Email: Ananeza.Aban@ugent.be

Affiliation: Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University

Nationality: Philippine

Land Occupation Movement as a Peasant Alternative: The case of Indonesia's Serikat Petani Pasundan

Abstract

This research centers on the land occupation movement of the Serikat Petani Pasundan (SPP) in West Java as a peasant alternative in a phenomenon of dispossession that is rooted in colonial intervention. There are two elements that the project would like to interrogate: first is the outcome of the land occupation movement to advance agrarian reform, second is the exceptional yet undervalued contribution of women in all the stages of the land occupation which has the tendency to be subsumed in the broader struggle for agrarian reform.

When Suharto's authoritarian regime was collapsing, SPP organized land occupations as a strategy of the dispossessed rural Sundanese population. Land occupation as an act of land reclaiming, is deeply embroiled in SPP's property arrangements and notion of citizenship, which brought them to their own local territorialization process characterized by local classification, communication, and enforcement. It became a political symbol for the peasants by gaining themselves back as citizens who have rights.

From a mainstream lens, these peasant-led land occupations can be thought of as "illegal"' acts because peasants transgress formal state (private) law by occupying land that is not legally theirs. Due to its illegal nature, it can be expected that land occupations will be quickly rejected or abrogated the moment the legal order is restored. Nevertheless, the evidence of peasant land occupations in other parts of the world often obtains a remarkably long-lived character moving towards sustainable settlements. This is to mention the cases in Brazil, Thailand, and Timor Leste.

For the peasant unions and their allies, land occupation is an act of reclaiming seized properties or a legitimate repossession of property. It must then be understood from a frame of longstanding landlessness, rural poverty, and state abandonment of agrarian reform.

While this action may be popularly perceived as an outright attack against the state, it may also mean an active and innovative response of peasants to challenge state and corporate power, and use the law and notion of property rights to their own advantage.

This research finds it relevant to discuss how land occupation becomes a 'weapon of the weak' in order to address the unfinished land reform project after Indonesian independence and resist indentured servitude since the epoch of colonial capitalism.

This study also attempts to contribute to enriching the iteration of public authority to a more inclusive manner. This emphasizes the peasant class as a political force based on their collective power to wage social transformation and their ability to execute alternative ways of living beyond the narrow boundaries of state-centric recognition and legitimation. This builds on a research line that is the politics of land access, with a special focus on the non-state public authorities sanctioning access to land and other natural resources.

Navigating the intersectionality between the agrarian reform struggle and women's emancipatory role, this paper also critically examines the status of peasant women in the domestic, production, and political spheres that can contribute to the narrative and challenges of 'repeasantization'.

Given the deep-seated imprints of patriarchy, violent and militarized masculinities within Indonesia's history of colonialism and Suharto's authoritarian rule, it is important to unmask how women react to these particular stages of their rural lives. This research will explore how women re-constitute their communities to build the foundation of the organization that fortifies their land occupation movement.

One moment during field work, a woman former tea plantation laborer graphically described how they, in the course of the land occupation, uprooted tea plants whenever the plantation men came to their village and destroyed their local staple crops. These are valuable stories of 'stubbornness' that deserve a space in scholarly investigation.

Bio

Ananeza P. Aban is currently a PhD researcher of the Department of Conflict and Development Studies and a recipient of the Special Research Fund doctoral scholarship of Ghent University in Belgium. She also serves as a Senior Research Fellow of the University of the Philippines (UP) Center for Integrative and Development Studies Program on Alternative Development. Among her major tasks are coordinating the field research across Southeast Asia, co-editing the Alternative Practices monograph series (2020, 2023), and ensuring the international linkages of the Program.

She finished her Master of Community Development degree from UP Diliman. Prior to her work in the academe as a full-time researcher, she headed the Secretariat Team of the ASEAN Civil Society Conference/ASEAN Peoples' Forum in 2017, the broadest regional platform of civil society groups that engages issues on ASEAN. While working in the academe, she still joins the social movement in the Philippines and at the Southeast Asia level. She has lived and worked with Metro Manila urban poor communities as well as indigenous peoples in Mindanao. She has conducted field research in many parts of Southeast Asia, including the borderland communities. Her fields of interest are globalization and development studies, critical agrarian studies, resistance and solidarity, radical political geography, gender and development. Her recent co-edited book is: Reimagining Development in Southeast Asia: Alternative Practices from the Grassroots and Social Movements (2025) which was published by Springer Nature.