A Stranger in One’s Own Home: Surveillance, Space, Place, and Emotion during the GAM Conflict in Aceh

“A Stranger in One’s Own Home” examines some of the implications of the surveillance strategy known as sweeping, which was a common form of spying and infiltration used against civilians by government security forces during the conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Government of lndonesia (1976–2005). Drawing from anthropological research on surveillance and terror, the article illustrates how sweeping worked to militarize social space on both the macro and the micro levels, and goes on to explore the affective climate that characterized these militarized social spaces. Although this form of surveillance was clearly a terror strategy, it did not result in a climate of constant terror, but generated a wide variety of emotional responses to conflict that varied across space and fluctuated with shifts in the dynamics of the conflict. As such, this article illustrates that while constant surveillance had profound and destabilizing effects on Acehnese society, that terror did not always work to break down social worlds. Moreover, it inadvertently brought worldviews clearly into focus and became the basis for everyday resilience.