 In fact, there's no paper that I wrote as an author or a co-author, which does not have your name on land, which does not have your name in the references. So I was wondering who else that is the case. Whose side is Professor Alun once or regularly? Just so you have a sense of... Okay, okay. So for some of you, it's not a known name. Okay. So we also have quite a group in the middle. Great. Well, let's start with the formalities of who you are according to those. It's not working. Here. Yeah. This one is yours. So is this better? I don't hear a difference. No, you have to get close to it. Yeah, but it's just the height is very inconvenient. I need to shrink a little bit and that I'm not even that tall. So your official coordinates, Professor of Development, Resource Management and Governance at the Department of Food and Resource Economics University of Copenhagen. So that there's a lot there that makes you very relevant for the people here. And your research focuses in terms of property, local politics and state formation, in particular social legal processes of conflict over land and natural resource. And I think if people are wondering social legal, what is that? I think your talk is going to make that crystal clear. Now, as part of my introduction, I thought I might, for those of you who don't know you or not that well, just make reference to two of your works that you wrote with others and that I think are really important for everybody to know. So one of these from 2011 with Nancy Paluso on the shifting frontiers of land control, actually all my students get to read it, your introduction, get exam questions about it. Because I think even though it's 12 years old, it's still very relevant and certainly in this context in which we are today of climate adaptation. And why do I say that? Because in that work, again, for those of you who haven't read it and are perhaps contemplating whether you should, you show how land and forest and water come under the control of new actors through a combination of environmental regulation, legislation, but also violence and how law and violence intertwine. And this remains relevant as we think of how land and forest in the global south are targeted for. And as I've learned from my colleague, David Pech, have been committed by their governance to things like carbon capture of benefit sources of energy, etc. What uses and users is this displacing? How is the law complicit in that? What forms of violence are used? So those are the questions that you open up in that paper. And the second one that I think is relevant for this community is your work with CECOR on property and authority in settings of legal pluralism. It's a quite analytically refined and deep way to engage with these dynamics. That's very relevant to for anybody, basically, working on land registration and registration in context of legal pluralism. And that goes way beyond forum shopping, which is sometimes what people think legal pluralism is all about. So yes, people turn to different authorities to pursue their claims or to find a solution to their conflicts. But in doing this, they strengthen the legitimacy of those they turn to. And with their choices, they shape the relative power of these authorities and institutions. And by seeing where people go, we can learn a lot about what are the institutions and leaders they have confidence in. And so it's not a lack of knowledge that, for example, make people turn to customary actors. But it's their calculations about what will work in view of tenure and how best to address it. So that's just a snippet for those of you who think, OK, why is that word so relevant? But it's high time to give you the floor and to talk about this interesting topic, an air of legality on Indonesia and beyond. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Big applause. Let me see if I can make this. Oh, yeah, that one has to go away. Yeah, that just has to go down. Can you hear me? OK. So thank you very much for this very generous introduction. I can recommend all my writing, not just those two pieces, but all of it. It's shockingly good. I am well aware that this is the last slot on the last day of something that has taken a lot out of you. Somebody referred to this as the graveyard shift. I've heard it referred to as the track of death in a race course. So I'll see if I can keep you, if not awake, at least alive until the end of this talk. But I'm going to talk about something that I've been pondering over for some time, the role of law and what role law has if we are in a situation of rightlessness. And it's always called an air, that's not one of this, an air of equality. And it is sort of based on experience and research in Indonesia, but I think it might resonate beyond. So this is from the outskirts of Medan in North Sumatra. You can see this man who put his land up for sale. You can see Medan is coming racing toward the countryside here. Either he sells the land and gets a little bit of money, or he doesn't and he doesn't get any money. This is inevitable, this will turn into something quite different very soon. And for him and for most ordinary people in Indonesia, rights are a faint promise and justice is just a rumor. Most people actually live in a situation of rightlessness. People lose their land in all kinds of ways. This is from North Sumatra as well. This was one fine morning when an oil palm company which had received a plantation lease moved its equipment onto village land to level it, to basically turn it into an oil palm plantation. This picture looks like Lord of the Rings with, this is Mordo basically, right? This is destruction and any of you who have had a biscuit during the day are part of it, because there's palm oil in the biscuit that you ate, I'm quite sure. So you're part of the picture. But this is a company that moves into land that people used to farm as smallholders back in the 1930s. They were evicted by the Dutch for a plantation. The Japanese occupied most of Indonesia in 1940. And people would move back onto the land to produce food for the Japanese army. 1945, Indonesia becomes independent. We have a very, very violent social revolution, especially in North Sumatra. People are fighting to keep the land. The new Indonesian army kicks them off. They move back, they're kicked off. They stay on the land during the late 1950s and they get residence permits. Not deeds of ownership, but residence permits. In 1965, there's a military crew and Suharto, Suharto is taken out and Suharto takes over. And everything that was written during the Suharto period is now no longer valid. So people get evicted again. And in 1998, we have this big democratic experiment in Indonesia, known as reformasi, and people move back onto the land. And now we're in 2016, and there's a company coming and saying, look, guys, we have it on paper, we have a lease for 35 years. Could you please just move? This is happening everywhere and all the time. So we might wonder, why do people who have experienced so little consistency in legal rights still appeal to the law and use legal means when they claim rights? And why does a company that needs to farm power on 10,000 hectares, why do they even bother to have a lease when they are in cahoots with power? Why do people, when they know they're defeated, still appeal to law? And why do companies who know that they were going to be victorious bother to get a lease? I want to say a few things about the types of rightlessness that people experienced. Just to cut it down to three types, basically. It has a colonial legacy in Indonesia. You have something called the Domain Verklang, and you have the agrarian law from 1865 and 1870, which basically says that all land that cannot be rightfully claimed with proper Dutch documentation belongs to government. I mean, we think we're dealing with land grabs now. This is a real land grab. This is basically to say the entire colony, whatever you think is yours, it's not really yours anymore, this belongs to government by the stroke of a pen. So legally, the law is favoring government over its citizens. That's the first step of the rightlessness we're experiencing here. Secondly, the actual legislation is incredibly complicated and incredibly contradictory. If you have a good lawyer, you can make the law say what you would like it to say. If you have a poor lawyer, you have no chance in hell. Honestly, the land legislation in Indonesia offers a variety of options that can be argued. And whoever is best at arguing that in the right context will actually be entitled. And I'm not just saying that because I don't understand the law. This is from lawyers themselves. It is incredibly contradictory and convoluted and complicated. It is not accessible for the ordinary person in the country. We call that hermeneutric injustice, but just think of it as a kind of deliberate complication of the legal system. And the legal infrastructure in both colonial societies, but especially in Indonesia, is basically captured by the elite. Courts, judges, the whole legal system is in the hands of very few people. And it is almost impossible to access it if you're just an ordinary person. If you're a few ordinary persons organizing in a movement, you have a better chance. But if you're an individual, good luck. It's not really possible. So we have this paradox that I mentioned. Why do ordinary people appeal to law if the cards are stacked against you to this extent? And why does a company even bother to get it in so they can just as well make an agreement with the local governor? I want to talk about three interconnected phenomena for the rest of the time. One is law's attraction in itself. One is the presumption of legality. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about ways in which people legalize their claims, despite laws in accessibility. So what do I mean by law's attraction? I think there are two fundamental things that make law very attractive. First of all, when you have a claim and you can convince the government or the state or political authorities, that this is not just a virtuous claim, but it's a right. You shift the responsibility of defending this right from yourself to government in principle. If you have a deed that says that government endorses this land claim as a right, it is on government to defend your right. That makes it really attractive because otherwise it's very hard work to defend your product. If nobody will defend it for you, if no government institution is there to say, look, by the power of government, you have to go because this person actually has a land right here. So it's incredibly attractive to be recognized by law. The other thing is that law also promises to lock in a decision over time. Now, for many of us in this room, it may not seem like such an urgent thing. But if you're Indonesian and look back, you will see that every 30 years there's been a regime change more or less. Actually, if you look at your watch right now, it should be time for one very soon. So it's super important that what is yours before and after a regime change is the same. And law promises that. It doesn't always do it, but at least it promises that if you have a land right, it is your right even if government changes. Sometimes it doesn't, depending on how government changes, but at least it has this promise and this attraction. The other thing I want to say a little bit about is the presumption of legality. The legal holder of state power has the presumption of legality on his side. Basically, it means that we presume that government is legal and what it does is legal. So whatever government decides is legal has the power of law. Of course, that's not always true. Sometimes governments do illegal things, but there's a presumption that government and law are connected. It's not always given. Sometimes it's merely a presumption, but a presumption it is. We do presume that government or state and law are somehow synchronized and connected. It means that if I consider legal, they're likely to enjoy the protection of the state. That's what I said just before that if you can have your interests considered a right, you can enjoy the protection of the state. But this works both ways. It also means that if interests enjoy the protection of the state, they're likely to be considered legal. So whatever the government protects as a right is presumed legal. I'm sure you can all come up with an example where this is not true and that's the whole point. It's a presumption, but it's a presumption that really works. So I'm going to skip these four slides because otherwise I'm not going to make it. So if we have this idea that there's rampant lawlessness on the one hand and still a sort of hope or confidence in the idea of law as something that can protect your interests as rights over time, but law is inaccessible for people. What do they do? How do you make things look legal if you have no access to the law? Social inequality makes knowledge about statutory law and access to formal institutions and trained lawyers an exception for most people. Most people don't see lawyers very often. That also goes for most people in this room probably, right? But we would know how to go about it. But for most people in Indonesia, this is not a realistic option at least. So what do you do? You resort to legalization by other means. I'm going to talk a little bit about representations because people use representations of government, of state, and of law in creative ways to give their claims this air of equality to make them look legal. So if you set out on field work and somebody asks you, what are you going to study? I'm going to study the law, I'm going to study the state. Then people ask, so what do they look like? You come home from a dusty day in the fields, you're sweaty, but really happy because today you saw the state and you also saw law. What did you actually see? I mean, what did you write down in your notebook that today I admit the state or today I saw law? We only see these, these are abstractions, we only see them through representations. So what are the representations that we have a shared understanding about as something that signals state law government? I think it has to do with visibility. How do you create legal visibility? How do you create demographic visibility, physical visibility, political visibility, economic visibility, service use of visibility? So in my field work in Indonesia, what was really interesting to me at least was how proud people were that they had a census sticker in the window. I was talking to people who had settled on a plantation. They argued that it was actually their land that had been occupied illegally by the plantation. The plantation said that these people were swatters and then you had to go. Nonetheless, they had small houses with windows and a small sticker from the census bureau. Why were they so happy about this sticker? It's because government knows we're here. This is a sticker I received from government. Government knows that I live here. It's not a deed, it's not a property deed. It doesn't say that I own the land. But government can't come here and say, what a surprise you're not supposed to be here, we didn't know you had to go. Government knows exactly where I am because they wrote it down in a little book and gave me this sticker. And every four, five years, there's going to be another sticker next to the first one that consolidates this mutual visibility between me and government. That's not exactly how they expressed it, but that's how I see it. That there's a kind of social contract that you establish of mutual visibility between government and the resident. Some people have addresses. I mean, everybody in this room has an address. You don't really think about it. But what is an address? It might not be where you live, but we have addresses. An address is basically a flag up in the air telling everybody and government that I'm here. So people, they try to give names to their streets, even though it's in a squat in the middle of a plantation or in an urban residential area, it's important that you give your name or give your street a name. And you should give your house a number because your neighbor did. And you can't say 123 because that's his number, so you're going to say 112. And what's the truth that you have an address? How do people prove that this is not just a number, that it's a real address? They ask for a cousin in summer to send them a postcard. And if the postcard arrives, it means that this is a real address. This is a bona fide address that I can show to people that I live here, even the post office knows that I'm here. I'm not here in hiding. I'm not a big fan of Jim Scott's book, How to Not Be Governed. I want to be governed. I don't want to be invisible. I want to be visible. I want to pay tax. People, this is also sometimes really difficult to explain to people back home that a lot of people are adamant about tax pay. They go to the local district tax office and say, look, this is my plot. I'd like to pay my taxes. And in many cases, the authorities will say, no, no, no, you can't do this. First of all, despite your little funny stick, you're not supposed to be here. This is not your land. You can't pay tax for it. But sometimes at the end of the year, there's no money in the till. And you need a bit of funding for the running cost of the district, so people accept tax payment. And you get a receipt. You get a small receipt that says I paid so much and then it says, stand and water my in this piece of paper. This is not proof of ownership. And what that means is this is proof of ownership. Anybody who's buying and selling land will have to provide the tax receipts for the past couple of years to show that I'm here in a regularized fashion. I'm not a pirate. I'm not a criminal. I'm not a rebel. I'm an ordinary citizen in Indonesia trying to make my way into society. So of course, I've got my tax receipts. And they will follow the land if you buy it. Movements that occupy land and have things constructed, they very often invite politicians to come and give an inaugural speech because they know that politicians know nothing better than come and give an inaugural speech and come on YouTube. But this YouTube clip is also the birth certificate of the place that you are inaugurating. Some of the places I've seen people were delighted because our Hamlet is on Google Maps. The Google car came up and down the street. It photographed it. We can see our houses. And it even registered the name that we gave to the street. We're on Google Maps. We don't care about government maps. In the government maps, this is a forest. But in the government map, even Bogor is a forest, right? So we're happy we're on Google Maps. That's what people use anyway. And now people can take a taxi. They can arrive to the right destination. We exist. This is endless. All kinds of representations of existence also do this. Signboards, public events, harvest festivals where you invite dignitaries and so on. All of this are representations of something. Not necessarily of property. But there are sufficient representations of a government recognition that there's a community living here over time. And that, if you can't get a property deed, this might have to do. I want to say a little bit about representations because it's an interesting thing. Think about it. Re-presentation. The word itself somehow suggests that we have reality here. And then we are presenting it again. We're re-presenting it. But first we have reality. So we have something real in the world. And we make a re-presentation of it. That's the whole sort of mental mechanism that starts in our heads when we hear the word representation. But sometimes the representation comes before what it represents. Sometimes the echo comes before the cry. Sometimes the proof, the agreement, the speech, the inaugural talk and so on comes before or at the same time as what it represents. It makes it real. It's not that we have real history here and then we have a re-presentation here. The representation of reality actually conjures it up. That may be quite busy because you can actually see it in many places. But let's just stay with these settlements here. But it means that property and legality comes into actuality through representation. It doesn't exist before. It exists through this representation. And it means if you are clever, you're smart and you make this representation, you're not just representing reality, you are forming it. And that's why this is a very crowded place. Many people are engaged in making representations. And of course they're not all coherent. And they will say opposite things. You will have one sign from the army saying that this is a terrain for army practices. And you'll have another sign saying, no, this is the village of so-and-so. And you'll have another sign saying that this is an old palm plantation. So representations are really important in the creation of reality. I'm going to show you a couple of examples of what I call improvised legalization. So this is from a plantation in West Java. People had been evicted from this plantation and they moved back onto the plantation. Not all of it, but a little bit. And they realized that they actually needed a school for their kids. So they began to mark out how much space do we need for a school. And then they applied to the regional ministry of education. Now the regional ministry of education in this area, they don't have lunch with the regional ministry of plantations. So they had no idea that this was an occupied land. So they grounded the money. And it was only when they were putting the roof up that people in the ministry of plantations began to make noise. But at that time, the embarrassment would have been too big for the regional governor. So he came and inaugurated this school and you've got the most solid plate of marble here with the letters and the sculpture of the Indonesian state. Look, this is not a communist red star. This is basically the signature of the state, which is chiseled in marble, commemorating the day when the governor came and opened this facility for the education of yet another generation of Indonesian citizens. This is not happening in hiding. This is as loud as these people can speak that we are Indonesian citizens and we are on this land with justice. The teachers, they showed me into the senior common room. I'm not sure you can see it very well. But in the corner, they had this table of trophies. This school enters into all kinds of local and regional competitions with the students. And the trophies you can see here are one for handicraft, where they came third. One for environmental drawing, also came third. And one for a relay race, which was the kindergarten. I'm not sure they finished, but they got honorable mention. So these... I mean, you can enjoy the aesthetics of these trophies. They're more elaborate than the World Cup. But what do they do? They basically say, we're not rebels. We can steal this land. We are part of a community. Our kids participate with all the other kids in this school activity. And we are decent citizens. This is what this says. We're not proud that we had to take the land back by force. But that was just a condition that what we really are is proud parents of the future citizens of the country. But it's not just small people who do this. This is a picture of an old plantation. And it goes on and on and on and on. Even these companies, they create an air of legality around their activities. If you want to have a plantation in Indonesia, you need to get a plantation lease or what they call a Hagu, which is a legal right to farm a particular crop and a particular piece of land for 25, 35, sometimes 40 years. In order to get this permit, you first need a location permit. Then there's a whole series of steps you need to perform. You need to have an enormous impact assessment. You need to have a social impact assessment. You need to have a financial plan. You need to have a business plan. You need to have a contract of loans from the bank and so on. So a whole list of steps. And then you can get your actual lease and then you can start your production. What happens in most cases is that the company says, okay, let's get the location permit and tell people in the area that this is actually the lease that they should get lost. So they're basically curating the location permit as if it was the lease. Few people can tell the difference. And if you are convincing enough and you can pay the local police to come and evict, then it works. And after a while, you can't tell the difference between illegal and non-legal plantation because the paperwork that was yesterday, now we are producing and this is how it works. So to make things look legal is not just to preserve of small people. It's also a strategy of companies. I want to show a couple of pictures from an urban setting before I finish. This is from Bandung. So Bandung is on Java and there was a railway line going into Bandung built in the 1870s. I won't just say 70s, but maybe that's not exactly true. But it was discontinued in 1980. Not enough passengers, all transport was moved to trucks and this railway line was just idle. And people began to ask the local station master because even though you didn't have an active railway line you had a station and you also had a guy turning to the station. I don't know how that's possible, but I mean he was there. So they asked the local station master would it be possible for us to grow a few crops on the land close to the tracks? We're not going to settle there, we're just going to grow a few crops and the station master said, well yes, if you promise to leave if the training begins to run again. No problem. So people began to farm small crops on the track. I mean you know it's warmer during the day and sometimes you need it. So people began to build small shelters so you can have a nap during the midday. Otherwise it's not possible. But this was not a permanent structure and few people began to cement floors in those small shelters and built more solid walls. And every year the station master would go up and down the line and people would greet him and say what a lovely civil servant who was helping the population to enjoy the benefits of the country and he received small gifts. After a while people began to build more solid structures. You see the rail here? This is a mosque by the way, right? Because they also needed a little bit of space. This is the rails going in through the back yard of an alley. Here you've got the rails. Nobody ever stole the steel bars and sold them. This is not our property. The rails are still there but you can see them and I mean the train's not going to run here anytime soon, right? Here's another one with... I used to have a picture of a badminton court where this rail line is going straight through. So what do people do to get a plot? Well, you get a plot through the station master who's a representative of government. You get an address as I talked about by sending yourself a postcard. And then people also go to the local... the lowest level of local administration be Erti or Ermi because they can issue an identity card. They can say that you live here. It doesn't say that you own the place. It just says you live here. And with this you can send your kids to school. You can apply for water or electricity. That was a little bit tricky because the electricity service and the water service said, look, we're not supposed to put in meters on land without the approval of the owner of the land and this is railway company land and people in the area said, well, we understand. We don't want to get you into trouble but could you come Saturday and just bring your tools. So all the meters were put in during the weekend by the people working for the electricity company and the water company, but not during office hours because that was kind of dubious but during the weekend you can get a lot done. So everybody has the water and the electricity read by the local agencies and they pay. Rent out land. This is very tight. Nobody has their own sort of toilet facilities or anything. So there's a communal set of toilets and they're constructed by an organization which is half governmental, half NGO, half paid by the World Bank and they constructed these amenities and people participated in the ways that they were supposed to and when I talked to this agency they said, well, you know, every year we get audited and the auditors they come and they look at this and they say, you know, you're actually not supposed to create public infrastructure on land which is under dispute but it is not corruption and that's it. So it's not really legal but it's not so bad as they want to bring anybody to justice for it. So you now have a kind of modest sanitary infrastructure in this neighborhood. Yeah, let's keep this one. I think this raises a number of paradoxes and I think they're not restricted to Indonesia. On the one hand we have multiple institutions and multiple norms that guide how people behave, how things are sanctioned and so on and there's a plethora of these things in Indonesia but in many societies. On the other hand, there is somehow a shared idea of a single law in a single state. It's very abstract but people have an idea that the law is somehow there we just need to apply it. The state is somewhere there and benign we just need to rid it of those people who somehow occupy it for nefarious reasons. There's also in many ways an idea of law's universality that it covers everybody. We are all subject to law. Even though people know that half of us can't access the law and the other half is protected by it even though they do illegal stuff. That's also kind of a paradox. How you can keep this cognitive dissonance in your head is beyond me but I think we practically do it all of this most of the time. We know that reality is not really what we imagine law and state to be. We have this idea of its universality and no full will that is not. That is at best an ambition. We also have this presumption that law is legal. What else should it be? We also have everybody everybody I talk to can come with a dozen examples of how they themselves or their uncle try to sort of just circumvent the law in a way to make legalities in just a little bit. We also often have this idea that law is fairly permanent but at the same time everybody that I've talked about here are incessantly working to construct and tinker a legality where all the legal paraphernalia and rituals and documents can produce this air of legality. On the one hand we think that law is old and stable on the other hand all engaged in manipulating it. This is kind of the same but maybe phrased in a nicer way. Because people refer to the law we all do that as if it was fixed but by referring to the law as if it was fixed we're actually building it bit by bit. We're constructing it bit by bit in our sort of social intercourse with each other. And we're constructing something that we believe to be already there. And finally let me get back to this thing about law's attraction because this is a really sort of pernicious paradox. It's exactly the enduring legalized exclusion that people experience and the fact that benefits of property rights are so tightly connected to the Indonesian state that makes law a promising proposition for people because they know that law is hard. Law is defended by the state. It is unlikely that I will enjoy it but I'm also entitled to try my luck. So in a funny way the abuse of law by the Indonesian state makes legal opportunities attractive for people even though they are almost out of reach. And I think I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Fascinating to listen to. We have two discussions while you all have questions to comment on ahead. You are starting. I thought you could start but be brief. Not because we don't want to hear you but because it's also very... Down and brief. I have my reaction in my mobile phone. So we just read it. I will skip so many things because Christian explained it already. I'm Bosman Batuban. I'm working in this university as a postdoctoral researcher at the Human Geographic and Spatial Planning Department. Thank you. Thank you, Januile Mpenke and Mayor for giving me this chance to discuss Christian article and Arab illegality. I also thank to my colleagues at Lubaunium with whom I discuss your article. Christian's paper identifies a paradox or so many paradoxes in the relationship between state, law, property, land, and people in Indonesia. For example, the paradox is even though the law is most often against them, people see law as vital for them. The article combines law attraction, rightlessness, and improvised legalization of those paradoxes. Christian explained already what these three are about. In Indonesia, the colonial state established itself as a major authority on land, including through two laws, forest laws and agrarian laws. Then forest and agrarian laws can be seen as instrumental for land dispossession. With that, the colonial government establishes itself as the owner and regulator of the land rights. Christian vividly captured what is going on and brought it to us in a very well-telling piece of article of how the state hegemonically controls the political imagination of Indonesia with no exception of its activists. My short comment on this, perhaps Christian is right that the state hegemonically controls the politics through law. Beyond land politics, I think, or I feel like, there are a lot of people in Indonesia including myself who are avoiding something that has relationships to court, police and hospitals. Nevertheless, I admire Christian's article. For me, this article is a massive contribution for Indonesian land or agrarian studies for revelation. I'm saying this not for the sake of academic politeness, I'll elaborate my argument through conversation on more than Marxist primitive accumulation and more than Lenin's capitalist development. In terms of theoretical conversation, Christian and Iroplagality helps me to understand that the land dispossession since the colonial up to the post-colonial Indonesia is more than Marxist primitive accumulation. Marxist primitive accumulation, by margin, basically has two sides. Land grabbing. Christian talked about that a little bit and the comparison of dispossession into wage labor. The question of land and the question of labor. What Christian and Iroplagality tells us, yes, that was or there is a land grabbing through colonization and it keeps moving in the post-colonial era. And there is a comparison of dispossession into landless to say the labor power but not only those the dispossess somehow was also insulted. I can add if the dispossess becomes the rule to urban migrants as I encountered many in my own research in Jakarta they are not absorbed as wage labor by the formal sector and have to find their own ways. By reading Christian's article I can see the Indonesian person of modern Marxist primitive accumulation which is the combined interaction of land grabbing, pro-italianization, insulting, and the production of pro-active surplus population. Second, landing capitalists in development. By my reading, the dominating discourse in Indonesian agrarian studies is class analysis for differentiation in the countryside. Learning's explanation of Russian capitalist development somehow defines the analysis of Indonesian agrarian scholars. According to Lenin there are two types of capitalist development in Russia. The first is Russian part in which the borderline developed themselves into agrarian capitalists. The second is American part in which the rural smallholders become the agrarian capitalists after our competitor of fellow smallholders. In Indonesia, I think that is not always the case. The rural landowners did not really expand into agrarian capitalists. Their smallholders are invested in other sectors, for example to send their kids to advance education in cities to later on become civil servants. This is another example of how strong the state is. People included themselves into the state rather than develop their own business. Of course, there are exceptions. The inclusion of agrarian elites into the state goes hand in hand with the fact that the state is the biggest landlord in Indonesia as Christian articles help us. It is exactly in this point I admire Christian work even more. Building on Christian work I can now ask a question as my attempt to bring the conversation into a different level. If the state is the biggest landowner and the trend is that the rural landowners do not really invest their support under agricultural business why then the learning influence capitalist development analysis of class dynamics in Indonesia is so persistent? If the existing theorists such as Marxist-Lithu accumulation and learnings capitalist development do not really treat with the Indonesian context or theory can explain Indonesian capitalist development what kind of capitalism exists in Indonesia. I am doing this question for the state of questioning for me they are theoretical questions as well as practical ones politics with good theory if we don't know what to revolve on how can we have revolution learning himself said that without revolutionary there can be no revolutionary movement it is in this point I don't share similar view with Christian I tend to see the paradox or those paradoxes you identify as contradiction or the seemingly contrasting conditions but they have the electrical relationship the notion of paradox for me does not really push you to identify the next move it doesn't bring the revolutionary element of the so-called question at least that is how I see Christian article the notion of contradiction or dialectical relationship always comes with the so-called question so what it pushes you to think through the possible synthesis that comes out of the existing contradiction to close for the sake of next move therefore before asking what revolution do we need like the question posted by Landa conference last year please allow me to take a step back to ask question what revolutionary theory do we actually have thank you some big questions there all you need to do is situate yourself in relation to Marx and Lenin and we will be done but not now because we are first hearing okay I think I have a very loud voice so I will use that be a bit close record it thank you I will start from the argument that we are all lawmakers that really stuck to me in your argumentation also from your article and I would like to introduce a hypothetical case say that the Dutch government has 1 million euro to improve land rights in Indonesia or say in Africa and they go to the cadastre we have this organization and they are determined to get it right so they put a lot of experts in the airplane they go to Indonesia the land administration department and they try to sort it out the chaos that you described and they also send a few planning experts because they think that more integrated bureaucratic coordination can significantly improve the situation of people and bring development I am starting to doubt whether that is working in Indonesia and I say well maybe we should just give this money to a bunch of NGOs which will make and give them a few stamps and let them produce all sorts of representations and we should also fund different organizations so we create bureaucratic competition so people can actually have more opportunities to create an error of legality would that be a good idea? that is my question to you professor Lund or would you go with the option that we have already tried? thank you would you take a minute to respond to some of the points and then we open it up for you well it is hard to say which of the two questions were most revolutionary first of all I think it is interesting to be in a conference like this with people from so many different positions in a way it is not just a university academic conference there are NGOs there are activists there are all kinds of people who have an interest in them and I think that is a very silent and healthy thing because it is too important to leave just one kind of discipline but I will make two cheap answers to those two questions I think Lin's question was to you know it is not really for me to say what should Indonesia do Indonesia Indonesia will have to figure out what is going to happen and it is in a way also an answer to you I think if the Dutch government has a million euros and it fills an aeroplane with technicians it is because they see the land question as technical it is not only technical it is super political but it is not only political it is also super technical the first thing you want to do when you go to the Cadastre is you want to say so what are we registering what kind of rights are we registering here and then there will be some you know American consultants say ownership and then there will be a European saying what do you mean by ownership we are talking about rights here and then we will have to park them outside of the Cadastre for the difference between a right and ownership and is ownership absolute and how absolute is absolute and how is it how do we transact things that are owned compared to things to which we just have a right and then once we figure that out we are going to take another week in the Cadastre trying to figure out so who should have this right and then we will have to ask Bosman back in and he will come in with Lenin under the arm and say look the recipe is here but it is not really it is really complicated to see who is supposed to be entitled the agrarian law in Indonesia stipulates that every person should have the right to two hectares of land if you take the population of Java and give everybody two hectares they will all be in the sea there is not enough land to give everybody two hectares so that has to be a very practical thing when you talk to the kids who went to the secondary school much to the lament of their parents they don't want to be peasants they want to go to Jakarta and make homepages a lot of them will end up in the countryside don't worry but I mean it is not a huge aspiration we are talking about things which are we will dilute ourselves if we think it is only technical or only political and we will also I think prepare ourselves for huge disappointments if we use the word solution in this it is not one solution there are ways of managing this contradictory politically tense problem right and I think just for the sake of argument with Lenin and the I think what you have in Indonesia is basically government has the power to allocate land to companies and government employees receive kickbacks according to where they are in this hierarchy that is a combo which is difficult to break up but you have to start by talking about it because it is not really it is a way of cheating the rest of the population out of their land rights and many people can enjoy land without actually farming cassava on it taxation is not a bad proposition but it is also not an easy one how do you tax people who have access to land maybe that is a way to go to say that the income from agricultural production should also lead to some kind of land taxation and land taxation should not just evaporate when it hits the local governor so there are many things to deal with at the same time but I think fundamentally it is not for an occasional observer from Denmark to say how Indonesia should solve this problem all I can do is to come up with inconvenient facts about the thing that is not just technical it is not just political it is not just one solution Java is different from Borneo Borneo is different from Sumatra and so on and maybe the decentralization experiment from 1998 should also be tried out on what kind of rights can government allocate to people or businesses and so on one of the things which is really strange in Indonesia is that it only recognizes individuals not communities that change might actually make a lot of a difference the Indonesian law recognizes a company which is also kind of a community but not a community so maybe there are some technicalities that can be looked at there but I think there is room for more than one plane of Dutch experts to chip in on this issue thank you let me send you the energy in the room who is dying to ask the question who is dying who is eager who is eager to ask the question there is at least one two, three, four we will take those try to be brief I should say that to you as well I guess and that is where we will conclude the formal part so I saw you Kay, you can go first a brief question I don't know how far the actual law is seen when you talk about it it was very interesting you know it is universal like a law as universal because it it can be also read as a story of plural understanding or the laws of legalism that people deal with so maybe I was actually thinking about the concept of legal pluralism rather than the universality so maybe you can clarify what you mean by so that is one Mark thank you so much for your wonderful talk one of my KAC students studies legal consciousness in post-colonial Bangladesh and she is found with very empirical research that many people understand the state law as the thing to which they need to attend and to mediate their lives and to orient themselves around and to play with to their needs but the real law is Islamic law is religious law and that is fixed and so I was wondering how does the legal consciousness of the people you are working with with respect to the land how is that shaped by their religious perceptions of law no, I knew that I was one of the first oh yeah yeah, a very short question I am just wondering the concept of digital material rights I was point by 50 years ago how does it relate to improvised legality thanks to Christian for a very interesting presentation you mentioned Jim Scott book the art of Nuffin Germans the people I work with are not subscribing to that they want to be visible I was wondering do you think there is a sort of a tipping point when people feel that their vitamins bind in so many times that they do move into this art not being covered or is it much more messy again and some circumstances want to be seen by some parts of the state and in other times not to be covered all right wonderful question let's deal with Jim first in his book he basically says this is an argument of a historical nature writing about the beginning of states and how people reacted to that at that moment a thousand years ago in the Anaheim Highlands it was still possible to escape the state I don't think it is possible to escape the state at present I don't think Jim thinks it's possible to escape the state I think his argument is really sophisticated I think it's a great book I just think it's a good book also to play up against because everything that he writes where people are trying to speak a different language from the state to be visible to not pay tax to be a surprise to the state is almost point for point the opposite of what people seem to behave here people don't want to be left behind by the state, they don't want to be neglected by the state they know that the state is an also fierce adversary but it's better that the state knows that I'm here than by some accident doesn't I'm not sure whether it's a tipping point maybe we're talking about a tipping point the state technology of how to manage personhood that has changed a lot over the past thousand years now every citizen has a smart phone it's really difficult to pick off the grid so I think there is a tipping point there's also the question of democracy and how to make the state work for you and make the state accountable to you and of course if you have sorry if you have talking about smart phones often if you are I don't know how are you going to do that how are you going to do that how are you going to do that what was I saying it's a big point yeah if democracy if you can hold government to account it's a whole different kind of state than what Jim Scott was talking about and it's also a whole different kind of state than what I've been presenting it doesn't mean that it's impossible to hold government to account there is form of democracy there are democratic there are political parties they do engage in some kind of debate and the possibility of a democratic accountability accountability cannot be excluded but it's just a lot of hard work so I think as a historical book and as a book to think about the social contract between citizen and state it's magnificent I just think when you look at what ordinary people do in deprived situations when they hope for rights and justice it's not really what he's saying they're basically saying look we're right here please recognize us so legitimate rights I don't think I write about legitimate rights and I think I stopped doing that a long time ago because I don't know what they are but what I do write about is how can you legitimate claims and want them to become rights and I think it's not easy to say that this claim is legitimate and this is not legitimate this is basically something that is being hammered out in social political confrontation every day but it's important the important part of Max Weber here is that everybody knows that it has to be legitimated you can't just say I want this you have to say I want this because I'm entitled because my grandfather was here or some other cult of authenticity is being invoked but you have to argue and it's in the legitimation of your claim that you can compare things but I don't think I would end up saying okay this is the legitimate claim I don't think that's possible I think you can maybe in the best of all worlds reach a level of let's reclaim the word equilibrium from the economists but some kind of balance where where your claim has to be legitimated it can somehow be accorded but you can't go over a certain boundary because then other people's claims are being undermined but I don't think that it's something that you can write down in a textbook honestly brief and say this is the equilibrium we're looking for I think what we have to look for is the way in which people legitimate their claims and sometimes people have very good arguments and sometimes they really don't it's really the hollow argument that you are using to legitimate your claim to this piece of land so I think legitimation is really important but that's more a processional dynamic than a heart concept and universalism, pluralism and religion yes of course what I've said today is a simplification of a simplification of a simplification right but again if you say that people in Bangladesh they have some reverence toward statutory law but they have their faith connected to religious law it goes back to the question of legitimation how are claims legitimated and I think for the people you're talking about they know how to play it on two pianos at the same time and I think it's the same here it's not that I will deny the existence of legal pluralism but I think in the abstract people have this idea that law is a good thing that law is a resource that we all should have access to in reality we don't and that's why some people go forum shopping and some people do all kinds of stretched legitimations of their demands but I think there is sort of a general belief that law and rights are something fairly universal there's a really good passage in Hannah Arendt's book The Organs of Totalitarianism where she says that we were not given equal rights at the beginning equal rights is something that we established as a combination to have an equal society it's not something that existed and that we can just take for granted it is something we need to fight for but I think most people if you sit down two and two they would argue that we should all have that I think that's a beautiful Hannah Arendt statement so thank you all you can sit back and relax and look at this