West Papua and Radical Politics
Since 1963, West Papua, the western half of the island of Papua New Guinea, has been occupied by the postcolonial state of Indonesia. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous West Papuans have been murdered by the military and police, and tens of thousands have been forcibly displaced to extract natural resources. Today, West Papuans are a minority in their own country due to decades of resettlement, genocidal policies, and massacres. In West Papua, activities such as mining, palm oil plantations and deforestation are some of the largest megaprojects in the world, taking place on an island that is home to the third largest rainforest on earth. In the pursuit of what West Papuan liberation movement leader Benny Wenda calls the vision of a Green State, the West Papuan struggle for independence still thrives and continues to resist the various forms of violence that subject West Papuan human life and land to exploitation and death.
However, the subject of West Papua is not particularly well known in Europe and there is limited mainstreaming of the subject in the wider academic curriculum. This call for papers addresses this lacuna and encourages submissions which think with and from West Papua as part of a larger global liberation struggle. We strongly encourage collaboration and coalition building across struggles, histories and geographies and between those interested in submitting papers to facilitate this step forward.
This call for papers is open to all. However, we are particularly keen to hear from those whose voices are not typically heard, as part of an attempt to place the existence of the West Papuan liberation struggle on the map, within public awareness and academic discourse:
- the Pacific region, Melanesian, and Papuan peoples
- those thinking from/with West Papuan politics and philosophies
- those thinking from/with other global liberation struggles
Collaborations and coalitions could co-produce papers by getting in touch with each other, with and across university institutions internationally and/or across the international West Papua related networks. You do not have to be institutionally affiliated to a university to be considered for publication. We accept essays, articles, interviews, artwork and works that push the boundaries beyond academic styles of writing. Some topics which submissions could address include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
Specific to West Papua,
- Indigenous Papuan politics, ethics, and philosophies of the Green State Vision
- Life and the politics of recovery, care, and community
- Language, art, imagination, knowledge, metaphor, and narrative
- The politics of health, water, and food
- Policing, surveillance, and Papuan identity
- The social death, criminalisation, and ghettoization of West Papuans
- Disordering the body-politic by refusal: riots, civil disobedience, and protest
- The loss of cultural ways of being through the adoption of state political institutions
What it would look like to think of West Papua alongside historical, contemporary, and future issues already within the curriculum,
- Collective liberation struggles, such as in Palestine and Kashmir
- State repression and mass displacement
- Ecocide, genocide, cultural genocide, and ethnocide
- Environmental justice, extractivism and indigenous communities
- The criminalisation and/or dehumanisation of indigenous peoples
- Globalisation, global politics, global capitalism
- Peoples, populism, and indigenous politics
- ‘Decolonisation’ and the ‘post-colonial’ despotic state
- Living among polluted and toxic environments
- Mass relocation and transmigration
Please refer to our submission guidelines
Articles submitted to: interferejournal@gmail.com
Deadline for submission: TBC
Due to be published: TBC
Links to our previous issues: Born in Flames; Violence and Orders; Disrupting Coloniality, Recovering De-coloniality.
If you would like to publish anonymously, please tell us when submitting your work.
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