Greasing the wheels of colonialism: palm oil industry in West Papua

This paper unpacks and explores the links between conflict, palm oil extraction and displacement of Indigenous communities in Indonesia’s Papua region (‘West Papua’). While the palm oil sector continues to be a growing industry, it begs many questions and belies a range of controversies. As certain impacts of large scale plantation development have by now become unavoidable, particularly on the local level, there is a growing need to understand the linkages between political and economic forces driving social conflict, extraction activities and its impact on native communities. In West Papua, Indigenous communities are systematically subjected to extractive violence and forced displacement, with large part of these incidents closely linked to the palm oil industry. Unsound practices of plantation development to satisfy demands of economic growth has lead to an increased militarization of Indigenous lands with a particularly harmful impact on Papua women. With climate change and its effects entering the stage, the risk of conflict and displacement have further increased. West Papua’s colonial origins led to decades of military rule, underdevelopment and political exclusion entrenching a power structure through violence which can only be sustained in continuing conditions of oppression. The palm oil industry thus functions within a predatory political economy where revenue-generating activity depends on inequality and vulnerability to violence. This article exposes the continuance of colonial mentality, in which an exploitative and deeply unequal economy is sustained to control wealth and resources. This not only impairs Papua communities’ climate resilience, but also diminishes the importance of their traditional environmental knowledge for climate adaptation. Building on the concept of human security, we conceptualize the intersecting threats created by conflict, gender and ethnicity in West Papua as a humanitarian catastrophe, contributing to the development of a principled understanding of such harms which will ultimately disrupt the existing colonial order.