Indonesian filmmakers explore why their country has so many land conflicts. As they film the protests of communities against palm oil companies and real estate developers taking their land, they find that the roots of these conflicts go back to Indonesia’s colonial past. When in the 19th century the Dutch colonial rulers claimed ownership over most of Indonesia’s land, they weakened the land rights of ordinary Indonesians. This heritage lingers, as in contemporary Indonesia the land ownership of ordinary Indonesians remains restricted. With the police siding with companies, the many demonstrations that communities organize seem to have little effect. Yet after long struggles some communities manage to recover their land, showing the viability of an alternative path to economic development. After the screening there will be a Q&A with Ward Berenschot, a researcher at KITLV and University of Amsterdam and involved in the making of this documentary. You can watch the trailer to Colonial Debris here.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at KITLV. Studying politics and citizenship in India and Indonesia, he is the author of Riot Politics (Colombia UP 2011) and co-author of Democracy for Sale (Cornell UP 2019, with Edward Aspinall). He recently directed the research project ‘Palm Oil Conflicts and Access to Justice in Indonesia’ which led to the Watchdoc documentary ‘Colonial Debris’.
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).