Rupture and its temporalities at Indonesia’s Jatigede Dam

In 2015, a long-proposed dam project was finally completed in West Java, Indonesia. Ultimately financed and built by Chinese actors, Jatigede Dam entailed a series of drawn-out processes of proposal, land acquisition, withdrawal, finance, and compensation. While the social impacts of dams are usually observed within fixed temporal boundaries, in this article we argue that a focus on 'project time', strictly bounded by planning and construction timeframes, obscures the broader conditions that render people displaceable and that disrupt naturesociety relations. To better illuminate the lived experience of displacement and resettlement at Jatigede we engage Mahanty and colleagues’ (2023) analytic of rupture, which provides an extended temporal and spatial frame. Through analysis of 24 interviews in the dam area, observation, and secondary data we detail the particular contours of rupture at Jatigede Dam and the crises that preceded and followed its construction. Our analysis understands dam construction to be embedded in broader processes of colonisation, transmigration, regime change, persecution, poor planning and governance, and inequality of opportunity. We conclude that the extended temporal frame of the rupture analytic captures the non-linear but interrelated, long-term processes that shape dam construction, displacement and resettlement to provide a richer understanding of nature-society disruption. By deepening the temporal dimension of rupture through the voices of those impacted by the Jatigede Dam, we provide a richer, socio-culturally contextualised understanding of time and its implications in hydropower developments.