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Foreign Perspective // March 2026 // by Simon

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There’s a crisis happening right now that almost no one is talking about. Not because it’s small, but because a government has spent six decades ensuring it remains hidden.

West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, has been under Indonesian control since 1963. An independence movement has been fighting ever since. And the Indonesian state has responded not just with military force but with something arguably more powerful: a near-total information blackout.

A quick history

The story starts before Indonesia even took control. Australian political scientist F.J. West began writing about West Papua as a potential international crisis in 1961. The territory was ethnically and historically distinct from Indonesia, rich in natural resources and caught between competing colonial interests. Three futures were on the table: independence, a regional federation, or integration into Indonesia. The international community chose none of them and instead looked the other way as Indonesia moved in.

In 1969, Indonesia formalized its control through the so-called Act of Free Choice, a vote in which 1,025 hand-picked delegates, under military supervision, unanimously chose integration. No universal suffrage. The stated reason: the population wasn’t educated enough to vote directly. The result was internationally recognized anyway.

The Free Papua Movement had already been founded four years earlier. It never stopped.

The numbers are alarming

Armed clashes between Indonesian security forces and Papuan groups have more than doubled since 2020, from 64 recorded incidents to 135 in 2024 alone.

The region currently hosts over 85,000 displaced people. That number has been climbing steadily for years.

In 2024, the HRM documented 18 extrajudicial killings and 54 cases of torture, the highest figures in the entire monitoring period.

And underneath all of this: oil, gas, and minerals. West Papua is resource-rich, and the revenues flow to Jakarta, not to the people living there. Donald Emmerson noted back in 2000 that this economic imbalance, combined with mass migration from Java to Papua, was the most combustible ingredient in the conflict. Nothing fundamental has changed.

You can’t report what you can’t access

Here’s the thing that makes West Papua different from most conflicts. The Indonesian government has systematically prevented the outside world from seeing what’s happening.

Foreign journalists need special permits to enter. Security personnel supervise them throughout their visit once they receive approval. In 2019, the government throttled internet access in Papua during protests to stop information from getting out. When civilian casualties are reported, the military calls them fake news, from regions where no independent journalist has been allowed to set foot.

This isn’t just censorship. It’s the destruction of the conditions under which truth can be established at all. Papuan voices, testimonies, and accounts of the conflict are structurally excluded from the public record. The anthropologist Margaret Mead saw this coming in 1967. She wrote that decisions about indigenous peoples‘ futures were being made without them and that this would cause irreversible damage. History proves her right.

Why this matters beyond Papua

The West Papua conflict is a stress test for two fundamental questions that go well beyond this specific island.

The first: How do power structures sustain themselves not through force alone but through controlling what can be known and said? The Indonesian state doesn’t just repress the independence movement militarily. It controls the discourse around it. Framing Papuans as „separatists“ or „terrorists“ isn’t a neutral description. It’s a political act that makes violence easier to justify and harder to challenge.

The second: what does legitimate political decision-making even mean when one side has no voice? You can have formal procedures, elections, and legal frameworks and still produce outcomes that are profoundly illegitimate, because the people most affected were never part of the conversation.

These aren’t just academic questions. They’re the reason West Papua matters and the reason the international community’s silence on this conflict is not neutral. It’s a choice.

What to read next

For a deeper theoretical analysis of the West Papua conflict, exploring Foucault’s analytics of power and Habermas’s critique of distorted discourse, read the full German-language version of this article on Foreign Perspective.

References

Empirical – West Papua

• ACAPS (2024): Humanitarian Impacts of Continuing Conflict in the Papua Provinces. October 2024. https://www.acaps.org
• Arfiansyah, A. (2025): Violence and Civilian Strategy for Protection in West Papua, Indonesia. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development. DOI: 10.1177/15423166251357724
• Chauvel, Richard (2021): West Papua: Indonesia’s Last Regional Conflict. Small Wars & Insurgencies, 32(6) DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2021.1990491
• Drooglever, Pieter (2009): An Act of Free Choice. Oneworld Publications.
• Emmerson, Donald K. (2000): Will Indonesia Survive? Foreign Affairs, 79(3)
• Human Rights Monitor (HRM) (2024): Annual Report 2024. https://humanrightsmonitor.org
• Human Rights Monitor (HRM) (2026): Annual Report 2025. https://humanrightsmonitor.org/reports/annual-report-2025-human-rights-and-conflict-in-west-papua/
• Human Rights Watch (2015): Indonesia: Discrimination, Repression Fuel Tension in Papua. https://www.hrw.org
• Human Rights Watch (2020): Indonesia: Papuan Protesters, Journalists Detained. https://www.hrw.org
• Mambor, Victor & da Costa Sarmento, Palagio (2020): West Papuan Control: How Red Tape, Disinformation and Bogus Online Media Disrupt Legitimate News Sources. Pacific Journalism Review, 26(1) DOI: 10.24135/pjr.v26i1.1085
• McWalter, Michael (2023): How Papua New Guinea Became an Oil Producer and then an LNG Producer. PNG Business News, 27 November 2023.
• Mead, Margaret (1967): The Rights of Primitive Peoples. Foreign Affairs, 45(2)
• OHCHR (2022): Press Release: Situation of Human Rights in West Papua. 01 March 2022. https://www.ohchr.org
• Wangge, Hipolitus Ringgi (2023): Securitization of a Political Conflict in Southeast Asia. Asian Security, 19(3), pp. 207–227. DOI: 10.1080/14799855.2023.2225419
• West, F.J. (1961): The New Guinea Question: An Australian View. Foreign Affairs, 39(3)

Theoretical — Foucault, Habermas & Postcolonial Theory

• Allen, Amy (2009): Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation. Philosophical Forum, 40(1), pp. 1–28. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2008.00314.x
• Brunner, Claudia (2020): Epistemic Violence: Knowledge and Domination in Colonial Modernity. transcript Verlag.
• Christensen, Gerd (2024): Three Concepts of Power: Foucault, Bourdieu, and Habermas. Sage Journals. DOI: 10.1177/17577438231187129
• Costa, Sérgio (2005): Postkoloniale Studien und Soziologie. Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 15,
• Foucault, Michel (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books.
• Foucault, Michel (1975): Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books.
• Foucault, Michel (2007): Security, Territory, Population. Picador.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1984): The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1. Beacon Press.
• Habermas, Jürgen (1987): The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press.
• Haus, Michael (2023): Grundlagen der Politischen Theorie. Springer.
• Kelly, Michael (ed.) (1994): Critique and Power. MIT Press.
• Legg, Stephen (2007): Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism. In: Crampton/Elden (eds.): Space, Knowledge and Power. Ashgate, pp. 265–289.
• Marz, Ulrike (2022): Critical Whiteness. In: Elbe et al. (eds.): Probleme des Antirassismus. edition TIAMAT, pp. 15–46.
• Parr, Rolf (2020): Discourse. In: Foucault-Handbuch (2nd ed.). J.B. Metzler, pp. 274–278.
• Reckwitz, Andreas (2012): Subjekt (3rd ed.). transcript Verlag.
• Stoler, Ann Laura (1995): Race and the Education of Desire. Duke University Press.