Making Caims Modestly The Norms and Discourse Driving Land Conflicts in Rural Indonesia

Ostensibly with the aim of spurring rural economic growth, governments across Southeast Asia have been providing agricultural, plantation, and natural resource extraction companies with access to large tracts of land, thereby facilitating the dispossession of rural communities. In response, conflicts, protests of rural communities against companies have become common across Southeast Asia. Focusing on ten conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies in Indonesia, in this article we study the discourse that rural Indonesians adopt to express their grievances and legitimize their claims vis-à-vis both companies and state actors. Employing a collection of 66 newspaper articles on community protests, we analyse in this article how community leaders present their claims to journalists. Comparing the relative incidence of needs-, customary law-, rights- and justice-based framing, we show in this article how the political discourse adopted by protesting rural Indonesians is marked by a remarkable irrelevance of conceptions of citizen rights and notions of social justice. Instead, protesting rural Indonesians tend to prefer to frame their claims mostly in terms of social obligations while formulating these claims in remarkably modest and polite terms.