Territorialization of plantation concessions: customary land acquisition process, agrarian fragmentation and social resistance

Abstract

Agrarian conflicts between indigenous peoples and large-scale oil palm plantation companies in Indonesia always occur in tandem with the processes of expansion of new land for oil palm plantations. The article reveals how the strategies of large-scale oil palm plantation companies organize land as the key capital for the production of the oil palm plantation industry. The study case found that most of the land needed by the company was under the tenure control of the Dayak community, and the company succeeded to control the customary land through means of excluding the Dayak community from their lands by utilizing territorialization policies, organizing formal support from the village government bureaucracy to localize space for the Dayak community’s resistance to the land acquisition process. This study provides a lesson that the domination of state-village power relations is an entry point for customary land occupation processes without the resistance of indigenous peoples.

Keywords

• Territorialization
• land acquisition
• indigenous people
• customary rights
• village government
• Armando Aliu, Faculty of International and Political Studies, Jagiellonian University: Uniwersytet Jagiellonski w Krakowie, Krakow, Poland