Noer Fauzi Rachman,
23 October 2006, a research prospectus submitted for my qualifying exam at Departement of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM), Society and Environment (S&E) Division, University of California, Berkeley.
I. Introduction
Massive demands for agrarian reform exploded in Indonesia after President Soeharto, the leader of a 32 year-long authoritarian regime, was forced to step down in 1998. While peasants all over Java occupied forest and plantation lands, a new decentralization law was passed, to be implemented in 2000. Rural groups and their supporters used rallies, demonstrations, and advocacy campaigns to convince new governments to endorse land reform policy. In 2001, the Peoples Assembly (MPR) mandated that the President and National Parliament of Republic of Indonesia (DPR) “reorganize land control, use and utilization (land reform) with special attention to local people’s ownership”. Five years later, little legal progress has been made, but land occupations continue.
In West Java’s uplands, more than ten thousand landless poor families have occupied plantation and forest lands, changing the land use of some 12,000 hectares in more than 50 villages to small-scale agriculture and agro-forestry fields (Fauzi 2003). More importantly, several peasant organizations with explicit agrarian reform agendas have been formed in West Java, as have some 20 organizations across the island. In any case, the fact that they are still occupying land would have been inconceivable a decade ago. After 7 years of occupation, these organizations have changed their political strategies as their political position has changed. They started to look for recognition for land rights from the state institutions.
My research will concentrate on one of these peasant organizations, Serikat Petani Pasundan or the Sundanese Peasant Union (SPP). I have several reasons for selecting SPP, besides my own familiarity and experience with the organization since its inception. First, the SPP is the biggest agrarian movement in Java (they claim to have around 50,000 members and occupy the largest total area of land of any single organization. Second, the SPP chapters have successfully promoted their leaders in village and district governments through local elections since political decentralization taken place in 2000. Third, the SPP have initiated, developed, and maintained alliances with urban activists and students, often on terms the rural occupants have set (around 30 full time and 20 volunteer urban activists in Garut, Tasikmalaya and Ciamis districts work for various SPP’s activities, like schools, trainings, workshops, legal assistance, campaign, advocacy, cooperative, disaster management, administrative works, etc.) Finally, the SPP has become a strategic reference point for other movement groups and NGOs to learn about organizing tactics, popular education methods, campaign, and advocacy skills.
Bringing together recent theoretical debates on the agrarian question in political ecology, and social movement theories on repression, transformative events, and leadership, my research will seek to systematically answer two questions:
1. How do particular regimes of capital accumulation intersect with state practices of repression to affect the SPP movement claims and the way in which the claims have been articulated?
2. Why are new agrarian movements in Java seeking to work within the state rather than in opposition to it, particularly, given the previous violence and antagonism of Indonesian state institutions toward peasants, smallholders, and the rural landless?
II. Background on agrarian movements in Java and Indonesia
Agrarian movements in rural Java in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took millenarian forms, which violently confronted the existing colonial regime (Kartodirdjo 1973). Early modern forms of peasant movement started when newly educated nationalist elites incorporated the rural masses in various forms, included guerilla movements, to challenge and overthrow colonial state power. When the Republic of Indonesia was formed in 1950, these movements were subsumed under the newly independent state. The charismatic populist President, Soekarno, convinced opposing political parties in parliament to pass the Basic Agrarian Law 1960, which mandated land redistribution. Indonesia’s Communist Party (PKI)—a legal party at the time--took advantage of the state’s land reform program, mobilizing rural people to take ‘unilateral action’ by occupying lands, mainly those owned by ‘feudal landlord’ (Lyon 1970). Through its mass organizations, especially the Peasant Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia), the PKI organized more than 6 million people in rural areas (of Java or indo or?], becoming the biggest communist party outside communist states like China and Russia at the time. But, the Communist movement was interrupted by counter-revolutionary military forces that in 1965 took over the state (Mortimer 1974). As is well known, hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists were killed or jailed without trial and left-wing parties and organizations were criminalized. Rural Java was especially hard hit (Cribb 1990, 1997).
Built on an anti-communist program, the counter-revolutionary military forces under President Suharto constructed a stable regime, named “the New Order”, through alliances with right-wing religious parties. Western-oriented technocrats helped construct a political economy built on large-scale development and massive programs for state control of Indonesia’s many resources. For more than 32 years, the rural masses in Java were kept under the complete political control of new bureaucracy and territorial military command structures. Further, although development was the theme of the New Order, most rural poor were marginalized by development programs (green revolution rice production in lowland areas, and forestry and big plantations in upland areas). One major result was the concentration of land in the hands of rural and state elites in lowland and upland areas, respectively.
Agrarian change during the New Order regime was characterized primarily by land dispossession by the state and its corporate or other capitalist cronies. The labels of “anti-Development” (anti-Pembangunan) and “the latent danger of Communism” (bahaya laten Komunisme) were used to reinforce the social trauma and fear rooted in the Soeharto’s violent rise to power in 1965. The New Order’s authoritarian practices resulted in the disappearance of leftist rural social movements in Java. By de-politicizing the rural areas, such tendencies were eradicated until the decline of the regime. In West Java, strict controls extended also to the remnants of the Darul Islam movement, some of whom were former military officers who had fought for the establishment of an Islamic State after Indonesian Independence (Horikoshi 1975; Jackson 1980; van Dijk 1981).
Until the 1980s, the New Order state successfully maintained so much power and control that rural protests almost never occurred. The regime’s stranglehold began to loosen in the 1990s under the influence of a coalition of rural-urban activism involving NGOs, students, and local leaders (Lucas and Waren, 2000, 2003; Aspinal, 2004). With various underground methods, some activist groups working in NGOs and student organizations in big cities such as Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Jogjakarta and Surabaya had organized dispossessed peasants, set up “komite-komite aksi” (action groups), and conducted public protests to government or parliament. With the collapse of the New Order in 1998 and the meteoric rise of decentralizing discourses within Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and globally, this coalition found fertile ground. Organized agrarian organizations mobilized and massive numbers of unorganized individual seized the opportunities available to them. Hundreds of thousands of dispossessed people occupied the plantation and forest lands of Java. For the first time in 35 years, peasant organizations were formed openly. With their appearance, they transformed the politics of land and laid the basis for transforming the political fields of post-Suharto Indonesia.
III. Theoretical Argument and Hypotheses
III.A. Agrarian Question and Movement in Political Ecology
Research on peasant struggles in various place in Latin America, Asia, and Africa bring agrarian question and movement topics to political ecology literature[nU2] (i.a. Guha 1989, Hart 1991, Peluso 1992, Moore 1993, Bebbington 1996, Escobar 1998, Li 2000 Wolford 2003 among others). Their contributions take us beyond the classic literature on agrarian questions (Byers 1995, Bernstein 1996) and also beyond the debates between and within the three main theories on agrarian movement in colonized and neo-colonized countries: moral economy (Scott 1975), rational peasant (1976), and rural class conflict (Paige 1975).
The recent debate on Marx’s notion on “primitive/original accumulation” and Polanyi’s notion on “double movement” has reinvigorated the theoretical grounds of the political economy of agrarian and natural resources and also stimulated new research agendas. Contrasting with the traditional interpretations of primitive accumulation that conceive ot it as a historical phenomenon, the new interpretations insists that current capitalist accumulation depends on continuous exclusion and enclosure of resources on the one hand, and creation of labor forces for capitalist markets in other hands.[nU3] These continuous processes will continue to grow, just as capitalism grows, expanding into other realms.
Moreover, any time social movements erect social barriers to this endless drive to commodify, expand, enclose and accumulate, capital attempts to dismantle these barriers. States and state institutions, use their coercive powers including violence or its threat to create conditions conducive to these capitalist processes (Perelman 2000, De Angelis 2001, 2004, Harvey 2003). The relationships between new and continuing forms of enclosure, and popular struggles against it, including agrarian social movements, help us extend the interpretation of what Polanyi referred as a “double movement,” On one side there is the historical movement of the market (the expansion of capital mentioned above), a movement that theoretically has no inherent limit and ultimately threatens pre-capitalistic social arrangement, like peasantry with its common resources and rural neighborhood. On the other hand is society’s natural propensity to defend itself, and therefore to create institutions for its protection, as limitless accumulation is not sustainable (Polanyi 1944).
The role of the state in violent enclosure processes is obvious in Indonesia’s establishment of property rights and zoning of natural and agrarian resources. Recent work by Hilmar Farid (2005a, 2005b) has re-opened the debate on the significance of the agrarian violence of the mid-1960s for subsequent political-economic developments in Indonesia, particularly the effects of oligarchic state and foreign capitalism that took form in the New Order period. The violence was followed in the end of 1960s and early 1970s by a series of laws and policies that effectively led to privatization or state control of a great deal of land and enclosures of land and resources, particularly forests and plantations (Robison 1982). What makes Indonesia interesting to the study of agrarian transitions, however, is that the state became the biggest “landlord.” In particular, the legislation of a national forest classified 72% of Indonesia’s land and approximately 23% of Java’s land as forest and subjected it to the jurisdiction of a nationally focused Ministry of Forestry. This move was interpreted legally to mean that forestlands were outside the jurisdiction of the National Land Bureau and therefore outside the realm of agrarian reform. Thus, even while land reform stayed on the books as part of Basic Agrarian Law 1960 — and was duly ignored by the Suharto regime — the legal structure for demanding land reform on forest lands constructed another barrier to legal contestations. Farid does not elaborate on this particular relationship between the realms of the agrarian and of the forestry, focusing more on smallholder properties.
In forest areas of Java, the State Forest Corporation (SFC) has played the dual role of both forest service and corporate forest enterprise (Peluso 1992). On plantation lands, a greater variety of landlords have operated, with state agencies acting in some areas as allocator of property rights to primarily domestic sources of capital and domestic companies, and in other areas as direct managers of plantations (Mubyarto et all 1992). The combination of different institutional arrangements for the realization of exclusive property rights with different physical environments created by different geographies and different land uses constitute what Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal (2003) call “agrarian environments.” The specific nature of upland West Java agrarian environments, i.e. the SFC and the state-owned plantation (PTPN VIII), enable the agrarian social movement groups to direct and formulate their collective claims to the central state as a legitimate authority to control the SFC and the PTPN VIII. My long-term engagement with agrarian movement groups in Java, indicates that state landlordism has been experienced differently than with the personalized relationships of village based landlords. Moreover, the experience depends on the institutions involved in implementing these enclosures because each has a different set of tools and tactics that they bring to bear in suppressing counter demands for land.
This situation enables the movements of the dispossessed peasants to directly challenge the state-landlords (the SFC and the PTPN VIII) through land occupations, while simultaneously demanding the central government use its legitimate power to change the allocation of land resources. In practice, these new movements have never demanded the state withdraw from the rural setting (as demanded by some current indigenous movement groups), or try to overthrow the existing state and build a new Islamic state (as Darul Islam movement did in 1950s-1960s) or a communist state (as PKI did in 1960s).
The objectives of Java’s agrarian movements are to change government policies, their implementation and their outcomes. In order to do that, the agrarian movements in Java are essentially inward looking, and do not seek the kinds of international legitimacy sought by “counter-hegemonic movement” (Evans 2000, 2005), or what Kerk and Sikkink (1998) call as “boomerang effect” (i.e. the kinds of pressure from international agencies produced by transnational advocacy network) or Sydney Tarrow’s new transnational activism (Tarrow 2005). Political fields of the SPP are national and sub national, not transnational, even since 2004 when the biggest international peasant network, Via Campesina, moved its secretariat to Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. While they are members of the Federation of Indonesia Peasant Union (FSPI), which the only member of Via Campensina from Indonesia, the SPP limits their participation within FSPI and Via Campensia as “consumer” of via Campensina informational dissemination rather that as organizational reference, resource mobilization network, or source of their political ideas. In sum Java’s agrarian movements exemplified by the SPP is differ from new socio-political rural movements that anchoring Via Campensina in Latin America, Asia and Africa countries (Veltmeyer and Petras 2001, Moyo and Yeros 2005).
III.B. The Social Movement Theory on Repression, Transformative Event and Leadership
The nature of state repression against agrarian movements in Java is relatively unique because, as mentioned above, state agencies in Java are the “landlords” against which contemporary peasants are acting. The modus operandi of these agencies are subject to larger changes in the political-legal environment of the state and in the new practices of governance brought on by Indonesia’s recent democracy and decentralization breakthrough. The movements emerged at a particular conjuncture when both the state’s repressive apparatus and the state-landlords were unable to disable the occupation actions. Compared with situations where landed elites in Chiapas-Mexico were unable to confront land invasion with violence because they lost political support (Bobrow-Strain 2003), and where big landlords in Brazil were unable to confront land occupations by Landless Rural Worker Movement (MST) because they lost legitimacy and legality to own unused land (Wolford 2003), land occupations in Java had a “grace period” 4 years (1998-2002) during the turbulent years following the fall of the Soeharto authoritarian regime.
Only after 2002 did the state-landlord, as embodied in particular institutions like plantations and state forest company, restore their abilities to accumulate. They also actively attempted to repress the movement when they reestablished their relations to the central government and big political parties. In macro level, this moment was the time when the central state institution regain their strengths. A recent effect of this reconfiguration of counter-movement activity is a new type of privatized violence (Wilson 2006), enacted in concert with government repression and response to movement activities and demands. It has become common for state or corporate landlords to hire private thugs or gangsters or to organize and pay local people to enact violence against land occupiers’ bodies, crops, and homes or working with non-governmental organization that have contradictory interest but have share many of the objects of concern with the movement. Private violence is not replacing direct state violence (by military, police, and forest police) against villagers, but complicating it.
Conventional explanations on movements’ emergence generally start from a shift in the political opportunity structure (Tilly 1978, McAdam 1982, Tarrow 1996). This shift is produced by conflict and tension between political power holders in state level. Usually this power struggle is external of the movement realm, but provide conducive moment for the movement leader interpret the situaton, mobilize their effort, organization and resources available to create collective actions. If the political opportunity structure creates more repression, movements are hypothesized to be demobilized. It is the opportunities that define the way in which the movement finds their success or failure (Kiersi 1995).
The leaders’ interpretation, attribution, and social construction that Snow and Benfor (1988) define as ‘framing’, plays very crucial to mediate between opportunity and action. The leaders’ framing usually also dignify and justify the movement, the organizational structures (that link the movement’s center to its base), and the main collective actions (that ensures sustained interaction with power holders). Without this adequate framing, the movements may not mobilize under both contracting and expanding the opportunities. Literature on framing in social movement that started with employing Goofman’s notion on framing (Snow and Benford 1988) has become major approach in social movement studies (Benford and Snow 2000, Snow 2005).
Every social movement experiences its “transformative events”, and it is now widely recognized that repression by authorities can become a transformative event either by significantly increasing the costs of additional mobilizing and organizing works or by leading to greater mobilization (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Hess and Martin 2006). In new agrarian movements, it is important to understand the conditions under which repression, including counter-movements and policies enacted in response to movement demands, stimulates increased popular mobilization rather than dispersion and demobilization. Kowalchuk (2005), researching Colombia’s peasant movement, and Ondetti (2006), researching the Brazil’s landless movement, argue that the key factor in transformative events is the leader’s capacity to deal strategically with these oppressive moments, including reframing. A key issue is thus whether and how leaders recognize and interpret opportunities for collective action, and when to hold back.
There is a need to combine a process-oriented and relational approach to political opportunities that explicitly examines how they work with the responses that social movements provoke or inspire and then alter the grounds on which they can mobilize (Meyer 2004, Meyer and Minkoff 2004). Yet, I will treat the opportunity not in positivist sense, but in relational perspective (Ray 1999:7). In doing so, I will use Bourdieu’s relational concept of a political field, which is understood both as configuration of forces and as sites of struggle to maintain or transform those forces (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 101). The political field is not the only condition of the investigation of political activities. It is also the result of a constant change and institutionalization where struggle over symbolic meaning is treated as important as struggle over material resources.
Social movement literature is relatively inattentive to leadership, which is not yet adequately theorized. General social movement theories have failed to address and integrate the tensions between two classical themes in sociology, i.e. structure versus agency (Barker, Johnson and Lavalette 2001; Morris and Staggenborg 2004). My research will contribute this theoretical lacuna by inserting the relational understanding that the leaders’ strategic capacity is not merely a product of their inner resources and creativity, but have been, in the Java case, overdetermined by their social relations, especially their engagement with members’ experience of political violence, their alliance with elites in political party, government and non-government organization, and structure of political field where they contest.
My long-term involvement with the agrarian movements in Java has provided me with a view of the crucial role of interactions between grass-roots local leaders and urban activist leaders who have strategized movement tactics in state-based political fields, including their demands for land reform and challenges to existing practices of accumulation and repression. This study of the SPP will enable me to more systematically test my own assumptions and those of the social movement literature.
III.C. Hypotheses
Based on those theoretical arguments, my research will examine the two hypotheses:
1. The on-going capital accumulation are intimately tied, through both past political violence (violent repression to millenarian rebellions and early nationalist agrarian movements, the 1960s protected war against Darul Islam guerilla movement, and the 1960s mass killing and torture over PKI members) and present political violence (various violent forestry and plantation repressive operations and individual criminalization), to the forms of West Java agrarian movements, the movement claims and the way in which the claims have been articulated;
2. The SPP’s agrarian movements seek to work within state-based political fields rather than in opposition to them, because of several circumstances: (i) their strategic capacity emerges and effectively succeeds in initiating and maintaining land occupation when the State is changing and susceptible for intervention; (ii) both the grass-roots leaders and urban activist leaders are aware of the consequences of present and past political violences that may generate deep-rooted traumatic experiences of political violence; and (iii) their alliance with elites in political parties, government institutions, and non-governmental organizations provide particular possibilities and resources for changing government policies and practices, and developing organizational capacities
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IV. Research Design
I will test my hypothesis by conducting twelve months of fieldwork in three districts, (Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis) using intensive and extensive qualitative research methods (Sayre, 1992). I chose those three districts because they are the SPP’s main working areas. The State Forest Company (SFC) and The state owned plantation (PTPN VIII) in those districts were heavily impacted by the land occupation organized by the SPP since 1999, and have tried to repress the movement through working with counter-movement groups, and pushing the government and police to criminalize them.
I have been deeply involved with the SPP movement since the beginning and have been a member of the teachers’ council of the SPP since 2000. Rather than claiming a studied neutrality in this area, I will explicitly state here that my many years of work as an NGO activist and direct involvement in the movement in various ways situate my position as researcher. But, for academic and reflective reasons, I am revisiting and theoretically interrogating parts of this experience and its context, and now will research them in an attempt to explain why these movements arose when they did and uncover the ways in which the movements have found their platforms under the influence of political context, particular mode of land control and agrarian history. I will assess how they had conducted land occupations and other tactics to accomplish their goals, how they framed their collective actions, and how they seized various political opportunities. As an NGO activist supporting the SPP movement I have a particular position that provides me with possibilities but also constraints to have access to my research subjects. I will review the internal documents of the movement, conduct participant-observation work with the movement including interviews with the leaders and members, conduct a village level study, and observe the movement’s activities. I will take advantage of the network that the movement and I have with district level government officials, parliament members, and political party leaders to access information about political opportunities and constraints, and political outcomes of the movement at the district policy level. Prior to enrolling at UC Berkeley, I worked as the chairperson of the national Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria (Consortium for Agrarian Reform) 1995 – 2002. I established a strong network of contacts with individuals in the Ministry of Forestry, National Land Agencies, National Human Right Commission and national parliament. I will take advantage of my connections to examine official responses to the land reform agendas demanded by agrarian movement groups.
IV.1. How does particular regime of capital accumulation intersect with state practices of repression to situate past and current agrarian movement, their claims and the way in which the claims have been articulated?
My proposed research will not treat the State Forest Company (SFC) and the state owned plantation (PTPN VIII) as particular regimes of accumulation, and the State practices of repression as two separated independent variables, and locate agrarian movements as dependent variable. My first point of departure is to treat them as different entities, but they are inseparable and mutually or may be unevenly constitutive each other. I will firstly trace the genealogy of the SFC and the PTPN VIII as particular form of “state-landlordism”, and then locate past and present agrarian movements in contingent relation with those within local forms of class interest and larger state formation and capital accumulation processes (McKeon, Watts and Wolford 2004). I will take an advantage from reviewing various literatures on historical aspects of the SFC, the plantations, the Java agrarian change and movements. But, I have to have critically aware about particularities of West Java upland histories and geographies in reviewing literature on Central and East Java centered histories of the SFC (e.g. Peluso 1992, Simon 1994, 1999, Awang 2004), of the plantation (e.g. Mubyato and Suryo 1990, Mubyato et all 1992; Sodiki 1994) of agrarian movements in Java (e.g. Dingley 1927, Aidit 1964, Kartodirjo 1973, Adas 1979, Dijk 1981, Svensson 1983, Santoso 2003), and of Java agrarian change (e.g. De Haan 1903, 1904, Svensson 1990, Antlov 1995, Pincus 1996, Hefner 1990, palte, 1983, Breman and Wiradi 2003). But, I have to have my own primary inquiry on contemporary history of West Java of the SFC and PTPN VIII as particular forms of state-landlord. I need data on characteristics of SFC’s forestry management units and PTPN VIII’s plantation units: its territorialization, acreage, governance structure, land use, and management of production. I have a book 1957 official statistic of plantation (before nationalization of foreign plantation in 1959, and during my preliminary research in summer 2006, I found the 2002 official statistics of plantations). I have to trace history every single units of PTPN VIII, and ask question on how the nationalization of the private-colonial plantation to PTPN VIII have situated their management practices and their contingent relation with local peasant communities surrounding the plantation. I have to have looking for relevant archive on this transfer in PTPN VIII central office in Bandung, and also in National Archive Center in Jakarta.
Differing with the SFC history in Central and East Java that institutionally have rooted in colonial Dienst der Boschewezen, West Java forest had been managed by forest service of provincial government since colonial times. I have to have access official data on transfer of forest authorities from West Java province to the SFC in 1979, asking condition under which the transfer taken place. I need to interview ex-high government officials who involved or observed in that process, and find some archives in the SFC central office, and Forest Library in Ministry of Forestry office in Jakarta.
I have to find various forms of local contestation events between state owned plantation or the SFC with local peasant communities in various period of time, and examine how state repression practices were employed in those contestations. I will rely on local elders story living surround the plantation and the SFC (the SPP local chapters have some local elders). I will deeply interview them to have their live history, and package aspects of narratives on the contestation. I will consult the aspect of narratives with some historian in Padjadjaran University in Bandung, Capital City of West Java Province. If available, I will search the relevant historical archives in library of plantation head office (PTPN VIII) in Bandung, the SFC central office, Forest Library in Ministry of Forestry office in Jakarta, and also in National Archives Centre in Jakarta.
To understand contemporary form of contestation in West Java Upland, especially in Garut, Tasikmalaya and Ciamis districts where the SPP works, I will rely on local newspaper Pikiran Rakyat and Priangan to conduct protest-event analysis, a particular type of content analysis for social movement studies (McAdam, 1982). This analysis will help me to have a ground data on dynamic of movement-initiated events since the SPP emergence, and how these events is really in contingent relation with the landlords and the State repressions. I will also use the newspapers as another source for detail description for some important events and some issues raised by various actors.
I will make village level case studies on the violent contestations over resources under the two different agrarian environments, i.e. forestry and plantation. During my preliminary research, I was able to collect some important material from SPP side, from journalist, from the Ministry of Forestry and the Association of Plantation Companies on two contemporary cases: (i) the 2003 “Wanalaga” (Forest War) Operation involved 320 full armed 320 regular police and 67 forest police, and enclosed more than 5,000 ha of forest areas from local occupiers. More than 1,000 peasants rounded up, and 27 “criminals” (included the SPP local leaders) were jailed for 3 until 12 month; and (ii) the Cisompet case, a confrontation between “PT Bunisari Lendra”, a unit of PTPN VIII, with the SPP local chapter. The plantation company used an official military training project held in the plantation area, and direct one component of the training activities in some 450 ha land occupied by the SPP members. Working with military trainee, they clear up the crops, and plant the land with chocolate and rubber shoots. They also mobilized plantation workers and hire thugs to fight against the SPP.
I will take these cases as important moments and examine conjunctures under which the movement has been articulated. I will conduct village level participant observation activities, including to observe the landscape, to conduct deep interview with the SPP local leaders and some members (man and women), to survey actual distribution of land, to conduct focus group discussion on local history of the SPP movement, and to participate in various available SPP’s local activities. I hope will acquire data on local agrarian differentiation, especially on class position of the SPP members, detailed biographical aspects of the SPP’s leaders, village level political configuration and social groupings, also the nature of the SPP collective actions, including those emerged from their interaction with the SPP’s urban activists.
IV.2. Why are the SPP’s movements in West Java seeking to work within the state rather than in opposition to them, particularly, given the previous violence and antagonism of Indonesian state institutions toward peasants, smallholders, and the rural landless?
To answer those two questions I need to have participant observation activity with SPP leaders and members, starting with examining history of the SPP’s emergence. I have particular position in the SPP movement that make me have a good access to their internal sources, including archives and internal reports of each cases that they handled, and also I will able to interview all levels of leaders and members. I will make an inventory to survey through guided interview, to all the SPP local elected/appointed leaders of 50 chapters on their biographical characteristic, situation that make them joint and then lead the SPP local chapters, the historical milestone of the chapter history, the “transformative events” that change their directions, role of urban activities in the local movement, political fields that they engage, the content of the claim that they make, the main tactics that they use to articulate the claim, and the success or failure that they achieve. I will have around 3 until 5 local leaders in each chapter based on recommendation of their elected leader. I will especially request women local leader(s) is chosen in his/her recommendation. I will also make guided interview with the SPP’s urban activist leaders asking question about their biographical characteristic, condition under which they joint with the SPP, the “transformative events” they involve, political fields that they engage, the content of the claim that they make, the main tactics that they use to articulate the claim, and the success or failure that they achieve in the political field. It will be easy to select the urban activist leaders, because they have been organized in student and youth organization in three districts cities (Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis) and one garus based NGO, Yapemas.
I will use snow-bowling sampling technique to select some the SPP leaders, both its local rural leaders and urban activist leaders, that have experience with past and present political violence (violent repression to millenarian rebellions and early nationalist agrarian movements, the 1960s protected war against Darul Islam guerilla movement, and the 1960s mass killing and torture over PKI members) and/or present political violence (various violent forestry and plantation repressive operations and individual criminalization). I will ask them if they are willing to participate in my research and tell their stories. I will make deep and open interviews to carefully dig their painful experiences.
I will interview and discuss with relevant persons in NGOs, local government officials, parliament members, political party leaders, high level official in Ministry of Forestry, National Land Agencies, and National Human Right Commission to carefully examine various scale of political fields, especially interaction between actors, agendas, processes and mechanisms, where the SPP deeply engage, establish their legitimate claims and gain acknowledgement of their existence. At least there are five fields that should be examined, i.e. (i) Control over land access, where SPP members create particular changes in land use, production system and settlements, as well as government land reform policies; (ii) organizational arena where SPP maintain and expand membership, build their leaders capacity, strategize their collective actions, and develope their organizational mechanisms; (iii) Political arenas, especially district and village level elections, where new political public leaders will be recruited, such as district level parliament members, district head and vice district head, and Village head; and in national level meeting, workshops, negotiation, etc., with National Land Agencies or Ministry of Forestry officials, national parliament and political party members; (iv) Civil Society network, where NGOs and other civil society groups have gave various sort of supports for the SPP movement, and (v) public opinion, where various newspapers or TV medias have covered SPP’s collective activities, views and claims, and also opinions from various proponent and opponents of SPP movement. ***)
Research Methods in Relation to Research Questions
Questions | Evidence – need to establish | Methods |
How do particular regimes of capital accumulation intersect with state practices of repression to affect the Java’s movement claims and the way in which the claims have been articulated?
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Create general narrative on decisive historical moments of state-landlordism and agrarian movement in West Java agrarian environment, · trace the formation of the SFC and the PTPN VIII as forms of landlordism · examine interaction of the state, the state landlord and agrarian movement in various historical periods · find specific forms of political violence to repress agrarian movements and locate the forms in historical periods · Overlay location of the past agrarian movements and location of the SFC and PTPN VIII area
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Secondary sources: on general agrarian history of West Java (e.g. Svensson 1983, 1990; Antlov 1995; Breman 1983) On the SFC (e.g. Peluso 1992; Simon 1994, 1999; Soepardi 1974, Department Kehutanan 1986; Boomgrad 1988); On PTPN VIII (e.g. Mubyarto and Suryo 1990; Mubyarto et all 1992) On agrarian movement (e.g. Kartodirjo 1973, Kartodirjo 1975. Svensson 1983) Archival materials: On agrarian environment history: use De Hann (1905) On SFC: Use the SFC’s official publication, like management plan for 5 years, or 25 years; reports on production, strategic planning, maps, etc.; Use: West Java government reports especially on transfer authority from provincial government to the SFC to manage West Java forest in 1979; see Ministry of Forestry decree on the transfer. On PTPN VIII: Use the PTPN VIII’s official publication, like company profile of each management unit, maps, strategic plan, report on production, etc., Government reports on nationalization of foreign estates. On agrarian movement: use the compilation archaive publication on local Sarekat Islam movement Interviews: On agrarian environment history: and agrarian movement: Interview some historians in Padjadjaran University On SFC: Interview Solichin GP (West Java Governor) in 1979 who made the transfer. On PTPN VIII : Interview leaders of West Java’s Association of Plantation Company.
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Create contesting narratives and geography of contestation over land in contemporary West Java agrarian environment · Produce a chart on frequency and type of “the movement initiated events” and “the repression actions” to show: (i) period under which the movement and repression rise and decline; and (ii) contingent relation between protest and state repression. · Produce a map showing the local agrarian movements and the state repression with location of the SFC and PTPN VIII areas. · Make case studies on two case show that between state repression and the form of agrarian movement is mutually constitutive: o the SPP vs the SFC o the SPP vs PTPN VIII See for each cases condition under which the repression produce particular effect to the movement, and the movement has been articulated. |
Content Analysis: rely on local news paper (Pikiran Rakyat, and Priangan) to conduct protes/repression-events analysis. Mapping the “protest-repression events” location: Overlay location of the local agrarian movements and the state repression with location of the SFC and PTPN VIII areas. Archival material: General reports of district parliament committees on land disputes; local government report on land disputes; national land board report on land dispute; internal SFC reports on illegal logging/forest destroyer/land occupation; report of association plantation companies on plantation condition. Interview: Jurnalists from Pikiran Rakyat and Priangan. Case studies: On the SPP vs the SFC: use the 2003 “Wanalaga” (forest war) operation. On the SPP vs the PTPN VIII: use the 2006 “Cisompet” case. For both cases, I will use various journalist reports, compare with official reports, and stories from victims. I will interview government officials, parliament members, national land agency officer or Ministry of Forestry officers, Commissioners in National Human Right Commission, Journalist, NGOs, and victims. For both cases, I will conduct village house-hold surveys and participant observation activities to have data on class background of SPP members, detailed biographical aspect of the SPP’s leaders, village level political configuration and social grouping, forms of the SPP collective actions, and their interaction with urban activists. In this village study, I will use snow-bowling sampling technique to select some the SPP members and leadersthat have experience with past and present political violence (violent repression to millenarian rebellions and early nationalist agrarian movements, the 1960s protected war against Darul Islam guerilla movement, and the 1960s mass killing and torture over PKI members) and/or present political violence (various violent forestry and plantation repressive operations and individual criminalization). I will make deep and open interviews to carefully dig their painful experiences. |
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Questions | Evidence – need to establish | Methods |
Why are new agrarian movements in Java seeking to work within the state rather than in opposition to it, particularly, given the previous violence and antagonism of Indonesian state institutions toward peasants, smallholders, and the rural landless? | Map multi-layered and multi-faceted political field of agrarian transformation where the SPP’s leaders have engaged. At least there are four fields of agrarian transformation that should be examined, i.e. (i) Control over land access, where SPP members create particular changes in land use, production system and settlements, as well as government land reform policies; (ii) Political recruitment arenas, especially district and village level elections, where new political public leaders will be recruited from village until district level; (iii) Law and policy arena, where multi-level and plural law and policy making processes taken place in the village, district, province and national. (iv) public opinion, where various newspapers or TV medias have contested in producing agenda land reform promoted by the agrarian movement.
Trace personal trajectory of the SPP’s rural local leaders and urban activist leaders. | Archival materials: From the SPP and its NGO network, I will learn various internal reports, notes, letters, public statement, etc. Focused group discussion: I will conduct various FGDs in various nodes depend on political fields where they lived, at least in student and youth groups (three nodes: in Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis), in the SPP working units, and with women leaders. Survey through guided-interviews: For the SPP’s rural local leader: I will make an inventory to survey through guided interview, to all the SPP local elected/appointed leaders of 50 chapters on their biographical characteristic, situation that make them joint and then lead the SPP local chapters, their changed personal trajectory, the historical milestone of the chapter history, the “transformative events” that change their directions, role of urban activities in the local movement, political fields that they engage, the content of the claim that they make, the main tactics that they use to articulate the claim, and the success or failure that they achieve. I will have around 3 until 5 local leaders in each chapter based on recommendation of their elected leader. I will especially request women local leader(s) is chosen in his/her recommendation. For the SPP’s urban activist: I will also make guided interview with the SPP’s urban activist leaders asking question about their biographical characteristic, condition under which they joint with the SPP, their changed personal trajectory, the “transformative events” they involve, political fields that they engage, the content of the claim that they make, the main tactics that they use to articulate the claim, and the success or failure that they achieve in the political field. It will be easy to select the urban activist leaders, because they have been organized in student and youth organization in three districts cities (Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis) and one garut based NGO, Yapemas.
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