By Courtney Bristow*

While at HuMa, I was interested in opening the book by Carol Warren and Anton Lucas (ed), Land for the People (2013). In the final chapter, they concluded the book with the intriguing article “Agrarian Resources and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.” This article remains relevant today, exploring how legal reforms are notably slow in addressing government land seizures by companies, impacting communities in Indonesia. Their analysis begins from the Reformasi era and the 1997-1998 Asian economic crisis. This chapter frames conflicts over local communities’ land rights against the backdrop of an economic crisis. Subsequently, land grabbing emerges as an excuse to try to mitigate the impacts of the sudden economic downturn. They highlight Indonesia’s food crisis with early sparks of conflict, indicating that the state would utilize “idle land” or abandoned land. However, conversely, this land accumulation actually serves as a way to secure other parties, namely investors.

At this point, the authors explore the advantages and disadvantages of large-scale investments versus smallholder asset ownership in Indonesia. They argue that despite the potential and benefits of large-scale investments, land transfers also pose issues such as “unilateral and non-consultative claims processes, inadequate legal compensation issues, neglect of environmental and social protection, discretionary approval processes, lack of transparency, monitoring, and law enforcement.”¹ In the Indonesian context, this process has the potential to cause more harm than good to local communities. This diminishes the argument that such land investments aim to reduce poverty; instead, they are likely to yield contradictory results, such as ecological damage. The authors examine the apparent contradictions between Indonesia’s revolutionary heritage and the social justice principles enshrined in Pancasila, and the ineffectiveness of legal reform movements in Indonesia itself.

Warren and Lucas connect the legal failure to protect its citizens with a combination of “bribery, political-party elite connections, and misinterpretations of the law by the courts.”² They use examples from previous chapters in the article to highlight this. In many cases commonly found, individuals who are disadvantaged often face criminal charges instead of having their issues resolved.

However, this chapter ends on an optimistic note. Warren and Lucas describe the changes and reforms that Indonesia has made, such as the Constitutional Court’s decision requiring the “resolution of conflicts with customary law communities in forest area status.”³ On the other hand, NGOs and activists continue to write, map, and propose reforms in various aspects of natural resources in Indonesia. Since this article was written in 2013, I have also observed further steps taken, such as the recognition of 8,800 hectares of customary forests in 2016 and 2017.⁴ In their final comments, Warren and Lucas acknowledge the ongoing challenges that will continue to slow down social reforms, but they also remain optimistic by concluding that the social movement is building the groundwork they desire, and a way forward can be found for the “common good,” even though the solution is challenging to comprehend.⁵

One criticism regarding Warren and Lucas’ text can be found in an article by Christopher Atkinson (2014), where he argues that in discussions of conflict, the elite