Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

Volume 74, No. 4

 

"Already Sovereign as a People": A Foundational Moment in West Papuan Nationalism
By David Webster

 

Abstract

A nationalist movement in West Papua (Irian Jaya, Indonesia) has recently returned to prominence. The roots of this movement, and of West Papuan identity, can be found in the history of the transfer of West Papua from Dutch to Indonesian rule in the 1960s and international political developments which affected West Papua. An elite political identity formed in this period filtered through to the mass of the population over the course of forty years of Indonesian rule and then asserted itself in cultural forms that were shaped by a new cultural Melanesianism that attempted to both embrace local identities and give them wider expression as part of a national identity. This paper explores the origins and historical development of West Papuan nationalism and its expression in symbol and ceremonial re-enactment and concludes that West Papuan nationalism has passed a point of no return. Even if they do not (or not yet) have a nation-state, West Papuans already think of themselves as a separate people, as part of their own "Notion-State."