Papua and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Land

The controversy arising after the screening of the documentary film ‘Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di Zaman Kita’ (Pig Feast: Colonialism in Our Time) does not merely reflect a debate over Dandhy Dwi Laksono’s audiovisual work. Behind it lies a much more fundamental and unresolved issue in the relationship between the State and Papua: how land is understood, interpreted, and placed within the paradigm of Indonesia’s national development.

To date, agrarian conflicts in Papua are often understood administratively as issues of permits, spatial planning, investment, or land rights disputes. However, in many Papuan customary areas, land is not merely an economic object that can be measured through compensation values or investment productivity. Land is a living space that holds genealogical memory, collective identity, social legitimacy, and even the spiritual relationship between indigenous communities, their ancestors, and their environment.

This is precisely where the root of Papua’s agrarian conflict lies: a clash of paradigms between the state’s developmentalist-style development and the cosmology of indigenous communities who view land as part of their very existential being.

Under Article 33, paragraph (3) of the 1945 Constitution, the State holds a constitutional mandate to control the earth, water, and natural resources for the greatest prosperity of the people. This mandate is further translated into various legal instruments, including the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960, the Job Creation Law, food security policies, national strategic projects, and the expansion of resource-based investments.

Within the framework of modern development, land is positioned as a production resource that must be managed effectively to drive national economic growth. Development success is subsequently measured through administrative and economic indicators: increased investment, expansion of production areas, infrastructure development, and regional economic growth.

This paradigm is not entirely flawed. The State indeed bears a significant responsibility to ensure food availability, open up isolated regions, attract investment, and create equitable national development. In the context of Papua, which has faced developmental inequality for decades, the State’s presence through various development programmes is often seen as a strategic necessity. However, problems arise when this development paradigm is applied uniformly to indigenous communities who possess a different perspective on their land and living spaces.

For many Papuan indigenous communities, land is never merely an inanimate object with economic value. Land is identity; land is the marker of a clan’s existence. Land is a spiritual space where community history is passed down through generations. Therefore, losing land is not synonymous with losing an asset, but rather losing a part of their very social existence.

This is where national law often reaches its limits. The State operates through formal legal instruments: concession permits, right-to-use titles, environmental impact assessments (AMDAL), area releases, and various other administrative procedures. As long as these procedures are deemed fulfilled, development is viewed as legally valid.

Indigenous communities often perceive that formal approval does not automatically imply collective acceptance of changes to their living spaces. This is especially true when decision-making processes are elitist, non-participatory, or only involve a small number of local actors without a full understanding of the long-term impacts of such development.

In this context, criticism of agrarian governance in Papua cannot be simplified as a rejection of development. The issue is not merely development versus anti-development, but rather what kind of development paradigm the State is implementing upon the living spaces of indigenous peoples.

Jalal, in his writing ‘Seeing Like James C. Scott: From Peasant Resistance to the Resistance of Rivers’, explains how modern states tend to operate through the logic of administrative ‘legibility’—an effort to simplify the complexity of society to make it easier to regulate, map, and control. Within such a framework, local community knowledge is often reduced to mere policy objects and development figures. This perspective is relevant to reading today’s agrarian conflicts in Papua.

In Papua, this tendency is evident when customary land is reduced to production areas, food reserve forests, or strategic investment spaces, while the cosmological dimension of indigenous communities receives almost no adequate place in the formulation of state policies.

Ironically, the Indonesian Constitution actually provides recognition for the existence of indigenous legal communities. Article 18B, paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution explicitly states that the State recognises and respects indigenous legal communities along with their traditional rights. Similar recognition is reinforced in various Constitutional Court decisions, including Decision No. 35/PUU-X/2012, which affirmed that Article 5, paragraph (1) of Law Number 41 of 1999 concerning Forestry has no binding legal force insofar as it is not interpreted to mean that ‘State forests… do not include customary forests.’

However, in practice, such recognition often remains at a normative level. The model of national development continues to move within a centralised paradigm that positions the State as the primary actor determining the direction of managing indigenous living spaces. This situation creates a paradox: on one hand, the State recognises the existence of indigenous communities, but on the other, development mechanisms often marginalise their social authority over their own land.