Movements for Land Rights in Democratic Indonesia

Abstract

This chapter deals with land rights, which have long been a matter of contention in Indonesia. It argues that a wave of peasant protests in the late Suharto period—and, in particular, a series of high-profile land disputes—not only gave rise to a series of regional peasant unions but also helped destabilize the regime. Like the labor movement, the peasant movement played little or no part in the actual moment of regime change. But, also like the labor movement, peasant movements have since worked to make use of the new political spaces made available to them by democratization. As the movement for land rights has evolved, it has been forced to broaden its repertoire of action from traditional modes of contentious politics, such as mass mobilization, to include tactics such as critical knowledge production, engagement in electoral politics, and a range of economic strategies. The chapter concludes, however, that the movement failed to mount an effective challenge to the dominance of Indonesia's political and economic elites in this domain.

Legal Advocacy as a Strategy for Agrarian Activism in Indonesia

“…This led to the intensification of land grabbing by state and corporate authorities at the expense of rural communities. Soon LBHs, lawyers, activists, and students participated in the new wave of legal advocacy for various local agrarian struggles [5]. Informed by the structural approach of legal advocacy, legal practitioners, activists, and rural community leaders of this period aimed to solve land dispute cases and, equally important, rejuvenate mass politics in rural areas.…”

Land Control, Coal Resource Exploitation and Democratic Decline in Indonesia

“…The analytical framework of this article employs insights from diverse literature. Drawing from works on critical agrarian studies and the Murdoch School of political economy, it stresses the way in which the nature of democratisation and decentralisation in transitioning countries such as Indonesia limits the ability of rural citizens and agrarian activists to push for agrarian justice policies and incorporation of the rural lower classes in political processes dominated by oligarchic and market interests (Anugrah 2019a;Hirsch 2020;Scoones et al 2018). The emphasis here is on the interplay between capitalist expansion in rural sectors, contentions between competing social forces and democratic trajectory in domestic context.…”

“…Lastly, Weingast's (1997) classic analysis of the coordination problem among prodemocratic oppositions is used as a lens to evaluate the ability of Indonesian agrarian movement actors to resist democratic regression. The fragmented nature of the movement has made it difficult for its advocates to mount a unified and effective counterbalance against the state and oligarchic interests beyond the mainstreaming of agrarian justice discourse and policy concessions in land and forest resource management (Anugrah 2019a). The participation of key movement actors-essentially civil society elites with backgrounds in agrarian activism-in the Jokowi administration has created fissures within the movement and ultimately weakened its ability to challenge illiberal practices by the elites.…”