Beyond the Pesantren: Reconfiguring Islamic Authority and Grassroots Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Aceh

Abstract

Two decades after the 2005 Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding, scholarship on peace in Aceh remains divided between elite-centred accounts of political settlement and normative accounts of ulama as moral guardians, leaving unexplained how religious authority actually operates in the everyday maintenance of peace. This article asks how dayah-based authority has been extended beyond the dayah after the conflict, through what mechanisms it sustains grassroots peace, and what limits the resulting peace carries. It employs a critical interpretive synthesis of sixteen peer-reviewed empirical studies on dayah, ulama, and religious authority in Aceh published between 2011 and 2025, read against contextual studies of the peace process and theoretical work on religious authority and everyday peace. The synthesis yields three findings. First, dayah authority has been dispersed into four sites beyond the institution: associational networks, village-level problem-solving, state-linked arenas, and the careers of dayah graduates and women leaders. Second, this dispersed authority sustains everyday peace through three mechanisms: converting religious bonds into collective action, arbitrating social problems, and conditionally mediating state programmes. Third, the same mechanisms produce what the article terms bounded peace, cohesive within the community that recognises dayah authority but exclusionary towards rival Muslim currents and religious minorities. Bounded peace is proposed as a synthetic construct explaining why religious authority appears at once as a peacebuilding resource and a source of intolerance. The article contributes to Islamic Studies by reframing religious peacebuilding as a reconfiguration of authority rather than a repertoire of peace activities.