Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 42, Issue 4, July 2011, Pages 418-426
Geoforum

Post-disaster economic development in Aceh: Neoliberalization and other economic-geographical imaginaries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.02.006Get rights and content

Abstract

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 and a subsequent Memorandum of Understanding ending three decades of armed conflict has opened up Aceh to international aid, trade, ideas and potential investment. For Naomi Klein in her (2008) book The Shock Doctrine, such disasters have been exploited systematically in processes of neoliberalization. Based on fieldwork in Aceh and Jakarta, this paper shows that while neoliberal elements are present within important economic-geographical imaginaries in post-disaster Aceh, they are intertwined with and exceeded by other imaginaries. We draw attention to the theoretical importance of a fuller understanding of such imaginaries, their origin and reach, content and the actors and mechanisms associated with their promulgation. The paper recounts four economic-geographical imaginaries of the future of Aceh: (1) Aceh as newly (re)opened to overseas investors; (2) Aceh as a site of revivable trade connections to the Malay and Islamic worlds; (3) Aceh as a self-governing economic space; (4) Aceh as a united territory of diverse cultures and districts. The first of these is most closely associated with processes of neoliberalization but is exceeded by the others which, taken together, unsettle any singular script of a “disaster capitalism complex” at work in the reconstruction of Aceh.

Research highlights

► Separatist conflict and the tsunami in Aceh mean that this Indonesian province might be expected to show evidence of what Naomi Klein has termed ‘disaster capitalism’. ► While neoliberal elements are present within important economic-geographical imaginaries in post-disaster Aceh, they are intertwined with and exceeded by other imaginaries. ► Four key economic-geographical imaginaries detailed in the paper unsettle any singular script of a ‘disaster capitalism complex’ at work in the reconstruction of Aceh.

Introduction

In this paper we focus on questions regarding the uneven patterns and processes of neoliberalization. Following Larner and Le Heron (2002) and Leitner et al. (2007), we argue for the importance of examining imaginaries associated within accounts of neoliberalization. The empirical case we examine is that of strategies of economic development circulating in post-disaster Aceh. These economic development strategies are accompanied by major economic-geographical imaginaries in the reconstruction of Aceh, especially after three decades of armed separatist conflict (1976–2005) and the tsunami of 26 December 2004. Such economic-geographical imaginaries speak to something of a deconstruction of the recently ‘imagined community’ of post-colonial Indonesia (Anderson, 1983).

Our study takes place some years after the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed as a basis for cessation of the armed conflict between armed separatist Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) rebels and Indonesian government forces. From this vantage point there is the prospect that the ‘economic dividend’ of Aceh’s autonomy may be little more than a figment of various imaginations. We use the term economic-geographical ‘imaginaries’, then, in relation to the disjuncture that exists between imaginings for Aceh and any substantive analogues they have in terms of economic development practice. In this, we draw from the recent work of Jessop and Oosterlynck who explore the ‘path-shaping potential of economic imaginaries (in their different forms and varying content)’ in an effort to ‘explain why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized and thereby come to co-constitute economic subjectivities, interests, activities, organizations, institutions, structural ensembles, emergent economic orders and their social embedding, and the dynamics of economic performance’ (2008, p. 1156). Our discursive preference for economic-geographical ‘imaginaries’ thus offers a useful tool for framing post-tsunami, post-conflict developments in ways that may not be easily explained by market logic or global capitalist forces.

National government concessions to demands for regional autonomy after the fall of President Suharto and the subsequent physical destruction of the tsunami extended the horizons of political and economic possibility in Aceh. However, by the same token, Aceh is no tabula rasa for processes of neoliberalization as a result of the activation of a global “disaster capitalism complex” (Klein, 2007). While the tsunami did reshape the military, political and socio-economic dimensions of “governable spaces” in Aceh (Le Billon and Waizenegger, 2007), complex geo-histories continue to channel economic-geographical imaginaries of Aceh.

In this paper we draw mainly from some thirty semi-structured interviews conducted in Banda Aceh, Jakarta and Singapore between December 2007 and January 2008. In addition we relate the interview material to a number of Indonesian legal documents, NGO reports, as well as local, national and international media coverage. We begin by further specifying imaginaries via a ‘meso-level’ analysis of: the content of imaginaries; their transmission via a diversity of agents and mechanisms; their constitution and appeal to audiences at multiple geographical scales, and; how mobile imaginaries rub up against those associated with the relative fixity of state territoriality. Next we discuss four important economic-geographical imaginaries at work in the process of reconstruction: (1) Aceh as newly (re)opened to overseas investors; and (2) Aceh as a site of revivable trade connections to the Malay and Islamic worlds; (3) Aceh as a self-governing economic space; and (4) Aceh as a united territory of diverse cultures and districts. In this discussion, we move from considering an imaginary inflected with the most mobile and neoliberal of policy norms and ideals to imaginaries that are less so. In a concluding discussion we reflect on how consideration of economic-geographical imaginaries questions the veracity of the singular script of neoliberalization within the context of post-disaster Aceh.

Section snippets

Neoliberal and other economic-geographical imaginings

Presently, economic development strategies for many places are bound-up with hegemonic processes of neoliberalization (Leitner et al., 2007, Peck and Tickell, 2002). Neoliberalization is a global, although geographically uneven, process involving “multiple determinations” (Harvey, 2005, p. 9) and significant contradictions between neoliberal practices and doctrine. There is a sense here in which neoliberalism can inhabit the present as ‘a concrete embodiment of its abstract description’ (

Post-disaster imaginaries in Aceh

In Aceh alone more than 130,000 people were killed with almost another 40,000 missing as a result of the 2004 tsunami. Initial evaluations suggested that damages amounted to US$4.5–5 billion (Asian Development Bank, 2005). A central government agency, the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Executing Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR) was formed with three main “missions” over a 4 year period: (1) rebuilding of housing and infrastructure; (2) improving the capacity of local government and social

Conclusion

Our case study of the large-scale reconstruction of Indonesia’s long-troubled province of Aceh places economic, geographical, political and historical imaginaries rather than practices at its center as one comparatively underexplored means of understanding the potential of neoliberalization. In considering varieties of capitalist imaginaries in the case Aceh, we have decentered strong neoliberal imaginaries to open up discussion of competing economic imaginaries that do not necessarily sit

Acknowledgement

Fieldwork in Indonesia was funded by the National University of Singapore (Research Grant R-109-000-066-112) and UCL Graduate School. We also gratefully acknowledge Lydia Ruddy’s hospitality and intellectual generosity during fieldwork in Jakarta. The paper has benefitted from suggestions from two referees as well as editorial guidance from Gavin Bridge. Cartographic work was kindly carried out by Lee Li Kheng.

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