Changing Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia: From Revival to Projects (original) (raw)
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The Trajectory of Indigeneity Politics Against Land Dispossession in Indonesia
Sriwijaya Law Review
Under the New Order authoritarian regime, the state endorsed terra-nullification of the customary territories had been the basis for the stipulation of state forest (hutan negara).After the fall of the General Suharto led regime in 1998 generated a new phase for the struggles of the customary groups in different parts of the archipelago. This article examines the rise of indigeneity and counter-hegemonic indigenous legal maneuvering spearheaded by Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) against ongoing land dispossession in Indonesia since the fall of New Order authoritarian regime which includes the indigenous mobilizations (strategy, organization and tactics) in the post-authoritarian country, including the avenue of new types of legal activism when it comes to the creative destruction of global capitalism today. It focuses on two modes of policy advocacy and campaign against land dispossession: (a) the production of the Constitutional Court Ruling No. 35/PUU-X/2012, a new legal ...
Indigeneity and the State in Indonesia: The Local Turn in the Dialectic of Recognition
Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 2020
When the indigenous peoples' movement emerged in the 1990s and grew stronger in the wake of reformasi, people formally termed "backward" and "primitive" suddenly emerged as political actors. This article traces the relationship between the state and the idea of the original, sometimes referred to as the autochthonous, sometimes as the indigenous, in Indonesian history and analyses how these relationships are reflected in legislation on land issues, the major concern of recent indigenous movements. In a second step, the article deals with current political strategies of the indigenous movement (AMAN), concluding that the movement is shifting its efforts from the "centre" (national legislation), to the provinces and the margins, a process we term the "local turn" in the indigenous people's movement in Indonesia. By drawing on the example of Enrekang, South Sulawesi, the contribution shows how peraturan dearah (local regulations) provide a basis for recognition within the margins of the Indonesian nation state.
Indigenous rights vs agrarian reform in Indonesia: a case study from Jambi
2014
Indigenous rights and agrarian reform may be on a collision course in Indonesia, adding to the complexity of resolving land conflicts there. Overview: A longstanding land conflict in Jambi province, Sumatra, highlights the tension between two strands of civil society: the movement to protect indigenous rights and the movement for agrarian reform. As the former succeeds in drawing attention to customary (adat) land unfairly taken in the past for corporate concessions, the latter sees the same land in terms of its potential for redistribution to the poor far beyond just the indigenous claimants. The goals of both movements are legitimate: customary groups deserve restitution for past injustices, including return of land wrongfully taken, while access to land could significantly improve the lives of the 14.4 per cent of rural Indonesians living below the poverty line. The problem is that using adat land as the vehicle for agrarian reform may be planting the seeds of future conflict bet...
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2019
A main assumption of indigeneity NGOs in Indonesia is that state recognition will strengthen indigenous peoples' rights to their land and forests against ongoing or future dispossession. In Indonesia, legal recognition has become central to the approaches of indigeneity NGO campaigns, while the local realities and problems among indigenous communities seem to receive less attention. Has legal recognition of indigenous communities turned into a national NGO project that does not solve the communities' land and forest-related problems? In this article, we compare two locations where communities have succeeded in obtaining state recognition. By focusing our analysis on the steps in the recognition process, from articulating community problems to eventually solving them, we show how indigeneity NGOs have had a dominant role, but achieved limited success. Instead of resulting in community autonomy and tenure security, the legal recognition process reproduces state territorialisation over customary forests and communities.
Impediments to Establishing Adat Villages: A Socio- Legal Examination of the Indonesian Village Law
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology , 2019
As adat revivalism has begun to influence regulatory, legal and administrative outcomes in Indonesia, adat (tradition or custom) has also found a place in one of the largest policy reforms reshaping Indonesia’s local governance systems: the Village Law. The 2014 Village Law includes a specific mechanism for villages to be recognised as ‘adat villages’. However, five years after promulgating this law, no adat villages have yet been completely established. In this article I take a socio-legal approach to examine the challenges of adat village establishment. A case study in South Kalimantan illustrates how the district government utilised the flaws in the legislation to undermine a customary community’s demand for recognition and to justify the stagnation of adat village establishment in their area. In a broader context, adat recognition through the 2014 Village Law tends to incorporate adat into the existing administrative village, instead of empowering the adat communities.
2017
Derived from the author's PhD dissertation for the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds, UK, this book discusses the revival of the adat (indigenous) movement in the context of political decentralization in Indonesia. Political reform and the passing of laws 22/1999 and 25/1999 on decentralization and regional autonomy after the collapse of the New Order regime in 19982 led to intensified political struggles by adat communities across the country. Tyson suggests that adat revivalism should not be understood in isolation, but in relation to the wider context of Indonesia's political and economic development. Furthermore, the revival of adat as a movement is related to the global discourse on indigenous rights. Built on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in a number of adat communities in Sulawesi, this book provides a rich account of how adat has been continuously used by different actors to achieve specific goals. In addition to indigenous...
(2017). Separating sisters from brothers: Ethnic relations and identity politics in the context of indigenous land titling in Indonesia. Austrian Journal of SouthEast Asian Studies, 10(1), 47-64. Environmental and social transformations in Jambi province, Indonesia, are inextricably interlinked. Large-scale agro-industrial development and nature conservation policies equally alienate local communities from their agricultural lands and turn land into a scarce resource. Consequently, access to agricultural land becomes increasingly contested , not only between communities and state institutions or companies but also among communities themselves. To secure or restore local 'indigenous' land rights against land grabbing and green grabbing by states and companies, indigenous land titling has become a powerful tool all over the world. Ongoing activities of indigenous land titling in Indo-nesia have been largely perceived as an act of justice by indigenous and land rights activists and affected communities. Yet, a challenging step towards titling is the identification of who is and who is not 'indigenous'. This highly political process creates ethnicity-based identities tied to rights and possibilities around land as a contested resource. Based on a case study of a national park in central Jambi, this paper shows that what is perceived as an act of justice against the state can also produce injustice among local communities by heavily impacting and transforming local social structures and relations.