Christian Lund: Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia - Transcript

Christian Lund
00:00:02 This is the Nordic Asia podcast.
,
00:00:08
Duncan McCargo
Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise
on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at
the University of Copenhagen. I'm delighted to be joined today by my
colleague, Christian Lund, the author of Nine-Tenths of the Law:
Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia, Yale University Press, 2021.
Christian, welcome to the New Books Network.
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00:00:32
Christian Lund
Thank you very much, Duncan.
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00:00:33
Duncan McCargo
Christian Lund is a professor in the Department of Food and Resource
Economics at the University of Copenhagen. And his previous books
include Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa, which is a
Cambridge 2008 book. He's recently finished directing an ERC
Advanced Grant project called ‘Rule and Rupture’, which is, as I
understand it, about how political authority is actually exercised in
various parts of the world as opposed to how it's supposed to be
exercised.
So, Christian, before this book, I know a lot of your writings had an
Africa focus and you say in the opening of your book that outsiders like
yourself ‘rarely recover from their initial bedazzlement’ with Indonesia.
What led you to start working in and on Indonesia?
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00:01:13
Christian Lund
Well, a number of things, I think. First of all, I had finished my work on
Ghana. I published a book, and I was thinking, how can I continue my
work without repeating myself endlessly? And I was basically looking
for a way of making some kind of change in my work. And I was
thinking, either you change your topic, and you remain in your region or
you change your region, but stay with your topic. And I wasn't quite
sure what to what steps I wanted to make, but I was fortunate enough
to have a sabbatical at the time. And I was at the University of
California, Berkeley for a year, and I met a number of people working on
Southeast Asia and also a couple of people working very intensely with
Indonesia. Initially, we just talked because I hadn't thought about
working on Indonesia but kept circling around issues that I had found
really interesting in my African material about what happens if states
are not the institutions that govern. What happens if statutory law
doesn't really say much about how people actually access resources?
And these questions seem to be reappearing, but in a different form.
When I talk to my friends who worked on Indonesia especially, I was
fascinated by people who worked on land occupations. So land
occupied by social movements when they occupy an old plantation and
are faced with a lot of governance issues that they can't go to the
government to resolve. So how do you distribute land among members
of the movement? How to resolve conflicts? How do you transact land?
Once you have a guy who decides what to grow, how can you enter into
contracts with factories or wholesalers of your produce and so on? So
there's a governance issue arising immediately once you occupy this
land. And I was really fascinated by the way in which people had tried to
approach this.
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00:02:55
Christian Lund
So after some hesitation, I thought, well, why not? I mean, let me go
there for a couple of months and just suss out what could be interesting
to work on. And I think the other reason I chose Indonesia was sheer
naiveté, because if I had known how complicated it was, I don't think it's
a place which is hugely complex history like many other places, but it
also has a huge academic literature that you need to familiarize yourself
with, which is, of course, both good and bad. It's good because you
don't have to find out everything yourself, but it's also bad because
you're then trying to find your niche. What can you say that hasn't been
said much better a million times before, but I think it only gradually
dawned on me how complicated the place is. If I'd known, I probably
would have hesitated even more.
,
00:03:38
Duncan McCargo
Yes, I understand that, I spent about six months in Indonesia myself
over the years and bailed out of Indonesia for those reasons too, that
it's hard to find a niche. But I retreated to Thailand, which is by no
means a simpler place. So when was it that you went to Indonesia for
the first time?
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00:03:54
Christian Lund
In 2021. Let me just tie a knot on this moving to Indonesia thing,
because I think it's very easy to say that, OK, I did a book on Ghana and
I did a book on Indonesia, but I mean, I haven't written a book on
Indonesia as such. I written a book on a set of phenomena that you can
find in Indonesia. If you're going to Indonesia for the first time or if you
need to know about Indonesia, I wouldn't read my book to get an
answer because it's a narrow sliver of an issue that I think is fascinating,
but it's not a book on Indonesia. It's a book on the way in which people
resort to law, even if they don't know what that actually means, to
resolve conflicts and assert rights to land. And Indonesia is a context
where this is happening in a very exciting way. But I think the issue that
I deal with should resonate in many places, many other places also. So
that's why I don't feel that I'm somehow an Africanists turning into a
Southeast Asianist, I never thought of myself as an Africanist in the first
place.
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00:04:51
Duncan McCargo
I understand: we are the Nordic Asia Podcast, so that we're obviously
interested in the Asian angle. But I quite understand that your questions
are much larger, broader comparative questions, which sort of brings
me to what I wanted to ask you next. It's very, very hard in a podcast of
this kind, because yours is a very rich book that's grounded in deep
research and it makes a complex argument. Could you try to reduce for
our listeners your core argument to its essence? What really is the
problem with land of dispossession that you're trying to grapple with in
this book?
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00:05:20
Christian Lund
I can try to do that. There's been a long discussion in political economy,
political ecology circles about how law doesn't do what law says it does.
So we need to look at other things when we when we are looking at
people's access to land and so on. We need to take into account all
kinds of other aspects of social life that help people access and control
land. And I think that is perfectly true. What surprises me, though, is
then when you talk to people who have land conflicts somehow, is just
how much time and effort they spend trying to legalize their
possessions. How much time and energy they spend to be seen as legal
owners or legal proprietors of land. And it becomes even more
confusing when you then realize how superficial people's knowledge of
the law then actually is. So my book is basically trying to investigate
what do people do to turn land claims into legal property in a situation
where they don't really know the law, they don't really have access to
legal institutions and where government is quite authoritarian. Even in
the present demographic age, the Indonesian government, its local
government, and maybe especially the plantation sector combined to
be a formidable adversary to smallholders. You can look at it in steps.
You can say that people face a kind of rightlessness in Indonesia, where,
first of all, statutory law puts a lot of property rights in the hands of
government itself. So people don't really own land in Indonesia. They
hold land for a long time, but in a precarious way. It can easily be taken
by government for plantations or forest reservations and all kinds of
other things. So people have short term or long-term leases to land. But
the whole land legislation is extremely complicated in Indonesia and
very few people can find a way around it. So people somehow have to
live with this imagination of what is legal and what is not legal.
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00:07:22
Christian Lund
And it means that people are trying to claim land and make that claim
look legal. So what does that mean? How do you make your position
look legal? I mean, it's interesting. I'm a huge fan of James Scott's work,
and his work has been very inspiring, and basically one of his arguments
is how do people avoid the state? How do people somehow go under
the radar of the state? The more I talk to people, the more I realize that
almost the opposite seems to be the case here. How do people act to be
seen by the state? Not to avoid it, but to be recognized and seen as
rights subjects, as legitimate holders of land, as legitimate residents in a
place. That is super complicated if you are poor, if you are not wellconnected to the political organizations, but people find all kinds of
ways to be visible. If you talk to people, they will be very keen to pay
the land tax and keep the receipt. The receipt says, black and white,
that this is not proof of ownership. But what that really means in
practice is that this is proof of ownership. It's good enough for people to
do local transactions among themselves. If you buy a piece of land, this
tax receipt follows. And it also makes you think that what is being
bought and sold is actually not the land, but the land right, even if it is
tenuous. So people are buying and selling land right opportunities with
all the warts you can imagine. It doesn't mean that you can't be evicted,
but at least you buy and sell land and you have these small
representations of your visibility. So, for example, when there's a
census, people are being counted and you get a small sticker that you
could put on your window.
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00:08:59
Christian Lund
People are very, very happy to have this sticker from the government
put on their window because it shows that government knows that you
are here, the government can't come and say, "we never knew you
were here you must be squatting" because they have this little round
sticker that says that says this family lives here and we know. So I've
become increasingly interested in the range of representations of
rights. So you pay your taxes, you make sure you have your take on
your window. You make sure that you pay for electricity and water. You
make sure you behave as you imagine government would like a citizen
to behave. You have your kids registered for schooling and so on. And
there are all kinds of ways in which you can demonstrate that you are
visible to the state. None of them says property, but they all amount to
a kind of indirect recognition of your right to be there. And I find that
really, really interesting. My book is basically about this. There are eight
chapters in all, six of them are cases all dealing with this issue about
how do people operate to signal what they have they have within the
law, even if they don't know what the law is.
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00:10:12
Duncan McCargo
Right. I mean, you've already alluded to this, but maybe I can draw you
out a bit, one easily understands that poor people, villagers, people in
marginalized communities would have struggled to assert their rights
to land during an authoritarian regime such as the New Order. But why
is it that in the wake of Indonesia's much heralded democratization
after the fall of Suharto in 1998, they're still struggling so much to
assert those rights?
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00:10:42
Christian Lund
When Suharto's regime fell in 98, there were this massive democratic
transformation, but it was there were two things that happened at the
same time. You had democratization and you had decentralization.
And decentralization basically meant that instead of Jakarta approving
every single little thing that happened in the country, this power was
delegated to the districts. And instead of Jakarta collecting taxes and
then distributing funds to all districts, districts were compelled to
recover their own funds. One way that this happens is that you can
allocate land to plantations. It's a very intricate system in Indonesia for
allocation of land to plantation companies. Basically, you need to have
first a search permit and then you need to have a plantation permit with
a search permit. That's basically a one-off thing and you pay the district.
Once you have settled your plantation, you pay for your plantation
permit and that money goes to the central government. So it means
that local governments, they only get a one-off payment every time
they issue a search permit to a company. So they don't have any
recurrent income from that, which incentivizes them to issue many
search permits as you can imagine. So that's what they do when they
give out search permits to plantation companies. Some may do it in a
very sober and regular way where they only search for land where
there's not already a settlement. But many, probably most companies,
will search for land, whether there are people there or not. They will say
that the search committee is practically the plantation permit, and they
will have people evicted and local government, because it depends on
this, will act to facilitate evictions. They will send police or army or
whatever to make sure their financial business of search permits can
continue. With the 1998 massive reform, you did get democratization.
You did get more of a multiparty structure,
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00:12:44
Christian Lund
and in the first maybe year or two, the whole peasant issue was high on
the agenda. But you also got decentralization which moved the
obligation and the incentive and the desire to make money from
Jakarta to local districts. This has meant the commodification of land to
a degree that very few anticipated, I think. And with this whole palm oil
boom that we've seen over the past 20 years, there's been a massive
drive to have plantations and to convert whatever land use you have
into some kind of palm oil producing.
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00:13:19
Duncan McCargo
So, in short, what happened after ‘98 unleashed a lot of new forces and
groups in society, many of which had interests that were highly
detrimental to the poor and marginalized peoples?
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00:13:32
Christian Lund
And even if the peasantry was in many places organized in peasant
movements and very well organized, this was only one of a thousand
organizations that sprung up.
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00:13:43
Duncan McCargo
One of the very interesting cases you talk about is the Sundanese
Peasants’ Movement in West Java, where they sought to occupy or
reoccupy, however you want to term it, land after 1998. What kind of
results did that movement have in their attempts to get the land back
into the hands of those who claim to have owned it previously?
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00:14:02
Christian Lund
It's probably one of the movements that has been most successful, the
land that they actually did take back or reoccupied. I mean, the
terminologies did this. Whatever way you ask the question, will reveal
your allegiance, that's true. But the land that they managed to control
seems to be managed in a very sound way in the sense that land is
being distributed among the members. They all have small plots. The
total area concerned is probably not as big as they would have wanted.
So it's a success where it happened, but it didn't happen as a sort of
sweeping wave that covered the entire province. But many plantation
companies have experienced occupations of part or all of their land. In
many places the sentiment is say, that’s okay stay here, we will not
keep evicting you and you will not keep expanding. It's not a total
success. But the places that it has happened, I think, has been quite
successful.
Of course peasant movements struggle with something which is bigger
than themselves, also. They struggle with the fact that young people
very often see their future outside of agriculture. I had a lot of talks with
people who were kind of disappointed in the sense that they had risked
everything. It's a dangerous thing to begin to occupy land when your
adversaries are armed and not mild mannered, right. They've sacrificed
everything. And what their kids wanted to do when they turned 12, 15
was not really to farm, but it was to do something in the city. And I
guess this is the case with agriculture throughout the planet. The other
thing is, of course, that the movements were carried by egalitarian
ethos and an empty commodification ethos. The movement very often
would say the movement has liberated this land; the movement is now
allocating half a hectare to you. If you will farm it, fine. If you will pass it
onto your kids, fine.
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00:15:58
Christian Lund
If you want to sell it, it has to go back to the movement first. You can
understand that this is a powerful ideology and also where it comes
from. But that's not really how people operate. You have sickness in
your family or if you need to mobilize some money or you need to send
your kids to college, you need to sell maybe a slice of your land. You're
not going to give it back to the to the movement. You're going to sell it
to somebody else. So even though the movement has tried to have this
kind of land registry and semi sophisticated way of managing land and
land allocation, a simpler form of land exchange for money is also
emerging. I haven't studied that. I think somebody should. But this is
undermining the authority of movement because now you've got
people who technically are on government land that was technically
given to a plantation for a 35-year lease. It is under the control of a
social movement because the actual control of the plot is in the hands
of the farmer who decided to hand over this control to his neighbor.
And it becomes very complicated to see who is the authorizing body of
this piece of property.
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00:17:04
Duncan McCargo
Yes, absolutely. Now, there are many other cases and examples in your
book, and we can't cover all of them. I'm particularly sorry that we don't
have time to talk about the urban questions so much in Bandung and
Medan. But maybe we should talk a little bit about Aceh, which
obviously has a very distinctive and specific history as a post-conflict in
inverted commas area. How did the quote unquote, ‘resolution’ of the
Aceh conflict in the early 2000s impact on the land issues that you're
looking at? Again, this sounds like it ought to be an opportunity, but I
didn't get the impression that that was really the case for many people
in Aceh.
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00:17:42
Christian Lund
Aceh has been a conflictual area for a very long time, and especially
since the mid 1970s, there was an armed resistance and basically a civil
war. And the Free Aceh Movement was the unifying resistance and
representative of the Aceh people in Aceh and when, just after the
horrendous tsunami in 2005, there were enough cause among people to
settle and make a kind of peace agreement. And I think people had high
expectations that the free Aceh movement, GAM, would continue to
defend their interests. But I think what happened when this movement
converted into being a political party was that it developed interests in
the plantation sector almost immediately. So instead of working for a
kind of land reform where smallholders would be given a piece of land
and individuals who had been suffering from the old whole war in Aceh,
instead of having that as the sort of highest point of the agenda, it was
seen too good an opportunity to latch onto the palm oil boom they
missed. And Partai Aceh basically won the first elections. They pushed
this allocation of land to plantation companies in a very, very aggressive
way. Companies were also very good at showing political people in the
different parties how they could benefit from this conversion of land. So
people who had high hopes for democratic transition with the peace
accord, I think they felt shortchanged very soon because the Partai
Aceh basically privileged transportation company development. One of
the chapters in the book is basically about this, how this guerrilla
movement, as soon as it became a state bearing party, developed
interests in the whole system that they had been fighting. It's quite sad,
actually.
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00:19:34
Duncan McCargo
It's a very sad and salutary chapter, but it really is essential reading, I
think, to understand the nature of that particular transition. And I shall
certainly be assigning that to my students in years to come. One of the
most interesting aspects of your book to me was through the way that
you researched these various case studies in collaboration with a team
of local researchers with the Indonesians. Could you talk a bit about
how you carried out the surveys and the identification of the cases and
then the field work as a sort of a team effort?
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00:20:09
Christian Lund
It developed over time also. My initial research was done together with
my colleague, Noer Fauzi Rachman, who I met at Berkeley, and when
he returned to Indonesia after having completed his PhD thesis, I went
there to visit him and the first two months I was there, I was traveling
with him and his associates and friends who had been in the SPP
peasant movement and the sort of social movements. I was given a well
guided tour. The work I did in Aceh and in North Sumatra was with local
scholar-activists, NGOs, or the legal aid organization in Aceh and
another organization in North Sumatra called HaRI, and we have
meetings where we discussed what the research issue is, what are we
interested? What am I really looking for? And then when I was
explaining what I was looking for, they would come up with examples of
where these things were happening. We would then drive around the
outskirts of Medan, for example, to find locations where these
particular kinds of controversies were taking place. And then we did
common exploratory fieldwork for a week or so where we talked to all
the significant actors we could find in that area and tried to get as many
stories and explanations about who controls land and how.
Then we had a kind of seminar as a group, and as a result of that, we
developed, not a very strict questionnaire, but some key questions we
wanted to investigate. And then students who were associated with
this NGO did stays in a series of locations to investigate those
questions. So who controlled land, how did that come about, who do
people go to when they want to verify their ownership and so on, so
forth. The idea was that students could use the material that they
gathered for their bachelor's thesis or master's thesis, and I could use it
for my purpose as well. So in that sense, the data was shared, and we
spent quite some time discussing the significance of the data and
comparing data between these locations.
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00:22:05
Christian Lund
It's a kind of pragmatic way of getting more substantive data from a
very qualitative way of sort of expanding the field a little bit.
,
00:22:13 Now, it's quite an exemplary way of working and in itself is very
Duncan McCargo interesting, I think, for other people who are perhaps interested in
rather different issues, they could still attempt some elements of this
collaborative methodology.
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00:22:23
Christian Lund
I have colleagues that experimented with this kind of fieldwork in in
West Africa, and that's where I did it the first few times. They've written
a small research protocol, h ow can you actually do this. And I think I
followed the protocol in spirit. I didn't apply to the letter because that
was impossible for me. This is an interesting group of social
anthropologists working in especially Niger and who have developed
this kind of collective fieldwork for identification of such groups, which
is a big collective presence in a place. And then you identify these
significant groups and issues and then you leave somebody behind, two
or more, to in depth study now what has been identified. This is a kind
of a methodology that can be adapted to different settings, variety of
ways. It takes a little bit of time, and you need to somehow have
aligned your purpose. I think one of good things for me was that people
who with whom I worked had personal interests in their findings as well.
,
00:23:16
Duncan McCargo
I guess this book really leaves us with the question, the classic question,
what is to be done? We have to, having read your book, feel rather
skeptical that it's going to be possible to, quote, unquote, solve these
problems by means of further legal reforms or remedies, which are sort
of classic responses that policymakers tend to come up with. What can
be done?
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00:23:37
Christian Lund
I think the one problem is to ask the question just like that, because you
ask the question, what is to be done? Then you kind of assume that
you're the one who should do it. You would probably get further in
asking what are people doing? What I mean, people write really well
aware of this. So what do people actually do and how can some of the
things they do be supported and strengthened institutionally. And one
way of operating is to have talks and debates in various districts about
what constitutes proof of ownership and what constitutes proof of
property. And this is maybe where decentralization and the enormous
size of the country can work in its favor, because in some places it might
actually work. It might actually be possible to find ways of common
exceptions that if you've stayed in a place with so and so long,
government can't just evict you if it wants to, but think it's going to be
an uphill battle because of the money involved. Even if people are
moving off the land, land is extremely valuable in Indonesia. And even if
people are moving off the land, we're still talking about millions and
millions of people for whom land is the direct source of livelihood. But I
think we need to pay attention to what people are actually doing and
not trying to think of a smart solution that nobody has thought of the
last 70 years. A Dutch colonial government laid down some tracks that
have been extremely convenient for any government to ride on because
it is government in all kinds of ways. I think the only way to challenge
this properly is to make sure that people use their democratic rights and
have a negotiation locally in their districts about what does it actually
mean to be a landholder. And if you paid your land tax, it shouldn't be
possible to evict you just for no good reason.
,
00:25:20
Christian Lund
But I think that it's a really tricky question. And I think it's also one of
the reasons that people actually live off the land. Even in the best of
times, it's a tough life, right? But if you then have to fight for your tough
life against adversaries that seem to be just getting stronger and more
determined, it's going to be an uphill battle.
,
00:25:39
Duncan McCargo
It is. I think that's an important note on which we have to end, but thank
you so much, Christian, for joining me today to talk about your new
book, Nine-Tenths of the Law.
,
00:25:48
Christian Lund
Thank you very much.
,
00:25:50
Duncan McCargo
I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at
the University of Copenhagen. And I've been talking to Christian Lund,
the author of Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in
Indonesia, which is out from Yale University Press in 2021. It's a book
that helps us gain a much deeper understanding of land and property
rights and the limitations of legal frameworks for securing those rights.
Thank you for joining the Nordic podcast showcasing Nordic
collaboration in studying Asia.
,
00:26:16 You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast