Technologies of dispossession: comparative analysis of frontier-making and state power in Indonesia

This article examines land dispossession in Indonesia through a conjunctural comparison of two frontier regimes: a long-standing commodity frontier in South Sulawesi and a rapidly assembled infrastructure frontier in Central Java. It argues that dispossession is enacted through a shifting institutional concert, where legal, institutional, discursive, and coercive technologies of power are adaptively sequenced. The state operates as a learning assemblage, recalibrating interventions across sites and timescales. By tracing divergent yet overlapping trajectories of dispossession, the article contributes to debates on frontiermaking, authoritarian developmentalism, and the political economy of state-led agrarian transformation in the global South.