Papers

• Dispossessing Land While Owning It: Palm Oil Smallholders and Indonesia’s Agrarian Roots of Neoliberalism Perdana Roswaldy Northwestern University

  With the neoliberal push for a smaller state and further land privatization, how should one explain postcolonial states’ strong grip on land governance? Scholars of Indonesia have shown many means of neoliberalization in the country, mostly by focusing on monetary restructuring in manufacture, notably to overcome the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. As such, neoliberalism requires a major financial crisis to significantly change state-led development projects. I examine Indonesia’s neoliberalism through the sociolegal history and invention of palm oil smallholders. I stress the relationship between agrarian reform and neoliberalism in formerly developmental nations by focusing on smallholders as a unique agrarian class that is crucial for land transfer, rural indebtedness, and monetary restructuring desired by global financiers. Juxtaposing archives and spatial analysis, I argue that Indonesia creates smallholders through land redistribution to sustain its land monopoly while supporting global capitalist interest in land rush. Restructuring legal systems for popular land distribution programs and forming a distinctive labor-farming class embodied in smallholders thus may aid neoliberal political economic projects in many agrarian-led developmental states such as Indonesia.

• Political Life under Corporate Occupation Tania Li University of Toronto

  Concessions issued to oil palm plantation corporations now blanket 22 million hectares, a third of Indonesia’s farmland. Still more land is leased to corporations for other plantation crops and mines. Massive corporate presence in rural areas reconfigures politics in three ways: first, it segments space and consigns social groups to radically different life trajectories; second, it rearranges the relationship between citizens and members of the state apparatus (government officials at all levels, politicians) who are officially tasked with smoothing the path of the corporations; third, it limits possibilities for collective action, since people negatively affected by corporate presence have no means to remove the occupying power. Since corporate concessions are renewable, and Indonesia has no history of restoring concession land to the former landholders after the concession expires, these transformations are not just massive, they are permanent. Drawing on ethnographic research in West Kalimantan’s oil palm zone, the paper examines the political configuration of corporate occupation and its implication for livelihoods and citizenship today and in future.

Abstract