RISING TIDE OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE INCIDENTS: INSIGHTS FROM THE JANUARY-JUNE 2023 DATA OF TH E CVEW DATASET

Since the end of the New Order regime, the trends of collective violence in Indonesia have been shifting into a more complex trajectory within the society. Most notably, the proliferation of small- scale group violence has become a prevalent and concerning phenomenon in Indonesia. Localized conflict, characterized by its multifaceted causes, has emerged as a consequence of a multitude of factors,  including  unemployment,  inequality,  change  in  sources  of  income,  clustering  of  ethnic groups,  and  religious  issues.1 This  has  caused  small-scale,  collective violence  to  happen on  a widespread scale –– all  of which  could  potentially  escalate  into  mass  atrocity  crimes. The Collective  Violence  Early  Warning  (CVEW)  was  developed  by  the  Centre  for  Strategic  and International Studies (CSIS) Indonesia to monitor this trends of collective violence in Indonesia. To accurately capture this trend, the CVEW Dataset was built using 73 verified provincial-level news sources from 34 provinces.5
This research report presents an updated account of collective violence incident patterns between January  and  June  2023.  This  report  analyzes the  general  trends  of  these  incidents  through a thorough examination of its frequency, lethality, geographic concentration, underlying causes, and interventions taken. Additionally, the report also provided three specific analyses, namely on the collective violence incidents in Papua, conflicts between foreign and local workers in Morowali, and the escalating social tensions in Maluku.