“Kita habis…we will be gone”: The politics of population, family planning and racialization in West Papua

Abstract

AbstractIn the context of a steadily decreasing Indigenous population, active military occupation, and a documented history of human rights abuses perpetrated by Indonesian state security forces, Black Indigenous Papuans have uttered phrases like extinction, and we will be gone in public and private spaces. These utterances often follow an indictment of Indonesia's national family planning program as a key node of state apparatuses of domination and, by extension, genocide. Amid Indonesia's global health success story of a historically lauded national family planning model, I examine the emergence of a local pronatalist program in which health workers are both providers and deniers of access to birth control. Through highlighting this story of Indigenous refusal and racial survival in the terrain of women's reproduction the stakes of a necropolitical environment marked by occupation, population control, and fears of genocide are brought into high relief.