Facilitating resonance: Brokerage in indigenous activism

Abstract

Putting forward a synergetic combination of three concepts – brokerage, indigeneity and resonance – this article investigates how brokers in Indonesia support indigenous communities in their struggle for citizen and human rights. It investigates the emergence of broker chains and multi-scalar activism that are needed to translate from the local – in this case the Aru Islands in Eastern Indonesia – to the global and vice versa. It engages with established and tracks the emergence of new brokers and analyses their strategies to produce resonance and mobilise for resistance on various scales, with media, arts and religion being main fields of engagement, and studies the challenges they face. The article thus explores the concept of brokerage within new fields and uses brokerage as an analytical lens to explore processes of mobilisation, relationship-building and identity construction.

Keywords

brokerage indigeneity Indonesia media and arts religion resistance resonance social movement

Introduction

In many countries, indigenous people have experienced long-term systematic marginalisation, suppression and exploitation (e.g. Stavenhagen, 2013). Quite often indigenous people rely on intermediaries to make their voices heard and to get their concerns translated into a language that speaks to national policies and resonates with a global rhetoric of empowerment, human rights and indigeneity. At the same time, so-called local knowledge has become an important asset in non-governmental environmental activism to counter neoliberal resource exploitation and promote alternative sustainable developments. In an effort to explain and theorise such dynamics, this paper brings together the concepts of brokerage (Lindquist, 2015), indigeneity (Li, 2000) and resonance (Khasnabish, 2007). Whereas each concept is well established within the discipline of anthropology and beyond, the literature has so far paid no attention to the synergetic effects between them. This contribution investigates how activist brokers¹ in Indonesia make local realities resonate with global discourses around indigeneity and, vice versa, make global policies and ideas resonate with local cultures, to support indigenous communities in their struggle for citizen and human rights. The local context are the Aru Islands that were threatened by a huge plantation project and that are part of Maluku Province, with its capital Ambon City, as the regional context within Indonesia. The conceptual framework helps to untangle and explain the production processes of resonance, mobilisation dynamics and the formation of protest coalitions.

Drawing on works by Diani (2003, 2013) and McAdam et al. (2001), the article conceptualises brokers as integrative force for the consolidation of social movements and successful social activism. This does not imply that every activist is a broker, but only those who have the necessary knowledge, skills, networks and motivation to engage in brokerage as detailed in this analysis. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Maluku, this paper argues that the production of resonance and multi-scalar activism bridging local, regional, national and international levels require chains of brokers (Bierschenk et al., 2002) – the linking and collaboration of multiple brokers in order to bridge larger geographical and ideational divides, from the local to the global and vice versa. After sketching the conceptual framework, I will introduce the setting in Indonesia and some key brokers and analyse various means and strategies that they use to produce resonance among a broad range of people on various scales, with media, arts and religion being their main fields of engagement. Looking at the work of specific brokers, their backgrounds, networks and interlinkage, the various technologies and spaces they use, specifying the moral ambiguity of brokers as well as outlining the challenges brokerage and resonant indigeneity face, brokerage provides an effective analytical lens to look into societal dynamics at the margins of the Indonesian nation state.

Brokerage, indigeneity and resonance

Intermediaries and brokers – two terms used interchangeably in this article – are commonly specified as figures who mediate between different social worlds – for instance between local communities and national law or governance, or between local communities and international agencies and discourses. Importantly, brokerage implies a two-way process: In my case brokers reframe local ideas and grievances up by, for instance, exposing them as human rights violations (Merry, 2006: 42) and translating the lived realities of local communities into a language that is accessible to national or international groups. But they also translate and reframe international and national law and global activist jargon to make them intelligible to local communities. Brokers often need to ‘transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005: 39) in order to make it intelligible and useful for the other side. Brokers need specific skills, including languages and jargons, organisational and mobilisation competence, impression management and social or relational skills (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 21–23). Depending on who and where these brokers are and their prior experience, they have access to different spaces, resources, knowledge and networks.

Brokers have often been described as ‘double agents’ (Leynseele, 2018: 3) or morally ambiguous figures (James, 2011: 319). This is due to their manipulation of people and information – for instance to tackle communicational and cultural misfits between social and cultural systems (Boissevain, 1974: 146, 148; Givan et al., 2010: 12) – and due to the benefits they derive from their intermediation – for instance access to external resources for local development brokers (Bierschenk et al., 2002). However, reducing brokers to mere manipulators and beneficiaries would miss important elements of a more complex reality. This article looks into cases where activists engage in brokerage to defend ‘community interests’ in inter/national spaces (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 37) and into ‘the collective, rather than the individual, consequences of brokerage’, with brokers being ‘crucial to the emergence of new collective actors’ (Diani, 2013: 1). What is often overlooked in the literature is that brokers not only translate between different ‘worlds’. They establish links between formerly unconnected or only loosely connected social sites or groups (Diani, 2003: 118; McAdam et al., 2001: 85), in the Aru case sites and groups on the local, regional, national and international levels. But they also mediate internally, within groups or local communities, to overcome dissonances and forge coalitions for the broadest possible mobilisation against a common adversary. Through such relational and connective skills brokerage creates and mediates meaning and belonging (Hönke and Müller, 2018) and is an important ‘mechanism in the social production, aggregation and transformation of contentious actors’ (McAdam et al., 2001: 100).

Brokerage is here directed towards the second concept, indigeneity. Indigeneity is commonly used to describe the original population of a land, often politically, economically and socioculturally marginalised in a national context. At the same time, indigeneity is not an indigenous concept, but the construct and projection of an international discourse. As argued by Li (2000) and others, indigeneity is a relational concept and a political category that stands for oppression as well as empowerment. Steur (2014) describes the indigeneity discourse as ‘the site of a complex process of coming to terms with contradictory pressures on their lives’. In such struggles, indigenous people ‘reach back selectively to deeply rooted, adaptive traditions: creating new pathways in a complex postmodernity’ (Clifford, 2013: 7). They weave together pieces of reality, ‘however much borrowed from or imposed by others . . . through the logic of a group’s own locally and historically evolved bricolage’ (Ortner, 1995: 176), and, at times, that logic is driven by the need or desire to resist in order to rescue livelihoods and culture.

Such processes of articulation can ‘transform(s) a people’s consciousness and awareness of themselves and their historical situation’ (Hall and Grossberg, 1986: 55). Indigeneity thus has the potential to ‘define broad constellations of shared or compatible interests, . . . mobilize social forces across a broad spectrum’ (Li, 2000: 5), and kick off social movements that ‘draw to it sectors of the population who have never been inside that historical bloc before’ (Hall and Grossberg, 1986: 55). The Aru case vividly shows how such rearticulation of identity (Duncan, 2009: 1081) and new forms of collective action are responses to changing sociopolitical circumstances and opportunities, impending threats and common enemies (McAdam et al., 2001: 102; Simmel, 1950: 148). In the construction of indigeneity, essentialisation takes place both ways: Government or international authorities impose essentialist notions on indigenous groups by asking them to prove their authenticity for claiming group-specific rights. For indigenous people, what Spivak has called strategic essentialism (Pande, 2017) is part of broader mobilisation processes to push through their claims or make their voices heard.

The third concept is resonance. To mediate between the external and internal worlds in both directions, indigenous people often depend on specific trusted allies (Bremen, 2017: 48) and brokers who must know local cosmologies as well as international rhetorics and national laws. Their specific and selective understandings crucially impact on ‘the articulation and interpretation of indigeneity’ (Forte, 2002: 263). To elevate indigenous peoples’ struggle to a higher level and put pressure on governments, brokers aim to produce resonance and indigeneity can serve as common ground, as ‘a point of convergence’ (Diani, 2003: 119), for villagers, rural and urban groups, local and national activists and international support. Neoliberal capitalist exploitation and violence has led to the emergence of a transnational consciousness and triggered resonance through provoking ‘new imaginations of the political’ amongst political and human rights activists worldwide, with media and communication technologies often facilitating resonance (Khasnabish, 2007: 516, 506).

Specific events involving indigenous peoples particularly shaped a global imaginary and triggered resonance, such as the Zapatista uprising in Mexico (Khasnabish, 2007) or the Chico Mendes rebellion in Brazil (Tsing, 2005: 229–234) that both successfully managed to conquer global mediascapes. Such cases offer ‘a vision of possibility and resistance’ and ‘a new vision and language of what political solidarity could mean across borders’, without reducing the significance of each single struggle (Khasnabish, 2007: 517, 521). To be effective, resonance needs to work both ways: a transnational consciousness and rhetoric making local dissatisfaction resonate and local struggles informing and feeding into the global rhetoric. Through such encompassing narratives, broad coalitions can be forged (Diani, 2013). This article sets out to present and analyse the empirical material from which this conceptual framework was developed.

Setting: Indonesia and Aru

For a long time, the Indonesian government denied the existence of indigenous peoples in its territory: either everyone is indigenous, or none (Persoon, 1998). This had to do with efforts to build a nation out of more than 17,000 islands and national leaders’ perception that indigeneity implies backwardness and hindrance to economic development. However, after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998, a democratisation and decentralisation process set in and ‘indigeneity’ became an important asset for local communities to fight for their rights. As on a global scale, a major factor in this quest for legitimacy is the portrayal of indigenous people as guardians of the environment, which simplifies the various ways that indigenous peoples use natural resources, but is happily picked up by international conservation organisations (Bettinger et al., 2014: 195–198). Adat is a term used for tradition and customary law in Indonesia and ‘indigenous people’ has been translated with masyarakat adat or adat communities. The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) was founded in 1999 and plays an important role in encouraging the ‘image of indigenous people as tied to the land, harboring an innate conservation ethic’ (Bettinger et al., 2014: 205). Among others, masyarakat adat struggle against the central government’s claim that all forests are state forests. Land that nobody makes use of in ways that are obvious to outsiders, through settlements or permanent farming, was considered to be state land, thus denying hunters and gatherers, swidden farmers and followers of indigenous belief systems collective rights to their ancestral domains or sacred grounds. Only in 2013, after many years of lobbying, did the Constitutional Court reclassify such land as owned by indigenous peoples – in case relevant evidence is provided – that they can use according to their aspirations and needs without ignoring other applicable laws and regulations (Decision No. 35/PUU-X/2012; issued in May 2013). However, with indigenous communities usually lacking the knowledge and funds and with different government levels involved, the process of granting forest tenure to indigenous peoples and local communities has been a very slow one (Sawitri, 2018).

The Aru Islands, since 2003 a separate district (kabupaten) within Maluku Province, are at Indonesia’s easternmost edge. Aru’s population of roughly 94,000 is by majority indigenous, mostly living in rural areas, with no easy access to markets, public transport, health and education services or telecommunication (Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru, 2018). However, historically and at present, Aru is quite important for the Indonesian state and an international market. The sea around the islands has always been a rich source of fish and pearls and Aruese have to deal with illegal fishery and modern slavery, illegal trade in sea turtles and birds of paradise, plantations and land grabbing – often backed up by the government. In this setting, the business conglomerate PT Menara Group wanted to turn almost 80% (500,000 ha out of ca. 640,000 ha) of the Aru land mass into sugar cane plantations. The company could only stake out that much land through the construction of a strategic alliance between 28 different (often ghost) businesses as legislation in Indonesia would prevent one single company from managing such huge stretches of land. The company is not a blank slate, has operated in places such as Papua and Kalimantan before, engaging in enormous logging or palm oil projects, and is known for such trickery, which did not prevent the Aruese government at the time to issue permits to the various companies involved (Gecko Project & Mongabay, 2019). Their intervention in Aru would obviously destroy the environment and the culture and livelihood of its indigenous people. What makes this case interesting is that despite all the infrastructural limitations a well-organised resistance movement called #SaveAruIslands emerged and toppled the project plans. This was only possible because local activists emerged as brokers and joined hands with people in different spheres and on various levels.

Brokers in Aru and Ambon

The emerging resistance movement successfully framed the Aruese as people who have been living in harmony with nature for ages and who have been deprived of their rights as indigenous people and Indonesian citizens. The movement thus strongly ties in with an international human rights discourse and establishes links and solidarity with a national and global environmentalist movement. To leverage their cause and produce resonance, local communities in Aru rely on media-savvy activists, who had the skills and wide networks to become brokers for their cause to effectively mediate and translate between local communities, the state and global dynamics and paradigms. Most of these brokers hail from Maluku, not all of them indigenous to Aru, and are based in different settings: national, regional, district capitals or villages; the world of journalism, human rights activism and environmentalism, youth culture and arts, the church or indigenous cosmologies. They all had opportunities to travel, study and engage in spaces beyond the narrow confines of a Moluccan village. What is crucial for mediating all the way from isolated villages to a global scale is the linking up of different brokers (Bierschenk et al., 2002; McAdam et al., 2001: 103–104). In the following I can only engage with some brokers in this chain and some of their strategies, which is not meant to create hierarchies or belittle other brokers’ efforts. I cannot engage with the many activists who helped to make brokerage successful but are not themselves brokers as they join protests or engage in other kinds of explicit or subversive resistance, but do not have the skills to bridge and translate between different knowledge systems and networks. The important point is that brokers were only successful through the formation of broker chains, as they effectively joined hands and drew on each other’s knowledge, networks and skills.

The SaveAru movement cannot be understood without taking the broader post-conflict context in Maluku into account and constant efforts to prevent the recurrence of violence and fight social injustices underlying it.² In mid-2013 students and adat elders from Aru’s two big adat communities, Ursia and Urlima, approached Jacky, a reverend of the Moluccan Protestant Church (GPM) and human rights activist, in Ambon to seek advice how to give leverage to their cause. Jacky was Director of GPM’s Research and Development Board at the time. He had undergone a substantial transformation from warmonger to peace activist who has dedicated his work to promote interfaith dialogue, strengthen Moluccan traditions of brotherhood and encourage the youth to creatively engage in peacebuilding. Another peace activist who mediated in the Aru case and is based in Ambon is Rudy Fofid, a journalist who has lost family in the violence and had made himself a name through his long-term engagement in the establishment of peace journalism in Maluku and in training Moluccan youngsters in poetry as a means to restore social relations. He went to Aru to build up citizen journalism to ensure that common people could contribute to the generation and distribution of information. Over the years, both Jacky and Rudy have developed extensive networks and skills that enabled them to become successful brokers for Aru.

AMAN was key in pushing through the decision by the Constitutional Court about customary forests (hutan adat) and their local staff help indigenous people in Aru with the procedural challenges to get their hutan adat recognised. They supported resistance and helped with brokering information to and from Aru. Alerted by AMAN and other brokers, the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) and Forest Watch Indonesia (FWI) started to investigate the case. These organisations provided the movement nation-wide networks for mobilisation, support and the exchange of (legal) expertise and knowledge. These brokers are what Forte has called ‘indigenous cosmopolitans’ who are ‘both rooted and routed, nonelite yet nonparochial, provincial without being isolated, internationalized without being de-localized’ (Forte, 2010: 6). But outside brokerage (i.e. people from Ambon or Jakarta) could have achieved nothing without a substantive base in Aru and without brokers that are deeply rooted in the local cultural context. It is they who got things going and who managed to bring together a critical mass in Aru as they knew how to reach out to people and tap into traditional networks that interlink and integrate Aruese society beyond the village level, despite the limited nature of telecommunication and transport infrastructure. They include clan networks based on shared ancestry and migration histories, kinship networks, hunting alliances, school networks, networks based on a traditional bipartition of Aruese society, traditional and ritualised village alliances and customary resource protection mechanisms that were also used to close hutan adat for the intruders.

Among the emerging brokers in Aru, is Mama Do, a retired primary school teacher who hails from Aru’s south, has worked in Ambon, and now lives in Dobo, the capital of Aru District; Mike and Yos, two journalists with strong links to Ambon; and Mika, a young civil servant, who had studied in Ambon, respects the government, but disapproves the way it treats its people. When these persons found out that PT Menara Group wanted to start business in Aru, they teamed up and developed strategies to mobilise the Aruese against land grabbing. Being deeply rooted in Aru’s social fabric and being motivated to learn from Ambon’s peace activists, to internalise the vocabulary of national laws and international rights discourses, and to put their local skills, networks and resources at the service of the movement, they became important local brokers. They acquired recognition by Aruese people and Mika was chosen to be the movement coordinator in Aru. It is the rootedness in local society and culture on the one hand, and the newly acquired capitals on the other that differentiates them from their fellow villagers and makes them what Faist (2014: 45) has called ‘partisan arbitrators’ who broker between two sides, but at the same time clearly take side with one of them.

These local brokers started a massive campaign, in which they travelled to most of Aru’s 117 villages, which took several months (August 2013 to April 2014) given infrastructural and funding limitations, to inform people about the impending plantation project, teach them lessons learned from other cases in Indonesia and beyond, tricks applied by companies to win over villagers, and warn them about the project’s impact on Aruese livelihoods, culture and environment. They showed me hundreds of signatures that they had collected on those trips; they had photographed and filmed the process, organised demonstrations and public rejection statements. As Mika told me, it was an unprecedented case of anarchism in Aru and good material to spread in social media to mobilise on national and international scales. The resistance case is also exceptional as it made Urlima and Ursia put aside existing diverging claims towards adat authority and land to unite and jointly resist. However, as one of the local activists emphasised, if the movement would not have been taken up by activists and intermediaries in Ambon to extend their brokerage efforts or, in other words, if they would not have built chains of brokerage, it would have been a long process with uncertain outcomes as they would not have had the means to produce sufficient resonance.

Producing resonance

The movement’s argument circled around themes that resonated well with a national activist discourse and an international rhetoric: environmental destruction and the violation of human and indigenous rights. Indigenous people in Aru consider their land to be inherited from the ancestors. Each clan manages its own land, with the lords of the land and adat elders being responsible for internal land distribution and the allocation of use rights to other clans. For people living in the interior, the forest provides a substantive part of their livelihoods, for those living at the coast, it feeds them when seasonal changes do not allow for pearl diving or fishing. Almost no villagers in Aru hold official land certificates. The plantation project would destroy livelihoods and a delicate ecosystem that is home to extensive mangrove forests, some of the best-preserved remaining forests in Indonesia, and a number of rare species, including the bird of paradise that also plays an important cultural role. Brokers and activists used media, arts and the church as strategic means to spread information, make the SaveAru movement go viral, produce and reinforce resonance in both directions, and put pressure on the government to withdraw licenses.

Media

There was a strategic division of tasks as activists told me. Whereas people in Aru provided a strong base and first-hand information and fought at the frontline, activists in Ambon and Jakarta made sure to ‘blow up’ that information nationally and internationally through action, media coverage and social media. Each setting had their own brokers who worked closely together in the form of a broker chain.

Brokers and villagers were keen to put forward those aspects that emphasise a living in harmony with nature and the acknowledgement of nonhuman agency that asks people to sustainably manage nature to preserve it for future generations. AMAN, for instance, knew how to present conflicts over land to the public and make it resonate with the international rhetoric on indigeneity. In a letter to the OHCHR Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, they emphasised that indigenous people in Aru believe their ancestors to be the owners and guardians of nature. That worldview promotes a balanced relationship with the environment as it prevents excessive exploitation (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) and Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), 2015: 3). The Committee responded by reminding the Indonesian government of its responsibility to protect indigenous peoples’ rights, to not destroy their ancestral domains and forests, to ensure free, prior and informed consent, and to take efforts to implement the Constitutional Court Decision No. 35/PUU-X/2012 (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2015). Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission took Aru as case study for its National Inquiry on the Right of Indigenous Peoples on their Territories in the Forest Zones (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia Republik Indonesia, 2015). The findings were published in print and online, in Indonesian and English, and were used for further mobilisation and lobbying work. The report states that for masyarakat adat the forest is a source of life and integral part of their livelihoods, culture and spirituality, and that the government threatened to violate various indigenous rights.

All movement actions and findings were shared through media with powerholders in Ambon, Jakarta and, potentially, the world at large. Investigative journalism was key in revealing details of the plantation plans, of laws and regulations breached, and the complicity of government and security forces. To cater for different media skills and access, a broad range of media was used, including traditional mainstream media, social media and more performative outlets such as theatre, poetry and life painting, being informed by both contemporary global protest aesthetics and local culture (e.g. Bräuchler, 2020). Trained journalists like Rudy, Mike and Yos wrote for printed newspapers, but also used online news platforms and social media and became important information brokers in the SaveAru movement. There are a few weekly newspapers in Aru, with a low print run, that are mainly circulated in government offices. As Yos emphasised, this makes them an influential tool in elite circles. News were also shared with regional newspapers in Ambon such as Rakyat Maluku, Ambon Ekspres and Kabar Timur and online portals such as Maluku Online. Social media informed influential regional and national newspapers and platforms like Kompas, Jawa Pos, The Jakarta Post or detiknews.com. The journalists’ networks and contacts are crucial here.

The SaveAru movement also had its own team of media-savvy youngsters, some of them also engaging in brokerage, who organised the movement’s Internet presence and social media campaigns, mainly through SaveAru’s website (http://savearuisland.com/, now inactive), blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. One of them designed the movement logo – a bird of paradise with hashtag SaveAruIslands, black on white – and an infographic visualising the extent of the planned intrusion. Both were picked up by thousands of social media users (in their posts, profile pictures, Facebook banners etc.) and printed newspapers prominently used the logo to label their coverage of the Aru case. Making news go viral is about posting the right information, but also posting at prime time, re-tweeting and mentioning accounts with huge followerships such as famous national musicians supporting the case. The way Aru is introduced on the SaveAru Facebook page resonates well with an international environmentalist stance (https://www.facebook.com/pg/savearuislands/about/): ‘Aru is a cluster of 300 small tinny islands where greatest birds of paradise are living harmoniously with kangaroos, black cockatoos and crocodile. This heavenly place is threatened to be destroyed recently by a stupid & greedy plan of our government to develop 500,000 hectares of sugar cane plantation across this region’ (sic).

Tweets by investigative journalists reveal that the regional government had clearly violated existing national and international rules and laws (e.g. UU No. 32/2009 on Environmental Protection and Management, PP No. 27/2012 on Environmental Licensing, UNDRIP, 2007) as it had issued permits and recommendations before the conduct of feasibility studies and any prior informed consent of the affected population was sought. The feasibility study then proved to be highly flawed, paying no respect to the project’s sociocultural impact (e.g. Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) and Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), 2015; Lembaga Kalesang Lingkungan Maluku, 2013). Other tweets also reveal the close entanglement of the investor with the military. One posted on 28 October 2013 by @SaveAruIslands provocatively asked why the investor needs military protection for its surveys in the first place. Such tweets point at closed meetings between the then acting governor, regional leaders, the investor and the navy in Aru (e.g. @SaveAruIslands 18 and 20 February 2014), something Kabar Timur has extensively covered in February 2014, with both outlets referring to each other. Through these various channels, pressure on the central government increased to investigate the case (e.g. Kabar Timur 27 March 2014).

Media also provided evidence and lessons learned from other cases where indigenous peoples were overrun by investment projects; lessons that produced political imaginaries that resonate well with Aru people’s ‘own living fabric of struggle’ (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013: 15). In particular visual elements make resistance appealing to people inside and outside Aru and they make the global rhetoric of indigenous and human rights more tangible for villagers. For instance, activists circulated images of a coffee plantation project in Lutur (South Aru) that misused licenses to appropriate adat land and destroy adat forest (e.g. @SaveAruIslands 4 December 2013). Through a chain of brokers, they made the images available to villagers in Aru. The screening of films about indigenous peoples’ negative experiences with neoliberal economy and state repression elsewhere was another effective means to instigate dialogue and mobilise for social and ecological justice. That is how Aruese villagers got to watch and discuss ‘The Burning Season’, a movie on the brave rubber tapper Chico Mendes who led the struggle against land grabbing in Brazil in the 1980s. Such examples provide inspiration and ‘a vision of possibility and resistance . . . of what political solidarity could mean across borders’ (Khasnabish, 2007: 517); they convey feelings of empowerment (cf. Tsing, 2005: 222–234).

People and organisations from outside Maluku helped to further spread information and effectively visualise the impending threat in Aru. Forest Watch Indonesia (2015, 2016) published a widely circulated report, in English and Indonesian, and co-produced a documentary called ‘The Warden of Jargarian Forest’,³ which strongly resonates with a transnational human and indigenous rights agenda. Mongabay, a U.S.-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform, critically reported on the case. Their online platform is international and multi-lingual and also accommodates contributions by local activists to multiply their reach (e.g. Almaskaty, 2016). Many video campaign clips on YouTube, in Indonesian and English, promote the unique fauna, flora and culture of Aru and how they would be destroyed by the plantation project.⁴ In turn, people on the ground took efforts to match such images, for instance, by posing in traditional G-strings for campaign materials, by welcoming visitors with rituals that emphasise their close relationship to ancestral land, or confronting intruders with bows, arrows and spears to show their readiness to fight.⁵

Such campaigns attracted attention from people across the world who took pictures of themselves holding #SaveAruIslands signs and posted them on social media. The Ambonese photographer and peace activist Embong assembled these pictures on a huge poster that was set up in Ambon during a SaveAru street art event, and in Dobo as an expression of global solidarity. Actions and demonstrations were organised on a national and international level, for instance, by FWI and AMAN in Jakarta,⁶ or by the Moluccan diaspora in the Netherlands (see e.g. Facebook Ulis Patty 6 March 2014), also sharing its visuals via social media. As a key SaveAru media team member put it: ‘It is they who extend our voices through their network of friends, which develops into an open spiral’ (Almaskaty, 2016).

Arts

Arts as specific kind of media, with great communicative power and mobility, play key roles in contemporary resistance and artists and their art have become important mediators within the SaveAru broker chain (Bräuchler, 2019a). An emerging arts scene in post-conflict Maluku provided the youths – many inspired by leading peace figures such as Rudy and Jacky – a thriving outlet for their aspirations and their desire to live a peaceful life, restore and strengthen relationships across a religious divide, creatively engage with Moluccan traditions and their future, and create a more positive image of the archipelago (Bräuchler, 2019b). Pierre and Yuli, an architect and a human rights worker, took this as an opportunity to found Ambon Bergerak (Ambon Moving) to offer a space for art communities and promote tourism and environment. Ambon Bergerak supported SaveAru and organised events such as concerts (involving local, national and international artists), life paintings and graffiti art, street theatre performances and poetry readings (e.g. Berry et al., 2013a, 2013b). They also distributed flyers and created movement T-Shirts and songs. These art works denounce the investor and pay tribute to Aruese culture and nature, among others by including old kapata (traditional songs or rhymes). Glenn Fredly (†2020), an Indonesian pop star who hails from Maluku, organised concerts in Ambon and Jakarta to support SaveAru, compiled albums with young musicians in Ambon, participated in public campaigns and launched an online petition together with Jacky (http://www.change.org/savearu).

Arts were key to making the movement’s struggle resonate with youth and creative communities in Ambon and beyond. It opened up a whole new world of mobilisation strategies and targeted audiences. Through announcing, commenting on, reacting to, and posting pictures of these events and art works, they reach far beyond the specific locality where the artistic action takes place. For artists and followers, art is the weapon, poetry the arrow to launch the ‘Bird of Paradise Revolution’ (Berry et al., 2013b), fight investor and government and energise the people of Aru and their sympathisers (e.g. @SaveAruIslands 25 October 2013). The movement song was created by a group of hip-hop musicians and poets. It uses three languages, Aruese, Indonesian and English, thus merging the local, the national and the global. The first verse (in Indonesian) goes like this (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0AolKskEKM): ‘As hypocritical rulers and dollar-eyed middlemen secretly agreed to sell themselves and pawn adat land, thousands of Ursia and Urlima took to the streets as Arafura’s anger rose from the islands and mangroves’.

Church

Yet another means to give voice to the struggle in Aru and produce resonance among a broad variety of people is the Protestant Church in Maluku (GPM). Aru has a majority Christian population and no other institution has better networks and a better communication infrastructure. Jacky as movement coordinator and head of the church’s Research and Development Board has taken great efforts to make the Synod adopt an environmentalist stance and support the struggle. In McAdam et al.’s (2001: 59, 118) words, he socially appropriated the church, and the collective identity it stands for, for resistance mobilisation. Religion plays an important role in Moluccans’ daily lives (e.g. Bräuchler, 2014) and activists like Mika are driven by a Christian spirit. Jacky had raised awareness about the Aru case at the World Church Conference and the Christian Conference of Asia (held in South-Korea). Visual evidence was displayed at GPM’s annual conference to make participants engage in discussions about their responsibility in the face of environmental destruction. According to Jacky it is the church’s responsibility to protect god’s creation and biological diversity and take side with the weak. Jacky also developed strategies for church-based environmental advocacy and substantiates this by verses from the Bible and the Constitutional Court decision on hutan adat that opens up space for such manoeuvres (for details see Manuputty, 2014).

In 2014, the Synod issued a statement rejecting the plantation plans in Aru, thus clearly opposing the government. The letter was sent to all ministers and Mika made sure to distribute copies in the villages and social media. Ministers started to include environmental education and information about the plantation project’s impact into their sermons; church services were turned into multipliers and means to mediate and mobilise against environmental destruction. As one priest in Aru emphasised in a conversation we had, ‘the environment can live without humans, but not the other way around’ (23 October 2016). Humans cannot be owners of the land, but they are supposed to manage it well, as another minister added (3 November 2016) – just as promoted within Moluccan adat. Catholics and Muslims are minorities in Aru, but were equally involved in movement activities (see also Manuputty, 2013).

Challenging brokerage

Such brokerage did not go unchallenged. Time was a major constraining factor. The fact that the central government had already issued principle permits for the plantation project put a lot of pressure on activists and locals to react quickly. The difficult transport infrastructure in Aru did not make things easier for local brokers. In some cases, there was no time for lengthy consensual decision-making processes and village heads decided to take an emergency decision on behalf of their people; a few villages could not be reached at all within the available time and with the available resources. Some activist brokers said that, given the various constraints, they had to beat the intruders with their own weapons, by trying to win over as many people as possible in a short time in Aru and beyond, by conveying a simplified argument that, in some cases, buys into the international imaginary of indigenous people living in harmony with nature. Due to the huge information and infrastructure gaps in places like Aru, the locals’ perceptions are shaped by information shared by brokers, training provided or material screened in the villages. This contributes to their empowerment, but it also reconstructs local knowledge in specific ways.

Making local realities resonate with a harmonising image of indigenous peoples has its problems. The linking up of marginalised people to transnational alliances of human rights and indigenous peoples can turn weakness into strength (Brysk, 1996: 53), but it rarely overcomes the larger power relationships they are entangled in. Strategic essentialism and indigenous rights activism are both tools and traps (Conklin, 2013). Positive representations are effective in producing solidarity and support way beyond the locality, but they often purport a rather static image that leaves no space for adaptation and development and that can make it difficult for indigenous peoples on the long run to fulfil criteria for their own ‘authenticity’ and thus the entitlement to group-specific rights (for some deconstruction of such image in Aru see e.g. Osseweijer, 2005; Spyer, 2000). Such depictions also ignore (or even reproduce) local inequalities and power struggles that might enable outside interveners to split the population in the first place (Mosse, 2005: 226). It thus commonly ignores the gap between representation, peoples’ lived realities and their heterogeneities (e.g. Brysk, 1996: 52; Khasnabish, 2013: 74–76).

Aru people were not only approached by activists from within and outside, but also by investor delegates who tried to ensnare them with exaggerated promises, which threatened to split the population into those who want to profit from the new business and those who reject it without compromise. The investor used mainly young villagers living in the city as guides through Aruese territory and villages for their surveys and as brokers that were meant to spread the news about the plantation plans and to convince villagers about their alleged benefits for Aru. Often, these brokers were attracted by financial incentives. Brokerage in Aru thus not only took place ‘for the good’, but also to support investment plans. However, that brokerage largely seems to have taken place in isolation, individuals did not envisage or manage to build broker chains that could leverage their action beyond a certain level. It looks as if they did not bring or develop the skills to translate between the different groups and worlds, mobilise and extend their networks, or use media and technologies in a way that they could close gaps and build bridges to reach out for further support, locally, nationally and internationally. These brokers have often been described as lacking local rootedness and as people who are mainly motivated by individual interests or short-term economic gains. Nothing even remotely comparable to the resistance movement I analysed in this article emerged from it.

Due to such internal divides and outside efforts to split the locals, the brokers described in this article not only needed to mediate between different groups and worlds, but also internally to forge coalitions for the broadest possible mobilisation. Outside activists frequently emphasised that they only got involved in SaveAru once it was clear that there is a strong base in Aru itself; they did not want to buy into or pick up any local power politics, which would have threatened their endeavour as only a unified and strong resistance could be successful. On the long run, however, existing rivalries, diverging land claims and different interpretations of development glossed over by the momentary enthusiasm of joint resistance could come to the fore again and need to be dealt with to prepare Aru for future threats.

As indicated before, the SaveAru movement is part of larger efforts in Maluku to rebuild society, deal with the aftermath of the conflict and address longer-term social injustices that were behind the violence and the disregard of political and legal procedures more generally. Whereas in the literature, the broker is often described as a morally ambiguous figure who mainly mediates for his/her own profit (Boissevain, 1974; James, 2011: 319; Leynseele, 2018: 3), in the Aru case movement activists are partisan arbitrators (Faist, 2014: 45) who fight for a common good. Nonetheless, successful intermediation led to upward mobility for some brokers. Jacky is one example. His peace activism, his commitment to the promotion of interfaith dialogue and his engagement in human rights struggles have earned him awards, respect and fame, nationally and internationally. In late 2017, he was called to become a consultant in interfaith affairs in Indonesia’s president’s advisory team, which is a great opportunity to make others benefit from his rich experience, but could also be interpreted as a classical co-optation strategy. Brokerage is a highly fluctuating field; it ‘is not a status which one attains once and for all’ (Bierschenk et al., 2002: 13). Some of those running SaveAru have moved on like Jacky, geographically and professionally. Although they try to stay alert and continue posting incidents of outside exploitation on their individual accounts, it looks as if new challenges will need the formation of new broker chains and the procedural and creative discovery of spaces, scales and strategies for mediation.

The intricate positionality of brokers requires difficult balancing acts (cf. Jensen, 2018: 2–3). An increasing entanglement in national politics is a great opportunity, but it also makes brokers vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by both governments and communities (Faist, 2014: 50; Merry, 2006: 38). Successful brokerage in Aru also came with high costs, on top of the enormous efforts, energy and resources the brokers put into this. Brokers like Mika and Yos have experienced intimidation by investment supporters and security forces, at home and in public (see e.g. @SaveAruIslands and Facebook, 17 and 19 December 2013). On 2 November 2013, for instance, around thirty people came to Mika’s house and threatened: ‘If you want Aru to be safe, you better don’t lead or follow any demonstrations’ (Tim AMAN Maluku, 2016: 640). As a civil servant, Mika also encounters pressure from his superiors. His father living in a remote village once told me how he felt compelled to go to Dobo to help protect his son. The fact that surveys and actions taken by the investor on Aru are escorted by military forces or that the conglomerate co-funds events such as the anniversary of a military base in Aru, is sufficient evidence for the complicity of investor and security forces (e.g. SaveAruIslands 10 and 12 October 2013, Tim AMAN Maluku, 2016: 628–629).

In April 2014, the Minister of Forestry officially declared that Aru is not suitable for sugar cane plantations (e.g. @SaveAruIslands 12 April 2014). However, it is only a temporary victory as the forest in Aru is still not recognised as hutan adat (Pemerintah Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru, 2012; Syam et al., 2015: 19–20) and there is a long list of businesses that want to invest in Aru. It is important that brokers and villagers stay alert. SaveAru was successful because of the enormous scale of the investment project, the massive efforts of multiple brokers and the unprecedented joining of hands of villagers throughout Aru. Investors now seem to intrude on smaller scales, which makes it easier to play communities off against each other and more difficult for mediators to produce resonance or to even take notice. Brokerage and resonance are not essential givens; once established they are not static and cannot be taken for granted. Such lack of institutionalisation has its advantages as it allows for the continuous adaptation to ever-changing circumstances, but the question remains, in how far they can trigger longer-lasting change, for instance with regard to the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples and their hutan adat. A challenge is also who determines what change indigenous communities want on the long run, some of them torn between the desire for cultural and ecological survival and for economic prosperity.

Conclusion

The discussion of brokerage in the Aru case allowed me to draw together some important themes from across this special issue in terms of the technologies of brokerage (e.g. the usage of a broad variety of media including letters, video, newspaper, social media, internet and the arts); the importance of social networks (e.g. church, NGOs, village groups, clans and other kin networks, art communities) and broker chains, of education (both of the brokers themselves and training given) and language skills (including the epistemic translation of local cultural practices into rights, indigeneity discourse, media campaign jargon and reports); and the vulnerabilities of brokerage.

The Aru case clearly shows that the production of resonance among a diverse range of people and with strategic discourses locally and internationally requires joint efforts by different groups and stakeholders; it requires the development of an argument that is concrete enough to address the issues at stake, but also broad enough to accommodate the stakeholder groups’ diverse backgrounds and motivations. Such mediation and translation were only possible, because of skilled activists on various levels, in Aru, Ambon and Jakarta, who could take on the role of brokers through their access to different kinds of networks, including the church and youth, human and indigenous rights activism, media and arts, the world of journalism and news, peace activism and traditional networks in Aru. The brokers’ main goal was to make local voices heard, empower them through training and discussions and make clear that the locals are the owners of resistance. Those brokers had to flexibly adapt their strategies and extend the brokerage chain when the need arose to establish new relationships or link up to other networks. Only very few brokers such as Jacky have the skills and resources to travel all the way, from one end of the broker chain to the other, from the village to the international realm and vice versa. Reaching out for as many people as possible, across the generations, social groupings and cultural backgrounds, also required the convergence of a broad variety of media (Jenkins, 2006), including arts, traditional rituals and social media (cf. Bräuchler, 2020). As one of the activists put it ‘media engagement has to move the way people are moving’ (Dobo, 3 January 2016) – a ‘procedural discovery’ as Bierschenk et al. (2002: 19) put it.

Looking through the lens of brokerage, this article tracked mobilisation processes to better understand the complexities of resistance and of collective identity as one of its key vehicles. Analysing the dynamic strategies, motivations and life worlds, as well as the technologies, media and spaces involved in brokerage and the emergence of new brokers, this contribution goes beyond classical portrayals of brokerage. In the Aru case, brokers did not only translate between different worlds such as local indigenous communities and a transnational human rights rhetoric, but also worked hard to forge broad coalitions within local communities that are crucial for the consolidation of social movements and successful activism. Broker chains allowed for multi-scalar activism, that is activism that develops beyond and blurs the boundaries between local, regional, national and international levels, and that enables brokerage to bridge larger geographical and ideational divides. The article also analysed how brokers used the concept of indigeneity and ecological awareness to make the Aru case and local realities resonate with international rights discourses and mobilise people beyond Maluku and what challenges they faced. Looking into how brokers in the Aru case strive towards a common good, exposing them to both physical danger and upward mobility, the article also set out to refine notions of moral ambiguity commonly associated with brokerage. The contribution makes conceptual advancements by looking at the phenomenon of brokerage from a new angle, that is the mobilisation for struggles against social inequalities and, at the same time, uses brokerage as an analytical lens to explore complex and dynamic processes of relationship-building and identity construction.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the funded project and the participants of the project-related workshops in Melbourne, Konstanz, Mainz and Frankfurt for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. A special thanks to my co-editors, Ute Röschenthaler and Kathrin Knodel for their team spirit and commitment to this project.

Authors’ note

Birgit Bräuchler is also affiliated with University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This article is one of the outcomes of a project-related exchange of scholars from Monash University Melbourne, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Goethe University Frankfurt (2019-2021) that is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Universities Australia.

ORCID iD

Birgit Bräuchler

Notes

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