Description

Throughout history the Indonesian state has struggled to assert control over its national frontiers (borders) and accompanying natural resources, using the arguments of national security and promotion of development to the ‘estranged and backward’ frontier inhabitants. As part of this pragmatic strategy in frontier colonization and resource extraction successive Indonesian governments have since the late 1960s allocated large-scale timber and plantation concessions along the resource-rich national frontier on the island of Borneo to military entrepreneurs and private companies. Long stretches of the national frontier between Indonesia and Malaysia are still widely forested and contain large patches of land classified in government policy narratives as ‘sleeping’, ‘waste’ or ‘idle,’ while the sparse population is classified as ‘uncivilized.’ The presentation examines the frontier constellation that combines resource extraction and sovereign politics, which is found repeated along other resource-rich borderlands of Southeast Asia.

Michael Eilenberg is a Visiting Professor at Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. He teaches graduate courses in Development and Global studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on issues of state formation, sovereignty, autonomy, citizenship and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of Southeast Asia. His current project, funded by The Danish Council For Free Research, focuses on the drive behind rapid agrarian expansion in frontier regions of developing states in Southeast Asia. His book At the Edges of States: Dynamics of State Formation in the Indonesian Borderlands (Leiden: KITLV Press) will be published in late 2011.