Extracting from the periphery: authoritarian extractivism and subnational poverty in Indonesia’s extractive heartlands

Indonesia is central to global commodity chains—from coal to nickel and copper-gold as energy-transition inputs—yet resource-producing districts sustain poverty above provincial averages. This article develops subnational authoritarian extractivism: overlapping globalizations are territorialised within a hybrid regime where formally democratic institutions are repurposed as sector-specific governance devices stabilising extraction and narrowing distributional contestation. Drawing on multi-site fieldwork in Muara Enim (coal), Indramayu (petroleum), and West Sumbawa (copper-gold), convergent mechanisms emerge: spatial concentration of extraction and deprivation; transfer dependence substituting for structural transformation; corporate social responsibility as discretionary patronage; and promissory electoral clientelism converting grievance into managed expectation. These mechanisms route value upward through fiscal and commodity-chain arrangements, concentrating social and environmental costs at extraction sites. Communities contesting these arrangements face intimidation, criminalisation, and legal harassment. Linking subnational poverty production to competing globalizations, the article reframes the resource curse as a spatial, sectoral form of authoritarian governance beneath democratic form.