ABSTRACT
Drawing on Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, which concerns “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” the chapter discusses power relations that shape and govern the contemporary postcolonial Papua and reflects on them in relation to the possibility of public criminology. It analyzes four areas: (1) the patterns of basic service delivery that affect Papuans’ everyday life; (2) extractive industry and land grabbing; (3) penetration of wahhabism, which promotes the puritanical stream of Islam, and (4) state violence. Drawing largely on my personal and professional experience in Papua over the last two decades, I highlight how these criminological concerns, which are public in nature, reveal deeper logics of governance, which are necessary to attend to when developing strategies to confront them. In explaining them, the chapter considers various degrees of Papuan resistance, which can be categorized into violent and non-violent, and the lessons they may provide for criminologists.
