ARI Working Paper Series

As a site of tremendous social, political and economic transformation over the past decade, Indonesia’s northwestern-most province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra has attracted considerable attention. Aceh has been the scene of one of the most catastrophic natural disasters and large-scale reconstruction efforts in human history following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and undersea earthquake. It has also been the site of one of Asia’s most protracted armed separatist conflicts, as well as a uniquely successful case study on the global map of conflict resolution. Since 2005, when an internationally mediated peace process in Helsinki led to resolution of the Aceh conflict, the province has become the subject of Indonesia’s biggest experiment with democratic decentralization via the conferral in 2006 of ‘self-government’ to Aceh within Indonesia. In conducting research about Aceh, many scholars use the provincial capital of Banda Aceh as a base, not least because of the city’s historical and contemporary relevance as a centre of important events and moments of transformation. Yet to date, little attention has been paid to Banda Aceh itself as the primary unit of analysis. Scholars and policy-makers alike have tended to take Aceh in its entirety as their sub-national subject of study.In this paper we provide a Banda Aceh-centered analysis of transformations within and about Aceh since 1998. This is done by tracing the changing position of the city, provincially, nationally and internationally, as well as internally in its relations with other (mostly rural) parts of Aceh. The focus is on the role that Banda Aceh has played- and continues to play- in the political, economic and social remaking of Aceh. The central conclusion of the analysis is that by re-centering our lens of inquiry onto the provincial capital of Banda Aceh we can gain new insights into a period of tremendous flux and instability in Aceh, not only in terms of the province’s often strained interactions with ‘outsiders’, but also in the largely overlooked urban-rural cleavages and interrelations between the Acehnese themselves.