Continuity of Agrarian Domination in Deli Serdang from Colonialism to Reform
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26811/peuradeun.v14i3.2647Keywords:
Continuum of Domination, Institutional Adaptation, Land Conflict, Postcolonial Governance, Legal PluralismAbstract
Persistent agrarian inequality in Indonesia reveals a critical gap in explaining how colonial legal and economic logics survive political regime change. This study examines how legal and institutional mechanisms reproduced and adapted agrarian domination in Ramunia Plantation, Deli Serdang, from the colonial period through the Reform Era. Using a critical-historical qualitative design, the study analyzed colonial archives, agrarian regulations, and institutional records alongside in-depth interviews with 30 informants and 40 field observation sessions. Data were interpreted through historical source criticism, thematic analysis, and triangulation. The findings demonstrate that political transitions changed the formal actors and instruments of control but did not dismantle underlying agrarian relations. Colonial concessions were reconfigured through nationalization, State Control Rights, HGU-based management, state–military–corporate networks, administrative fragmentation, and infrastructure-driven land acquisition. These adaptations left historical occupation, customary claims, and actual land use unresolved while privileging actors with stronger administrative and political resources. The study advances the continuum-of-domination proposition to explain that agrarian domination persists not through institutional immobility, but through the translation of inherited governing logics into new legal and administrative forms. Agrarian justice, therefore, requires conflict resolution that integrates documentary genealogy, historical land relations, actual land use, and differentiated community claims rather than relying exclusively on formal titles.
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