Official spaces for peacebuilding, reconciliation and coming to terms with the past are still very limited in Indonesia, giving the matter of creative peacebuilding and resistance enormous urgency. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, authors in this special issue look at the creative ways in which the Indonesian grassroots deal with continuing and new crises, including resource exploitation and the neglect of indigenous rights, communal violence and the exclusionary character of the revival of tradition, and increasing radicalisation and changing security landscapes. This article introduces some key concepts, including peacebuilding and creativity, moral imagination and transformative justice, and the main pillars of creative peacebuilding discussed in this special issue, namely culture and tradition, arts and media, and deradicalisation.