In “Humanitarian Encounters in Post-Conflict Aceh, Indonesia,” I examine the humanitarian involvement in Aceh, Indonesia following two momentous events in Aceh’s history: the earthquake and tsunami on 26 December 2004 and the signing of the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that brought a tentative, peaceful settlement to the Free Aceh Movement’s (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) separatist insurgency against Indonesia on 15 August 2005. My research focuses on the international humanitarian engagement with Aceh’s peace process but frequently acknowledges the much larger and simultaneous tsunami recovery efforts along Aceh’s coasts that preceded and often overshadowed conflict recovery. Using ethnographic data based on five years working with four different international humanitarian organizations concerned with post-conflict recovery in Aceh, I address two main topics in my dissertation. The first is an insider’s perspective on the anthropology of humanitarianism. From one chapter to the next, I recreate and situate a particular humanitarian world’s relation to local structures of power and suffering that expands upon and complicates some of the prevailing debates in the anthropological literature on humanitarianism. From the unique vantage point within various humanitarian organizations, stories of Aceh’s post-conflict recovery filter through with selective and idiosyncratic ethnographic clarity. The accumulation of these stories reveals, by way of mosaic example, a logic of humanitarian intervention. The second topic I address in my dissertation is the story of Aceh’s peace process within the larger context of Indonesia’s post-New Order transition to democracy. I situate my data within a rapidly growing literature of insightful histories and critiques of Aceh’s conflict and subsequent transformations since the tsunami and the formal end of hostilities between GAM and Indonesian security forces. My focus on the ethnographic details in each chapter is set against some of the broadly taken-for-granted histories that have come to define Aceh’s recent successes and failures in its transition to peace. / Anthropology

Superficial information of the civil wars in Aceh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka creates the idea that both conflicts were in similar situations when they were hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. It thus seems surprising that in the wake of the tsunami, the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia signed a peace agreement, while the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Government of Sri Lanka returned to war. This thesis aims to explore what factors related to the tsunami contributed to this difference and whether rational choice theory can serve as an explanation for this difference. In order to find out, I conducted a qualitative comparative case study though the analysis of secondary documents. The results suggest that the factors that contributed to the difference can be divided into four broad themes: (1) the timing of the tsunami and thus the pre-disaster context; (2) the geographical situation and with that, the military impact; (3) the types of guerilla groups, including their abilities to rule, their access to financial capital and their strategic; (4) the role of the international community, which can be further divided into firstly, the geopolitical relevance of these countries, and secondly, internationalization, community engagement and separating the tsunami and conflict. I believe that rational choice theory explains the difference in outcome between the two conflicts very well. This theory assumes that people, given the circumstances, and in view of all the possible options, will act in line with the option that is expected to satisfy them most and minimize their losses. Applying this theory to the case studies of Aceh and Sri Lanka following the tsunami, it was appealing for the Free Aceh Movement to settle, but this was not the case for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As a result, the former chose to sign a peace agreement with the Government of Indonesia, whereas the latter chose to continue its fight against the Government of Sri Lanka.