Reflecting on the excerpts from these two articles deepens my understanding of how Indonesia’s oil palm industry creates conditions that sustain organized violence and predation rather than delivering broad-based prosperity. Tania Murray Li’s 2017 piece, drawn from intensive ethnographic research in West Kalimantan between 2010 and 2015, focuses on the long-term consequences that follow the initial land acquisitions. She describes how the seemingly orderly infrastructure of plantations, including roads, mills, housing blocks, and contractual arrangements, conceals a pervasive predatory system that she terms the “mafia system”. This system operates without a single controlling family or clear boundaries between participants and outsiders. Managers skim wages from workers, officials demand bribes that often tie to election financing, and local residents adopt predatory behaviors to avoid becoming victims themselves. Li argues that this form of violence is infrastructural because it becomes embedded in the material monopoly over land, forests, water, and income opportunities that large-scale plantations impose. She concludes that promises of reform through regulation or certification schemes remain ineffective since the plantation logic subordinates law, governance, and livelihoods entirely, and the situation only deteriorates as plantation zones expand and reach saturation.
Paul Kenny, Rashesh Shrestha, and Edward Aspinall’s 2022 paper adopts a wider analytical frame to explore the broader relationship between commodity booms and low-intensity conflict across Indonesia. Informed by original fieldwork in South Sumatra and supported by quantitative evidence from multiple sources, including a primary survey of 1920 individuals in nearly 200 villages in North and South Sumatra, the 2014 Village Potential Survey, and national violence monitoring data covering 2005 to 2014, the authors show that violence is strongly associated with the extent of oil palm cultivation in a given area. They find that conflict peaks at intermediate levels of plantation coverage and becomes more pronounced when international commodity prices are high, as occurred after 2008 with a high point around 2012 before easing as prices declined. Their explanation centers on choke points in the oil palm supply chain, particularly the time-sensitive harvesting of perishable fresh fruit bunches, their rapid transport to centralized mills, and the processing stage, all of which create repeated opportunities for theft, extortion, and competition among mafias, youth gangs, company security forces, and other actors seeking control over rents. The authors make their results robust by employing reduced-form analysis and using agro-climatic suitability as an instrument to address potential endogeneity in plantation expansion.
Both articles highlight the decentralized and systemic nature of the “mafia” phenomenon in oil palm zones. They portray it as a networked form of predation that draws in state actors, private companies, and communities alike rather than a conventional criminal organization with a clear hierarchy. Li emphasizes the structural entrapment that mature plantation zones enforce through resource monopolies, while Kenny and colleagues demonstrate how violence fluctuates with market conditions and production technologies, indicating that the intensity of conflict depends on price cycles and the degree of cultivation rather than increasing uniformly with full saturation.
The excerpts together illustrate that legal agricultural expansion can generate organized forms of violence and extraction comparable to those observed in illicit commodity sectors, yet they do so through distinct methodological strengths. Li’s narrative conveys the daily experience of plunder, powerlessness, and dependency in ways that statistical patterns alone cannot capture, whereas the quantitative scope of Kenny’s paper maps temporal and spatial variations that place localized cases within larger national trends. This combination strengthens the argument that oil palm booms frequently produce rapacity instead of reducing conflict through widespread income gains.
The persistence of these issues remains striking when considered in light of ongoing industry developments. Indonesia continues to pursue significant further expansion, including renewed efforts to increase planted areas, raise biodiesel blending targets, and open frontier regions, even as earlier moratoriums have ended and pressures on Indigenous lands and ecosystems persist. Reports of continued land conflicts, environmental crime networks, and concerns over rights violations suggest that the predatory dynamics both papers identify have not substantially diminished. While certifications such as the RSPO have undergone refinements and received attention in recent stakeholder discussions, the core critiques presented here, particularly Li’s view that such measures fail to alter the underlying plantation model, appear largely unaddressed in practice.
These readings leave a lasting impression that agrarian capitalism in settings with weak institutional oversight often institutionalizes violence as an intrinsic feature of wealth creation. They prompt serious reflection on whether the current expansion trajectory can ever produce equitable benefits for the communities most directly affected or whether limiting further growth offers the more responsible path to prevent the predatory systems described from becoming even more deeply entrenched throughout the archipelago.
References
- Li, T. M. (2018). After the land grab: Infrastructural violence and the “Mafia System” in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zones. Geoforum, 96, 328-337.
- Kenny, P. D., Shrestha, R., & Aspinall, E. (2026). Commodity booms, conflict, and organized crime: Logics of violence in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation economy. The Journal of Politics, 88(2), 000-000.
Last modified on 2026-01-26