Indigenous Land Rights under Threat: Dispossession and Resistance in Indonesia’s PSN Food Estates

Abstract

This article examines how the Merauke National Strategic Project (PSN Merauke), as a continuation and transformation of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), affects the realization of indigenous peoples’ land rights in Papua. It poses two main questions: how do indigenous peoples oppose and protect their land rights, and how do PSN food estate objectives impact the implementation of those rights? Using a socio-legal approach, the research integrates a critical analysis of the political-economic activities supporting the initiative with normative analysis of international human rights frameworks and constitutions. The study emphasizes indigenous peoples' agency and resistance tactics rather than depicting them as helpless victims. The study shows that dispossession patterns that were previously seen in MIFEE are intensified in PSN Merauke. First, the initiative combines militaristic control techniques with a state-centered paradigm of food sovereignty that marginalizes meaningful involvement. Second, it functions through a framework of conditional recognition in which indigenous land rights depend upon prior official acceptance of indigenous existence, permitting acts of denial that keep communities legally invisible. Ultimately, the article argues that PSN Merauke reveals a structural paradox of recognition within Indonesia’s developmental state, while indigenous claims of indigenity emerge as a counter-sovereign strategy to defend land, identity, and the “right to have rights.”