Violent conflicts become reoccurance phenomenon in the post colonial history of Indonesia. However, the pattern of the conflicts are different in different periods and different regime of power and so do the approaches to take measure coping with it. Both state and non-state agencies initiated peace making activities to bring the conflicted groups into peace process. The most common  model to reduce the violence so far use the security approach in which the government made chase fire and sponsored peace accord between the conflicted parties. As to follow up the program, they deployed military and state apparatuses to facilitate soio economic recovery for the communities affected by the conflict. To some extent, ethnic and religious leaders, social workers, academician and NGO activists also developed peace and initiated reconciliation in different level of societies. Since there were sometimes no coordination among the peace initiators, their works seem overlap one to another.  This paper describes the violent conflicts and efforts to develop peaceand reconciliation in Indonesia in order to seach for anthropological perspective on conflict resolution.This paper is divided in three sections before it comes up to conclusion. First is to review the violent conflicts in the post colonial history of Indonesia with the special attention to ethno-religious violence and its peace process. Secondly I examine peace making activities in some area of Indonesia. I will highlightthe peace efforts initiated by both state and non state actors. Then I will take into account the common problems arising from the previous approach of peace making and search for appropriate model to prevent the humanitarian tragedy reoccuring in the future.

Keywords: violent conflicts, peace making, reconciliation, anthropology of peace