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Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on combining scholarly work on land conflicts around oil palm plantations in Indonesia with activism against the use of palm oil as a biofuel in the EU.

Paper long abstract:

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia go hand in hand with growing social inequalities and conflict caused by rural communities' loss of access to corporations. My ethnographic fieldwork in the early 2010s further confirmed this and also analyzed how private standards such as RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) were unable to address these issues. Although my work reported on these injustices I felt frustrated about not being able to do more about it than just that, bearing witness. Although bearing witness may be a very important step in a political process of change, I did not know how to make this knowledge more useful politically. This changed in 2018 when the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth challenged me to write an 'academic letter' signed by Dutch academics to the Dutch government, reporting on these issues and urging them to promote a stop to the use of palm oil as biofuels in the EU. However, this also entailed a bringing together of divided commitments and different roles and related normativities of being a good activist and being a good scholar. In this paper I will reflect on these different roles, on the conflicting norms that guide these roles, on what it meant for ownership over the letter writing process, and on whether this letter was in the end really academic or actually much more an activist endeavor.

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