Greasing the Wheels of Colonialism: Palm Oil Industry in West Papua

Abstract This article explores the links between colonial conflict, palm oil extraction, and displacement of Indigenous communities in Indonesia's Papua region (“West Papua”). 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 led to an increased militarization of Indigenous lands with a particularly harmful impact on Papua women. West Papua's colonial origins led to decades of military rule, underdevelopment, and political exclusion entrenching a power structure through violence that can only be sustained in continuing conditions of oppression. The palm oil industry 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 fuels multiple forms of insecurities for Papua communities 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, plantation development, ethnicity, and gender in West Papua as a humanitarian catastrophe, contributing to the development of a principled understanding of such harms that will ultimately disrupt the existing colonial order.