When and under what circumstances does natural resource extraction give rise to violent conflict? This research from the Australian National University analyses the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia. It argues that natural resource exploitation promoted conflict in Aceh only because it became entangled in wider processes of identity construction and was reinterpreted back to the population by ethnic political entrepreneurs in a way that legitimated violence. Rather than any intrinsic qualities of natural resource extraction, the key factor was the presence of an appropriate identity-based collective action frame.
War raged in Aceh province in Indonesia, from the mid-1970s until it was brought to an end by a peace deal in 2005. The foundation of the main guerilla group, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), in the mid-1970s coincided with the development of Aceh’s Arun natural gas fields. GAM leaders and other Acehnese dissidents emphasised their exploitation, and exploitation of other natural resources, in their condemnations of the Indonesian government.
The situation in Aceh indicates that natural resource exploitation gives rise to conflict when it becomes entangled in wider processes of identity construction and is reinterpreted back to the population by political entrepreneurs in ways that legitimate violence. The particular mechanisms giving rise to an identity and collective action frame conducive to violence will vary widely from case to case.
Natural resources are only one field among many through which the conflict in Aceh was expressed and legitimated.
- The historical construction of Acehnese identity provided a bank of cultural references and historical memories with which to legitimate insurgency.
- Acehnese ethnic identity was territorialised and a sense of Acehnese entitlement developed. This sense of entitlement was inflamed by the increasingly authoritarian political conditions then prevailing in Indonesia.
- In this context, a counter-elite developed who extended and inverted the official discourse to stress Acehnese victimhood and exploitation by Indonesia.
- Claims about unjust exploitation of natural resources resonated powerfully in the Aceh conflict because they reinforced the discourse of deprivation that already infused Acehnese identity by the 1970s.
- In Riau and East Kalimantan, which experienced similar processes of natural resource exploitation, there was no context of historical violence and institutionalisation of ethnicity. They did not become sites of violence.
Acehnese grievances about natural resource exploitation only arose and became politically consequential for violence as part of a wider discourse of deprivation that positioned the Acehnese as victims of the Indonesian state.
- It is important not to overlook insights from earlier generations that emphasise both the social and political conditions under which people rebel, and the ideological and cultural frames that must be present to legitimate rebellion.
- It is important to think of grievance, not as an objective measure, but as a socially constructed value (such as identity, ethnicity or greed) that arises only within a particular historical, cultural and political context.
- Even in separatist and ethnic conflicts, there will be variation in the circumstances giving rise to a collective action frame legitimating violence (state institutionalisation of ethnic identity will not always be crucial).
- Even in cases where natural resource grievances appear to be central to conflict dynamics, it is important to look at the processes by which those grievances arise in tandem with identity construction.
