Paper short abstract:

The integration of "frontier" zones is a type of process where market expansion generates contradictory forms of displacement. In the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, citizenship is shaped by the sorting of autochthons and newcomers into categories unequally marked by the lack of a viable home market.

Paper long abstract:

"Frontier" zones, somewhat isolated from centralized infrastructures and markets, provide intriguing combinations of opportunities and obstacles to the governance of labour. The political integration of national peripheries opens spaces for merchant expansion and resource extraction, fueling growth of petty trader communities and rentier arrangements. Conversely, entry of new commodity provision networks and land-rent mechanisms tends to disrupt rural subsistence livelihoods without generating wage work opportunities to absorb labour made, effectively, surplus. This contradiction characterizes recent transformations of livelihood, residence and citizenship in the Central Highlands of the contested, resource-rich Papua region at Indonesia's far east. The inter-ethnic constellation in Papua's La Pago customary territory features an autochthonous majority increasingly shifting from technologically rudimentary agriculture into informal work and attachment to indirect rent distribution via an expanding state administration, and a growing, variegated newcomer trade sector. While newcomer traders entering Papua have exited situations of economic stagnation in other Indonesian regions, Papuan highlanders increasingly leave the highlands seeking work elsewhere. These intersecting patterns of displacement reflect a hypertrophy of administration and petty trade and the unavailability of a viable home market that could integrate work and consumption. The slow separation of autochthonous Papuans from the means of production is embedded in the emergence of new modes of frontier citizenship that call attention to the political function of labour market management in processes of national integration and fragmentation.