2025 Theses Master's

Displacement Within and Beyond the Physical: Examining Political Geology, Traces of Materiality, Collective Memory and the Practice of Gotong Royong in the Sidoarjo Mudflow Disaster

Naro, Arimbi Alessandra

The Sidoarjo Mudflow, which began in May 2006, is not merely an environmental catastrophe but also a manifestation of Indonesia’s complex entanglement with extractive industries, corporate interests, and political power in the postcolonial era. The sudden disaster transformed many subdistricts into an engulfed landscape where lives, histories, and memories were buried beneath layers of mud. To this day, the mudflow remains an ongoing crisis. While its proximate causes are subject to political and legal contestation, the disaster has been situated within broader discussions of corporate responsibility and public sector involvement, with ongoing debates over accountability and governance shaping its aftermath.

Furthermore, in Indonesia, land is imbued with cultural and spiritual significance, and this disaster, associated with capitalist forms of development, has disrupted not only the physical environment but also deep-rooted traditions tied to place attachment, memory, and collective identity. As a result, the affected communities have engaged in rituals and acts of remembrance, ranging from religious prayers to the creation of mud sculptures, seeking to maintain a connection to the land. The spirit of gotong royong, rooted in Indonesia’s enduring traditions of mutual care and solidarity, informed the ways in which affected communities organized and navigated the disaster.

At the same time, it is important to critically reflect on how the discourse of “resilience” operates in such contexts. In Sidoarjo, what is often described as resilience did not emerge from autonomous agency alone, but was largely necessitated by structural abandonment and the prolonged absence of institutional support. While the community’s capacity for collective action demonstrates strength and dignity, these forms of grassroots endurance simultaneously reveal the uneven distribution of recovery burdens. The framing of resilience, when left uninterrogated, risks normalizing systemic failures and obscuring the responsibilities of the state and corporate actors. Rather than treating resilience as a celebratory endpoint, the study approaches it as a contested lens to examine how vulnerability is managed, perpetuated, and redistributed in disaster governance.

Building on this, the research analyzes inequality through the lens of extractivism and capitalism, focusing on how political and economic dynamics intersect with environmental degradation, displacement, material remnants, collective memory, and gaps in policy enforcement. It examines the Sidoarjo Mudflow as part of Indonesia’s wider extractive landscape, exploring how such processes generate environmental harm and disasters, drive social disruption, and complicate recovery. The study also considers how Indigenous practices of collective care and communal autonomy emerge in response to inadequate institutional provision. By examining governance and transparency in disaster recovery, it highlights the critical role of place attachment and collective memory in shaping public conversations and societal responses.

Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that the communities affected by Sidoarjo Mudflow, whose experiences have largely faded from recent public discourse, remain central to the conversation despite the complex political and social tensions surrounding the disaster's aftermath. By reflecting on the gaps and long-standing challenges observed in the Sidoarjo case, the research invites further inquiry into questions of governance, memory, and justice in post-disaster contexts.