The Invention of Borders and the Criminalisation of Movement
The sea, once a free and open space for Indigenous ocean-based nomads, has been systematically compartmentalised and policed, particularly after the end of World War II. This transformation is not merely a geopolitical shift but a profound alteration in how space, movement, and identity are conceived.
The imposition of state borders in Southeast Asia — particularly in Indonesia — marks the violent interruption of a way of life that existed for centuries without the need for fixed territorial boundaries. In fact, the emergence of these state borders not only criminalised Indigenous mobility but also imposed a fundamentally alien structure of sovereignty over spaces that were previously conceived as fluid, relational, and interconnected.
The concept of borders, as we understand it today, is largely a modern invention linked to the rise of the nation-state system.
In the aftermath of World War II, newly independent states in Asia, including Indonesia, inherited colonial borderlines that were drawn without regard to the Indigenous peoples who had long navigated, lived, and traded across these borders. These boundaries, inherited from colonial cartographies, were never meant to accommodate the realities of Indigenous oceanic mobility.
As someone whose community lives, breathes and occupies tiny island at the state border, I experienced how they imposed an arbitrary, rigid classification that segregated communities, restrictively defined territorial ownership, and criminalised movement. Theoretically, this transformation can be understood through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of bio-power and governmentality. Foucault argues that the modern state exercises power not only through laws and regulations but through the normalisation of behavior and the organisation of space.
This is particularly relevant when examining the relationship between Indigenous ocean wanderers and the state in postcolonial Southeast Asia. The imposition of state borders effectively redefined how space should be used and occupied. Once, the ocean was seen as a vast commons — fluid and transitory, where people moved freely according to their seasonal cycles, fishing, trading, and visiting other communities.
newly independent states in Asia, including Indonesia, inherited colonial borderlines that were drawn without regard to the Indigenous peoples who had long navigated, lived, and traded across these borders.
With the creation of state borders, the ocean became a series of fragmented territories, each with its own set of legal regulations, administrative controls, and security forces. The act of crossing from one territory to another — whether to visit relatives, barter goods, or fish as my people does for generations — was no longer an organic, customary practice but a transgression of state law.
In short, the ocean became a zone of exclusion, where Indigenous mobility was criminalised.
It reminds me with the work of Claude Meillassoux, where we can see that the state’s control over movement — particularly the imposition of border regimes on oceanic spaces — is a direct extension of what Marx calls primitive accumulation. Meillassoux argues that post-colonial states continue the colonial project by dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land, their labour, and their means of subsistence.
In the case of ocean wanderers, their means of survival — movement and access to diverse marine resources — was regulated and restricted through bureaucratic mechanisms like residency requirements, fishing permits, and national identification cards.
These measures serve to reterritorialise space — previously governed by kinship relations, traditional navigation methods, and ecological knowledge — into state-managed territories. The forced confinement of oceanic peoples to specific, fixed locales within the nation-state structure is an extension of primitive accumulation; it is an attempt to dispossess these communities of their means of livelihood in favor of a capitalist model of resource extraction and state control.
Another important theoretical framework to consider is the work of Michel Foucault on disciplinary power. In his analysis of how modern states exercise control, Foucault describes a shift from sovereign power — exercised through direct violence and spectacle — to a more insidious form of control that operates through surveillance, normalisation, and categorisation.
The criminalisation of Indigenous mobility along state borders in Southeast Asia is a clear example of disciplinary power in action.
Indigenous ocean wanderers were subjected to state surveillance through military outposts and checkpoints. We were no longer free to navigate the seas as how we had for generations but were instead required to carry documents, registers, and permits that allowed them to exist within state-defined spaces. The ocean, a space of freedom, was now subject to the logic of security and sovereignty. In this context, the creation of state borders and the criminalisation of movement are intertwined with the state’s desire to control resources and populations.
The forced confinement of oceanic peoples to specific, fixed locales within the nation-state structure is an extension of primitive accumulation;
Take for example the Indonesian state efforts to ground the Bajau community. By reducing nomadic communities to fixed, administratively defined spaces, the state can more easily exploit the resources within those spaces — whether through direct extraction (such as mining, logging, or fishing) or indirect control (such as taxation and regulation).
The policing of Indigenous peoples at borders — whether through militarised enforcement or bureaucratic restrictions — is thus not only about territorial sovereignty but about controlling labour, production, and consumption. This aligns with the concept of necropolitics as proposed by Achille Mbembe, who writes about the ways in which states regulate life and death through systems of exclusion and marginalisation.
For Indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia, the imposition of borders is not merely a political or legal issue; it is a question of survival.
By criminalising movement and restricting access to resources, the state has undermined the ability of oceanic peoples to sustain themselves, effectively pushing them into economic dependency and, in many cases, poverty. As the state introduces policies that limit their mobility and access to traditional livelihoods, Indigenous communities are not only dispossessed of their resources but also subjected to forms of social death — no longer able to live in the way they once did.
While at the same time, the resistance to these forms of control is fraught with contradictions.
On the one hand, Indigenous peoples continue to contest the state’s imposition on their territories, often through informal resistance or legal challenges. On the other hand, the very structure of the state — its administrative power, its legal framework, and its military enforcement — makes it difficult to challenge the borders themselves. In many ways, the state borders are not just physical boundaries but symbols of a larger ideological project — one that seeks to erase Indigenous ways of life and replace them with a modern, state-centric vision of development and governance.
Furthermore, the legacy of colonialism plays a crucial role in the creation of state borders and the criminalisation of movement. As postcolonial states emerged in Southeast Asia, they inherited the colonial logic of territorial management and resource extraction. Colonial powers like the Dutch, the British, and the Spanish had already imposed their own forms of spatial control over the region, creating borders that served to facilitate the extraction of resources and the subjugation of Indigenous populations.
In Indonesia, the legacy of this colonial project is particularly evident in how state borders were drawn across the ocean, dividing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and fishing grounds. This colonial legacy is reflected in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who explored how colonialism imposed binary oppositions — civilized/primitive, developed/underdeveloped, land-based/oceanic — on Indigenous peoples. These oppositions continue to structure how the state views ocean-based nomadic peoples. The state, with its emphasis on sedentary life, private property, and resource extraction, continues to treat the ocean as a frontier to be tamed, controlled, and exploited.
In contrast, Indigenous ocean wanderers live a way of life that is inherently mobile, relational, and ecological. These contrasting worldviews are at the heart of the conflict over state borders and Indigenous mobility. This is why it important to understand how te criminalisation of Indigenous movement is not merely a consequence of the imposition of state borders; it is a direct result of the colonial project that continues to shape state policies and practices.
By criminalising movement and restricting access to resources, the state has undermined the ability of oceanic peoples to sustain themselves, effectively pushing them into economic dependency and, in many cases, poverty
The state’s regulation of movement, its categorisation of people, and its control over resources are all part of a broader effort to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land and their way of life. Through bureaucratic measures such as residency requirements, permits, and identity cards, the state seeks to solidify its control over Indigenous populations, transforming us from free agents of the sea into subjects of the state.
The criminalisation of movement, the imposition of legal controls, and the surveillance of these communities are part of a broader process of territorialisation and resource extraction that seeks to subsume Indigenous ways of life into the logic of the nation-state. This process, rooted in colonial history and sustained by modern state mechanisms, has left Indigenous oceanic peoples in a state of perpetual struggle — not only for survival but for the right to move freely across the ocean that has long been our home.
Landlocked Imaginations and Continental Extractivism in a Volcanic Archipelago
I grew up with the sea as our horizon, not just a backdrop to life but its very condition of possibility. For us, the ocean is not “between” lands — it is a connective tissue, a source of life and movement, a memory. But within the vision of the postcolonial Indonesian state, our ocean is invisible. The official maps are filled with solid colors — green for land, blue for water — but these maps are projections of a worldview that privileges land as the only space of value, and everything else as peripheral.
This inherited cartography of colonialism defines not only what counts as territory but also what counts as resources. The sea is rendered inert, passive — while the land becomes the principal site of extraction.After independence, Indonesia, like many postcolonial states in Asia, adopted and intensified what Claude Meillassoux described as the colonial mode of production, repurposed for national development.
Though the colonisers had left, their extractive logic remained embedded in the structures of the new state. Roads were still carved into forests, ports expanded to ferry out minerals, and energy poured into opening up inland territories rich in coal, copper, nickel, and gold. In this model, the value of a place was tethered to what could be dug up and shipped out. The worldview remained continental — even in a country like Indonesia, where the archipelago comprises over 17,000 islands and a maritime zone double the size of its land area.
This dissonance between geography and political imagination is more than ideological. It has material consequences.
The state’s extractive focus on land-based resources reproduces a form of what Marx described as economic fetishism — where the means of production (such as mining sites) are mistaken for the source of social order, rather than the social relations that govern them.
In this context, land becomes fetishised as the ultimate resource, while the ecological and cultural realities of the coast and sea are dismissed as marginal. Villages are relocated inland for the convenience of access to markets or resources. Maritime nomads are resettled into cement housing with no docks or boats, as if their lives could be transposed onto land with no loss.
This spatial logic also reveals an epistemic failure — a failure to recognise that coastal and island worlds are not empty frontiers but dense with meaning, knowledge, and life.
The equation of development with control over nature. This mindset, inherited from colonial extractivism, defines the land as “terra nullius“
The state’s singular focus on land-based extractivism portrays how well the kind of continental metaphysics, in which the value of a place is determined solely by its terrestrial productivity. This metaphysics not only silences the ocean but also creates a dangerous blind spot: it fails to account for the geological precarity of many of these newly exploited zones. Indonesia sits at the convergence of multiple tectonic plates. Volcanic eruptions, underwater earthquakes, and tsunamis are not anomalies — they are regular features of the archipelago.
Yet this fundamental reality is often ignored in the planning of large-scale extractive projects.
Coastal areas and small islands, prone to sea-level rise and seismic events, are treated as stable territories for infrastructure development. Nickel smelters are built within disaster-prone zones. Land reclamation buries mangrove forests that once protected shorelines from erosion and flooding. And the people living closest to these ecosystems — those with the most knowledge of how to live in balance with their volatility — are excluded from decision-making.
Here, Marshall Sahlins’ critique of Western economic rationality is particularly illuminating. Sahlins argued that so-called “primitive” societies often have more sophisticated systems of balance, sustainability, and reciprocity than modern capitalist economies, which claim to be rational while exhausting their own conditions of survival. The state’s drive to extract and accumulate — framed as a rational project of national development — proceeds as if ecological constraints do not exist. It is an anti-cosmic economy, in which capital accumulation overrides the lived knowledge of cycles, tides, and tectonics that has long sustained island and coastal peoples.
In fact, the state’s disregard for geological risk reflects a deeper problem: the equation of development with control over nature.
This mindset, inherited from colonial extractivism, defines the land as terra nullius — a blank slate to be tamed, engineered, and brought under capitalist production. The ocean is similarly viewed as a zone to be enclosed — via marine spatial planning, blue economy corridors, and the expansion of offshore mining.
Furthermore this technocratic vision does not merely control space; it silences alternative cosmologies. It treats Indigenous ecological knowledge not as science but as myth. When communities warn of changes in wave patterns, coral bleaching, or fish migration, these observations are dismissed as anecdotal rather than empirical.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage helps to highlight what is lost in this process. Indigenous communities, especially in island regions, are masterful bricoleurs — assembling their cosmologies, livelihoods, and survival strategies from the fragments of nature, weather, spirits, and memory. These are not inferior forms of knowledge, but different epistemological orders that respond to the sea’s unpredictability with flexibility and respect.
Yet the modern state displaces bricolage with linear planning and risk-blind extraction, introducing vulnerabilities that did not previously exist. What’s more, the land-centric approach to extractivism introduces cascading risks not only to local communities but to regional stability. Extractive infrastructure built in disaster-prone areas does not merely endanger those working or living nearby — it risks triggering environmental collapse, economic displacement, and conflict over diminishing marine and coastal resources.
When fish populations collapse due to sedimentation from inland mining operations, tensions rise between Indigenous fishers and migrant laborers. When mangroves are destroyed for port expansion, storm surges no longer have natural buffers, and entire settlements are wiped away. These disasters are not natural — they are political. They are the result of extractive decisions made far from the coasts they endanger.
Michael Taussig’s notion of mimetic excess is useful here to better understand. He describes how colonial powers often reproduced a hyper-rational, exaggerated version of themselves in the colonies—applying logics of order, measurement, and discipline with greater intensity than in the metropole.
This is what we see in Indonesia’s post-independence extractive policies: the imitation of colonial rationality, now justified in the name of national progress. The irony is devastating—the very forms of control that were once instruments of colonial domination are now embraced by the postcolonial state, amplified and redeployed on its own people and ecologies. And once again, Indigenous communities are positioned as obstacles to development rather than stewards of sustainability.
If we look deeper, the state’s allegiance to land-based extractivism is not just about resources — it is also about legitimacy. The nation-state seeks to affirm its sovereignty through mastery over land. Building roads, bridges, ports, and smelters are not only economic projects; they are symbolic acts of authority. The land must be seen to yield to state planning. And yet, in doing so, the state becomes blind to the lessons of its own geography — that it governs not a continent, but a volatile, oceanic archipelago, alive with water, movement, and unpredictability.
Indonesia’s post-independence extractive policies: the imitation of colonial rationality
The post-independence Indonesian state continues to view itself through the lens of continental extractivism, disregarding the reality of its archipelagic geography and the ecological intelligence of its coastal and Indigenous communities.
This landlocked imagination is a colonial inheritance that prioritises terrestrial accumulation over maritime resilience, producing policies that are both economically short-sighted and ecologically catastrophic. The challenge is not only to recognise the ocean as a space of life and value but to reimagine sovereignty and development from the perspective of the sea.
Until then, we remain governed by a state that sees only land, even when it is sinking.
The Epistemic of Anti-Marxism, Structural Blindness, and the Limits of Indigenous Resistance
I have sat in village halls where the walls were lined with woven mats, community leaders speaking with fire in their voices about stolen land, poisoned rivers, and broken promises. I have been in workshops in the capital, where Indigenous youth sketched campaign posters calling for justice, for recognition, for the return of ancestral territory.
And yet, amid this flurry of activism, there is often something missing — a language for the structure itself. We name the mine, the company, the politician. We name the loss. But rarely do we name the system that makes such loss inevitable.
The silence around capitalism, particularly in its extractive and colonial form, is not accidental.
In Indonesia, the legacy of anti-communism runs deep, its roots entwined with the birth of the postcolonial state itself. After the mass killings of 1965–66, in which hundreds of thousands of suspected leftists and members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were murdered, Marxist thought was not only criminalised — it was demonised, severed from the possibility of informing public discourse, let alone political strategy. The purge against PKI did not simply erase a political movement; it created an epistemological vacuum.
As an ethnographer with Indigenous roots, I feel this absence not just in texts, but in conversations. There is often an intuitive understanding among Indigenous leaders of what is wrong — a deep sense of betrayal by the state, of violence masked as law. But without the tools to name capitalism, imperialism, and class struggle, the analysis remains tethered to moral condemnation, not structural critique. The state becomes a bad parent, not a class project. The corporation is evil, not a manifestation of capital accumulation. We fight symptoms, not systems.
Maurice Godelier’s insights into the role of ideology and symbolic systems in masking economic relations are crucial here. He reminds us that myths are not only stories; they are structural cover-ups.
In Indonesia, the national ideology of Pancasila, with its calls for unity, harmony, and social justice, often functions as such a myth — projecting the image of a benevolent state even as it enacts policies that favor elites and dispossess the poor. This symbolic apparatus makes it difficult for Indigenous movements to name their oppression as structural, rather than incidental. Extractive violence is framed as a policy error, a rogue project, or the result of corruption — not the logical outcome of a system designed to turn land into capital.
The purge against PKI did not simply erase a political movement; it created an epistemological vacuum
Claude Meillassoux’s theory of economic dependency helps illuminate how Indigenous communities are not just dispossessed materially, but also epistemically. Their subsistence economies, which once operated in relative autonomy from global capital, are now entangled in dependency through market integration, state surveillance, and development schemes.
Yet many Indigenous organisations still frame their struggle in terms of Adat (customary law) recognition rather than anti-capitalist resistance. While Adat is crucial for cultural survival, it is often abstracted from the economic conditions that undermine it. The forest is sacred, yes — but it is also commodified. The sea is ancestral, but now zoned for tourism or offshore drilling. Adat alone cannot confront capital.
This is where the insights of Marshall Sahlins and Michael Taussig become urgent.
Sahlins’ work on the structure of the conjuncture — the meeting point between external forces and local agency — shows that Indigenous people have always negotiated power, not merely resisted it. However, without a theory of capital, these negotiations are increasingly asymmetrical.
While Taussig’s writings on the public secret — that which is known but not spoken — are especially resonant. Everyone knows, at some level, that the state and corporations are linked in a shared project of extraction. However, this is rarely articulated in movement spaces, where the fear of sounding “too political” still shadows strategy discussions. The result is a politics of ambiguity, where NGOs talk about sustainability while avoiding the word “capitalism,” and activists denounce injustice without naming class.
Even more concerning is the NGO-isation of Indigenous resistance, in which struggles are reframed through the language of donors — human rights, environmental protection, gender equity — without confronting the economic system that makes these rights perpetually vulnerable.
The bureaucratisation of dissent leads to what Taussig might call a mimetic containment: movements become mirror images of the institutions they seek to influence, adopting their language, timelines, and risk aversion. Reports are written, conferences held, policy briefs circulated. But the system remains untouched.
This epistemic disarmament is particularly dangerous at a time when global capital is accelerating its extraction of the “green economy” — nickel for batteries, rare earths for wind turbines, carbon credits from forests. The language of sustainability is increasingly weaponised against the very communities who have long lived sustainably.
And yet, many Indigenous movements are not equipped to decode this new frontier of accumulation. Without a structural analysis, the new extractivism appears progressive, even benevolent. After all, who could oppose renewable energy?
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of mythemes — the minimal units of myth — can help us see how the ideology of development reshapes Indigenous narratives. Where once the forest spirit warned of imbalance, now the state says the same thing — but its solution is reforestation with monoculture, or conservation through enclosure. The story is co-opted, the structure inverted. Resistance becomes rebranded as partnership, and the language of rights becomes a mechanism of pacification. This is not cooptation alone — it is structural inversion.
While Adat is crucial for cultural survival, it is often abstracted from the economic conditions that undermine it
What is needed is not only a return to Marxist thought but its reinvention through Indigenous cosmologies. The goal is not to substitute one ideology for another but to forge a critical framework capable of naming and confronting the realities of state-capitalist extractivism.
This includes recognising that the postcolonial state is not simply the liberator of the nation but the inheritor and re-articulator of colonial violence. The nationalist struggle, in many cases, displaced imperial control while retaining its economic logic. Independence without transformation becomes a revolving door of dispossession.
To move forward, Indigenous movements in Indonesia must break the silence around class, capital, and the state. This means reclaiming the tools of structural analysis — historical materialism, political economy, anti-colonial critique — and adapting them to local contexts.
It also means refusing the binary between culture and politics, between Adat and ideology. The forest is not only sacred; it is political. The sea is not only ancestral; it is under siege. To defend them requires not only memory, but theory.
This is not an easy task. It means challenging decades of anti-communist propaganda, confronting the cooptation of NGO language, and resisting the seduction of token recognition by the state. But it is necessary. As long as the system is misnamed, it remains unchallenged. As long as Indigenous resistance avoids the language of structure, it remains trapped in the structure’s terms.
The ship of resistance cannot be steered without a map. And that map must show not only the land and the sea — but the hidden currents of capital, the submerged reefs of ideology, and the winds of history that brought us here. Only then can we chart a course out of the storm.
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