Title

Securing the Land, Silencing the People: Adat Land Grabs under Indonesia’s Strategic Food Estate in Papua

Speaker

Dr. Rosita Dewi (BRIN)

Abstract

Papua remains one of the poorest and most conflict-affected regions in Indonesia, where prolonged political contestation and deep socio-economic inequalities shape daily life. The research on “Securing the Land, Silencing the People” examines how state-led recognition, securitization, and development converge to dispossess Indigenous Papuans in the name of national progress. The study introduces the notion of a silent crisis, a condition in which Papua’s formal legal recognition, including its status as Indonesia’s only region granted Special Autonomy explicitly acknowledging Indigenous identity and governance, coexists with entrenched marginalization, racialized state control, and an increasingly securitized development regime.
　Engaging global debates on Indigenous rights, the research shows how legal recognition, often celebrated as empowerment, fails to secure substantive protections in Papua and becomes deeply contested. By combining the politics of recognition with land-grabbing framework, the study develops the concept of corrupted recognition, explaining how legal and institutional acknowledgment of adat rights has been transformed into a mechanism that legitimizes land appropriation, suppresses dissent, and obscures violence beneath participatory and inclusive rhetoric.
　Tracing Papua’s political trajectory from contested integration, Indonesianization, and New Order militarization to the Special Autonomy era, the study reveals how autonomy has evolved into a framework for permanent security governance. Rights granted on paper unfold alongside coercion, surveillance, and unresolved human rights violations. This dynamic becomes especially visible in Merauke District, where the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) and its reincarnation as the National Strategic Project for food estates exemplify how development acceleration escalates conflict and deepens the crisis of recognition.
　Drawing on extensive fieldwork, legal and policy analysis, and ethnographic research with adat organizations, Marind communities, and state–private–security alliances, the study exposes how participatory tools, mapping initiatives, and institutional brokers are strategically co-opted to facilitate accelerated land grabbing. By bridging structural analysis with detailed village-level cases, the study offers a rare multi-scalar account of how recognition and resistance unfold simultaneously within Indonesia’s most securitized region. It provides critical insights into the politics of development; Indigenous rights; and the enduring struggles of Papuans, whose lands and voices remain under threat, even as the state performs recognition in the language of empowerment, legality, and national development.

Short Bio of the Speaker

Rosita Dewi is a researcher at the Research Centre for Politics, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Indonesia. Since 2005, her work has centered on the politics and governance of Papua, with a sustained focus on indigenous rights, autonomy, and conflict resolution. She is a co-author of Papua Road Map: Negotiating the Past, Improving the Present, and Securing the Future (2009), a landmark study on Papuan political aspirations and state responses. In 2017, she earned her doctorate from Kyoto University. Her recent publication, “The Paradox of Papuan Recognition After Two Decades of Special Autonomy: Racism, Violence, and Self-Determination” in Advances in Southeast Asian Studies, critically examines the contradictions of Indonesia’s autonomy framework and its implications for Papuan self-determination.

Moderator

Masaaki Okamoto (CSEAS)