Violent conflict, which has significantly marked Indonesia’s democratic transition since late 1990s, may threaten the development of viable democracy. The key research objective, as well as the moral appeal of this thesis is to discover what developments may mitigate the tendency for various types of conflict and violence to emerge in contemporary Indonesia, and make the country’s transition to democracy safe for its constituents. This thesis is the first coherent study of social conflict in Indonesia that empirically evaluates the grievance, greed and social contract theories of conflict. It provides a historical overview of conflict and development since Indonesia’s independence and simultaneously undertakes empirical analyses of four types of conflict – separatist, ethnic, routine-everyday and electoral – in contemporary Indonesia. It also extensively surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the economics of conflict to locate the present research within a broader context. The thesis utilizes a variety of research methodologies in its data collection and empirical exercises. The data section of this study has specifically constructed an electoral hostility index across 282 of Indonesian districts, based on a database on electoral conflict compiled mainly from newspaper reports. The empirical sections employ several different regression techniques, including Poisson, Negative Binomial, Logistic, Ordered Logistic, Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Two-Stage Least Square (2SLS).