In 2002, male village leaders and youth living near a transnational mining corporation's operation in rural Indonesia attacked a group of visiting environmental activists. I analyze the moral commitments of the corporate managers who provoked the attack and the village elites who organized and executed it, turning to the context of the burgeoning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) industry to grasp the broader dimensions of the beliefs and practices through which managers and elites legitimized their actions. This essay shows that the CSR industry is coevolving alongside environmental advocacy campaigns and grassroots corporate security models.
After the Batu Hijau mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, began operating in 2000, mine managers identified area farmers as a top security risk because they were threatening to shut down the mine unless they were given jobs there. Among various efforts to get local residents “back on the land,” the mine began sponsoring participatory integrated pest management trainings that were supposed to turn residents into productive and self‐reliant subjects. Instead, these trainings evoked subjects who claimed—through their resistance to certain aspects of the trainings—that they were dependent on and entitled to conventional forms of development aid from the mine. [participatory development, subjectivity, Indonesia, mining, environment]
The cigarette industry mobilizes independent retail as the scaffolding for ubiquitous cigarette advertising and sales in Indonesia, forming an expansive semiotic and material architecture of cigarette circulation in a country with limited tobacco regulations. As impending regulations threaten to curb cigarette advertising, and independent retailers face stiff competition from mushrooming chain convenience stores, Philip Morris International's Indonesian subsidiary has developed a retail community programme to recruit and ‘modernize’ select retailers. The programme has intensified the quotidian labour of marketers who use knowledge, persons, and things to inhabit and renovate independent retail. I show how fashioning cigarette markets entails fashioning retail infrastructure, and is embedded in intimate relations of power, care, and violence.
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