When Customary Land Meets Capital: Indigenous Sovereignty, State Legality, and Agrarian Dispossession in Kajang, Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines the agrarian conflict between the Kajang Indigenous community and a plantation concession operating under Indonesia’s Right of Cultivation regime. Moving beyond administrative explanations of overlapping land claims, it argues that the conflict reflects a structural reorganization of territorial sovereignty under concession-based agrarian capitalism. Drawing on critical ethnography, the study analyzes how customary land embedded in relational governance, social reproduction, and ancestral obligation is reclassified as “state land” and transformed into concessionary space. This juridical reclassification constitutes a contemporary modality of dispossession mediated through legality rather than overt coercion. The HGU regime functions as a legal technology that produces territorial abstraction, stabilizes capital accumulation, and institutionalizes hierarchical legal pluralism in which statutory sovereignty prevails over customary jurisdiction. Although Indigenous communities are formally recognized within national legal frameworks, such recognition remains conditional and does not redistribute territorial authority. Resistance in Kajang therefore represents not only opposition to corporate expansion but a political struggle over sovereignty and the authority to define land itself. By integrating Marxian political economy with decolonial theory, this article demonstrates that contemporary agrarian conflict in Indonesia is embedded in the operation of law and state-centered sovereignty. It concludes that meaningful decolonization of land governance requires structural transformation of concessionary regimes rather than procedural recognition alone.