THE PREDATORY PRESIDENCY: Prabowo, State Power, and the Political Economy of Governing at Scale
cr: women nations instagram “Generals own forests, conglomerates own forests. Papuans own nothing. We are merely tenants here.” cr: topbnews.com Elisa Kambu, Governor of Southwest Papua, made this remark at the 2026 PAPEDA Summit in Sorong, in the presence of senior central-government officials. His broader argument concerned the disappearance of forests, the marginalisation of indigenous communities, and the need for formal recognition of customary forests. The statement embarks a question that sits at the centre of Indonesia political economy: Who actually benefits from the resources of a state? The conventional answer is that Indonesia’s natural resources belong to the people and are administered by the state. The politically relevant question, however, is about who possesses the institutional power to determine its allocation, who captures the rents generated from it, and who bears the costs when extraction produces social or environmental damage. That distinction ...