The rise of Papua’s customary land conflict on social media: digital activism and the media representation analysis of the Awyu community

For indigenous Papuan people of Indonesia, land and forest have been an inseparable part of their lives for so long, becoming a place to survive and preserve their ancestral values. The importance of land causes land rights as a crucial issue, especially with the expansion of large-scale extractive industries that repeatedly threaten the indigenous people’ lives and environmental sustainability. This research focuses on the conflict between the Awyu people in Papua in defending their customary lands against the expansion of oil palm plantations and to what extent digital activism plays a role in that. Digital ethnography and discourse analysis are used to analyze the contents of the Awyu community’s campaigns in the digital space, while Hall's politics of representation and Foucault's power and knowledge theories are used to examine how these contents represent and produce meaning of the community. In this context, digital activism has succeeded in becoming a new strategy for fighting for indigenous peoples' rights, attracting global attention, and encouraging accountability from the government and companies involved. The final result of this study is that digital activism plays a crucial role in strengthening representation and opening new spaces for advocacy for indigenous peoples' rights in Indonesia.