Negotiating Cultural Differences After Conflict: Intercultural Communication and Social Cohesion in Post-Conflict Maluku, Indonesia
Abstract
This study examines how intercultural communication shapes the reconstruction of social cohesion in post-conflict Maluku, Indonesia, where religious and cultural differences remain entangled with memories of communal violence. It approaches social cohesion not as the disappearance of difference or the achievement of interpersonal tolerance, but as a relational process through which communities continuously negotiate identity, trust, belonging, and the meanings attached to difference. Drawing on a qualitative multi-site case study, the research combines in-depth interviews, participant observation, and analysis of everyday intercultural communication practices among selected Muslim and Christian communities. Particular attention is given to communicative episodes in which conflict memories, cultural identities, and locally embedded practices are invoked, contested, accommodated, or reinterpreted. The study conceptualizes these interactions as processes of cultural negotiation through which historically divided communities learn to communicate across boundaries without necessarily dissolving them. Its central contribution is to reposition post-conflict intercultural communication from the management of cultural diversity toward the relational negotiation of difference. This perspective connects intercultural communication with peacebuilding and social cohesion scholarship while foregrounding the everyday communicative processes through which trust and shared belonging may be reconstructed. The Maluku case further illustrates how culturally embedded practices can provide relational resources for sustaining social cohesion beyond formal reconciliation initiatives.
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