A Perfect Tsunami? El Nino, War and Resilience on Aceh, Sumatra

The history of Aceh, Indonesia highlights societies’ resilience and vulnerability in the face of natural and human-made disasters. A multi-scalar, qualitative and quantitative analysis of land use changes in nineteenth century Greater Aceh by using GIS analysis, highlights that processes may play out differently at the system and subsystem levels. At the system’s meso and micro levels, the episodic and the structural violence of war, climate anomalies, and tsunamis wiped out entire communities and families of people, animals, and plants while at the macro scale Aceh society showed remarkable resilience. Greater Aceh’s case also suggests that the impact of war through population displacement and the destruction of such environmental infrastructure as homes, villages, orchards, and irrigated fields while less immediately and directly destructive than such episodic events as the devastating 2004 tsunami, nevertheless may have a comparable impact because the events are more sustained and cumulative over a timeframe of years and decades.