Based on ongoing biographical research of Indonesian migrant workers in the oil palm plantations of Malaysia, this paper explores their different strategies of survival in a sector characterised by an ongoing precarity of livelihoods. The life stories of six workers from Sulawesi, Flores, Java and Sumatra are used to illustrate a tentative typology of migration experiences. As the workers set out from their own specific context of 'surplus population' , they are confronted with a migration labour regime that is based on the social and political precarisation of the workers. However, in order to achieve their development aspirations, the workers find different ways of adapting to or circumventing the precarious labour regime. In particular, flight or absconding (lari) is used to change employers, to find better working conditions and to increase wages. Another key strategy is to increase the permanence of their stay, either by choosing illegality or by negotiating retrospective documentation. These strategies lead to the emergence of long-term transnational networks that change the social reality of the migration regime in the oil palm industry.
Indonesia has a long history of land grabs before this term was coined, reaching from colonial occupation to cleptocratic rule. The most recent wave of enclosures across the archipelago builds on large-scale, market-oriented spatial planning. This paper shares our experience of using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to produce highquality community controlled maps in order to challenge some of the official spatial planning processes in West Kalimantan. Developed at first as a component of action research looking at the political ecology of the Kapuas River, the drone mapping soon developed its own dynamics and delivered quite impressive results in bolstering legal and political claims of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Dayak communities. We argue that relatively simple and accessible drone technology has some potential for furthering the recognition of local and indigenous people and their territorial claims. Such a view, however, stands in contrast to recent debates that have highlighted the limits and even detrimental social and political effects of countermapping. Drawing on our experience with 'community drones', we compare 'traditional' and drone counter-mapping in key dimensions of production, distribution and use. This comparison helps to delimit more clearly the occasions and conditions under which drone-based counter-mapping may be a politically useful tool.
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