Violence as Development: Indonesia’s Colonial Agenda in West Papua

James C. Scott (1938-2024).

The late anthropologist James C. Scott, in "Seeing Like a State" (1998), warned of a chilling truth: 

When modern states impose simplified visions of order, they often destroy the complex, living realities of the people they claim to help

Nowhere is this truer than in West Papua—where Indonesia’s so-called “development” is nothing short of a slow-motion cultural genocide.

Take the Indonesian government’s grotesque plan to carve two million hectares of food estates out of Merauke, one of the last bastions of indigenous Papuan land. 

Marketed as a noble bid for national food security, this initiative is in fact a brutal land grab—driven by Javanese elites in Jakarta who have never set foot in a sago forest, never listened to the elders of a Papuan clan, and never cared to understand the land they seek to dominate.

For Papuans, the forest is not just home—it is blood, memory, and soul. Ripping it apart to plant rice—a crop alien to this land—is not just ecological sabotage. It is an assault on identity. It is Jakarta shouting: "your culture does not matter; your existence is inconvenient."

This isn’t new. It’s a repetition of a colonial script, dressed up in the language of “national interest.” Similar schemes in Kalimantan and Sumatra have already turned biodiversity into barren monoculture, evicted communities, and handed power to oligarchs and generals. Yet Jakarta pushes on—because failure, in the eyes of the powerful, is preferable to acknowledging indigenous resistance.

Let’s be clear: this is not about feeding the poor. It’s about feeding a nationalist myth that Papua is an empty frontier to be conquered, tamed, and exploited. It’s about turning forests into profit, people into statistics, and dissent into silence.

True development empowers; it does not erase. It listens; it does not impose. What is happening in Merauke is not development—it is displacement. It is dispossession. And it must be named for what it is: a crime against the land and its people.

West Papua does not need Jakarta’s bulldozers or bureaucrats. It needs justice. It needs land back. And it needs the world to finally see what is happening—not as policy, but as plunder.