Claiming Authority at the Edges of the State: Regional Autonomy and Local Politics in the West Kalimantan Borderlands

This paper examines state-local relations in the border region of West Kalimantan since decentralisation, with a focus on five ethnic Iban dominated subdistricts within the remote district of Kapuas Hulu, on the border of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It tracks the fate of a political movement for a new district in this resource-rich region, arguing that the borderlands can be seen as a critical site for exemplifying the changing dynamics of state-local interactions that Indonesia is experiencing in the wake of decentralisation.