the same clan are accepted as a natural variety of thought, while the bond of blood keeps them from turning into enmity. Tolerance is practiced without awkwardness, through providing halal dishes (parsubang) at customary ceremonies, so that no one is left out of the shared table. Similar dynamics live on in the Pela Gandong tradition of Maluku, the Tongkonan ancestral houses of Toraja, and the Menyama Braya philosophy of Bali. Sociologists call this phenomenon cross-cutting cleavages: a shared belonging, whether ethnicity or kinship, that cuts across the divide of religion, so that a quarrel never hardens into war, because one does not go to war against one's own blood.

In Galtung's terms, custom does not merely hold back direct violence; it often grows a positive peace, because it tends to mutual recognition, not just a ceasefire. Yet we must praise custom without being naïve. The tragedy of Maluku in 1999 to 2002 reminds us that even Pela Gandong could be overwhelmed when political and religious mobilization from outside outran the reach of local bonds. What is remarkable is what happened afterward: Pela Gandong was revived as a path to reconciliation, mending what had been torn. So custom is not an impenetrable fortress, but a supple wisdom, and it is precisely in that suppleness that its honor lies.

Building Bridges, Not Walls

This organic harmony runs in the same direction as the path taken by the Ministry of Religious Affairs under Minister Nasaruddin Umar, a scholar known for his inclusive approach. He understands that living together asks us to build more "bridges" than "walls." Walls are raised out of fear of difference, and they try to silence conflict until it explodes into violence. A bridge acknowledges that there are two different shores, and then allows a continuous, peaceful meeting between them.

The Ministry's central mandate today is to shift the national paradigm: not to erase difference or pretend conflict does not exist, but to build fair legal, policy, and cultural channels so that difference does not turn into violence. By institutionalizing this inclusive vision and drawing from indigenous wisdom, Indonesia shows that diversity can be crossed in peace.

The Question We Leave Behind

But here we arrive at a tension worth pondering, one I will deliberately leave unresolved. The customary mechanisms we praise work precisely because they are informal, rooted in blood and village, and not the state. Their strength is born of intimacy. The state, meanwhile, including the Ministry of Religious Affairs, is a formal, bureaucratic institution, and in a certain sense anonymous.

Custom protects the brother; the state protects the stranger. Both are forms of recognition. Only their radius differs, and the radius of the state is far wider. Dalihan Na Tolu, Pela Gandong, and Menyama Braya reach as far as the bonds of blood and village can reach. The state is asked to reach farther: to protect the rights of those who are no one's kin, to whom no one is bound by clan or ancestor.

The question we leave behind is not how the state might imitate custom. The question is this: can the state widen that radius of recognition until it embraces the stranger, protecting a person's rights precisely because they are human, and not because they first became a brother? (MA)