Rightless Resistance: Palm Oil and the Struggle for Land and Citizenship in Indonesia
- Ward Berenschot (University of Amsterdam), Adriaan Bedner (Chair/Discussant)
- Date
- Wednesday 3 July 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- C0.20
This lecture presents the findings of a collaborative research project that studied the trajectories and outcomes of 150 conflicts between palm oil companies and rural Indonesians in Central Kalimantan, West Kalimantan, Riau, and West Sumatra. As palm oil companies expand their plantations, rural Indonesians are losing their land and their livelihoods, often with very limited compensation. The resulting conflicts involve tense, long-running standoffs, involving violence, arrests, and occasionally deaths.
Using these palm oil conflicts as a prism to explore the relationship between the Indonesian state and its citizens, I will argue that the relative rightlessness facing rural Indonesians generates a particularly accommodative and ‘rightless’ form of collective action that avoids invoking, and engaging with, legal provisions or rights and instead relies on informal connections, bargaining power, and mediation. The tragedy of postcolonial citizenship is that weak guarantees of citizen rights are self-reproducing: a concerted resistance to rightlessness is largely absent, not so much because of repression, a lack of skills, or stark power imbalances, but rather because the experience of rightlessness is discouraging citizens from envisioning and enacting their struggles in terms of rights, laws, and regulations. I will illustrate these arguments with clips from a documentary I made together with Watchdoc on this topic, entitled ‘Colonial Debris’.
Bio
Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at KITLV. Studying politics in India and Indonesia, his research focuses on the role of money and informality in election campaigns, while a second field of research concerns the character of civil society and citizenship in these countries. He has also been involved in efforts to promote legal aid in Indonesia, particularly in relation to land conflicts sparked by palm oil expansion.