Technologies of dispossession: comparative analysis of frontier-making and state power in Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines land dispossession in Indonesia through a conjunctural comparison of two frontier regimes: a long-standing commodity frontier in South Sulawesi and a rapidly assembled infrastructure frontier in Central Java. It argues that dispossession is enacted through a shifting institutional concert, where legal, institutional, discursive, and coercive technologies of power are adaptively sequenced. The state operates as a learning assemblage, recalibrating interventions across sites and timescales. By tracing divergent yet overlapping trajectories of dispossession, the article contributes to debates on frontier-making, authoritarian developmentalism, and the political economy of state-led agrarian transformation in the global South.