Palm-Oil Booms Shift Violence From Theft To Turf Wars in Indonesia

Why This Matters

Paul Kenny, Rashesh Shrestha, and Edward Aspinall investigate how agrarian commodity booms — specifically the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia — reshape local violence and criminality. Understanding these dynamics matters for governance, land policy, policing, and corporate responsibility in regions where extractive agriculture is expanding.

What the Authors Ask

Do commodity booms produce a single pattern of rural violence, or do they generate different kinds of harm at different stages of production? The authors propose two distinct logics of commodity-boom violence: (1) organized criminal extortion aimed at extracting rents from established production sites, and (2) violent competition among mafias, gangs, landholders, and commercial actors for control of rents during periods of plantation expansion.

Data and Methods

• Uses sub-district panel data to track the relationship between the area devoted to oil palm cultivation and incidents of resource conflict and criminality over time.
• Employs dynamic analyses and instrumental-variable techniques to address endogeneity in plantation expansion and to support causal inference.
• Complements administrative data with a targeted primary survey of 1,920 respondents from oil-palm-producing and non-producing villages to capture local experiences of extortion and intergroup conflict.

Key Findings

• The form of violence varies with the stage of oil palm development: theft and organized criminality (extortion) are more common in villages with established, productive plantations, while collective group conflict (competition) is concentrated in villages undergoing plantation expansion.
• Temporal patterns align with the theory: competition spikes during expansion phases and responds to prevailing commodity prices, whereas extortion persists where production is well-established.
• Results are robust to instrumental-variable estimation and dynamic panel specifications, and the survey evidence shows that rates of extortion and competition differ depending on whether — and when — oil palm production began in a village.

What This Means For Policy and Research

The study distinguishes two mechanisms by which agrarian commodity booms generate local violence, suggesting that policy responses should be stage-specific: conflict-mitigation and land-rights interventions during expansion, and crime-prevention and regulatory oversight where plantations are established. The paper demonstrates the value of combining longitudinal administrative data, causal inference tools, and targeted surveys to unpack complex local dynamics of resource-driven violence in Indonesia.