A.C.A.B.: Studying up the rule of law in Banda Aceh, Indonesia

This article examines the case of the arrest of several punks in Banda Aceh in November 2013, known as the ‘Rex incident’, and the criminal proceedings that followed it. It is a textual continuation of an urban ethnography conducted in the city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, between 2012 and 2016, conducted in the aftermath of major punk and metal concert arrests and re-education in December 2011 that led to high-profile international punk solidarity campaigns and media attention. The article draws attention to more mundane experiences of structural and physical violence and the obstacles, resourcefulness and ways of coping after the height of the global punk solidarity campaign of 2012 had passed. Drawing attention to silences in global solidarity efforts and the local media when the ‘Shari’a morality vs the right to be punk’ issue is not in focus, the article challenges such binaries, arguing that they hinder understanding of the everyday experience of punk, and overlook the wider misuse of state power, violations of rule of law, and the violent political economy in the post-conflict context of Aceh. Thus, it is argued that the punks in Aceh are constantly studying the hierarchies and relations of power through their embodied and gendered existence in the city. Attention to their everyday experience draws attention to their active negotiation of space and agency within such hierarchies.