Indigenous People, Migrants, and Refugees: A Clash of Individual and Cultural Human Rights

Abstract

Current debates on decentralization and revitalization in Indonesia are closely linked to discourses on individual and cultural human rights: local or indigenous people claiming rights based on their cultural roots, migrants claiming equal individual human rights as Indonesian citizens, and refugees referring to both their human right to protection and their cultural right to return to their ancestral land. Individual human rights and their collective counterpart, cultural rights, will be two of the hardest touchstones for the cultural turn in peace research and are the central theme of this chapter. The contrasting claims of indigenous people, migrants, and refugees in Maluku clearly show the dilemmas arising out of the granting of, on the one hand, cultural rights — one important outcome of decentralization and the adoption of an international discourse on collective human rights in Indonesia — and the granting of individual human and equal citizenship rights, on the other. Whereas every Indonesian citizen can claim the latter, only some can claim collective rights for local polities, which results in multiple citizenship, the essentialization of culture, and the exclusion of cultural outsiders.