After the 1998 Indonesia’s democratic reforms, the central government embarked on political projects of decentralization to shift the centralistic character of the Indonesian state. These decentralization reforms include the granting special autonomy to secessionist regions, including the easternmost and marginal region of West Papua. While territorial autonomy has been used as a strategy for accommodating minorities in many contexts (González 2015, Palermo and Malloy 2015), in West Papua, indigenous territorial autonomy has become a battleground for the indigenous practice of self-government. This contention is especially manifest in the redrawing of administrative boundaries or pemekaran in the indigenous territory. This presentation wishes to examine pemekaran both as a new technology of government and an exercise of self-rule and its impacts on the relationships between the state and indigenous peoples in Indonesia. Looking specifically at the provincial level pemekaran, this presentation wishes to contribute to the conversation on the legal and political meanings of indigenous self-government.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Veronika KUSUMARYATI is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to the easternmost and marginal area of Indonesia. Her scholarship analyzes the idea of race and indigeneity, and how they have shaped Euro-American and post-colonial ideologies of racial hierarchy. Specifically, she studies the lives, thoughts, and politics of the Indigenous Papuans in Indonesia as they intersect with colonialism, racism, and the expansion of capitalism to the indigenous frontiers. She holds a doctoral degree from the department of anthropology at Harvard with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She’s currently an assistant professor in anthropology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).