توسعه پس از فاجعه اقتصادی در آچه: آزاد سازی نو و دیگر تصورات اقتصادی، جغرافیایی

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 and a subsequent Memorandum of Understanding ending three decades of armed conflict has opened up Aceh to international aid, trade, ideas and potential investment. For Naomi Klein in her (2008) book The Shock Doctrine, such disasters have been exploited systematically in processes of neoliberalization. Based on fieldwork in Aceh and Jakarta, this paper shows that while neoliberal elements are present within important economic-geographical imaginaries in post-disaster Aceh, they are intertwined with and exceeded by other imaginaries. We draw attention to the theoretical importance of a fuller understanding of such imaginaries, their origin and reach, content and the actors and mechanisms associated with their promulgation. The paper recounts four economic-geographical imaginaries of the future of Aceh: (1) Aceh as newly (re)opened to overseas investors; (2) Aceh as a site of revivable trade connections to the Malay and Islamic worlds; (3) Aceh as a self-governing economic space; (4) Aceh as a united territory of diverse cultures and districts. The first of these is most closely associated with processes of neoliberalization but is exceeded by the others which, taken together, unsettle any singular script of a “disaster capitalism complex” at work in the reconstruction of Aceh.

In this paper we focus on questions regarding the uneven patterns and processes of neoliberalization. Following Larner and Le Heron (2002) and Leitner et al. (2007), we argue for the importance of examining imaginaries associated within accounts of neoliberalization. The empirical case we examine is that of strategies of economic development circulating in post-disaster Aceh. These economic development strategies are accompanied by major economic-geographical imaginaries in the reconstruction of Aceh, especially after three decades of armed separatist conflict (1976–2005) and the tsunami of 26 December 2004. Such economic-geographical imaginaries speak to something of a deconstruction of the recently ‘imagined community’ of post-colonial Indonesia (Anderson, 1983). Our study takes place some years after the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed as a basis for cessation of the armed conflict between armed separatist Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) rebels and Indonesian government forces. From this vantage point there is the prospect that the ‘economic dividend’ of Aceh’s autonomy may be little more than a figment of various imaginations. We use the term economic-geographical ‘imaginaries’, then, in relation to the disjuncture that exists between imaginings for Aceh and any substantive analogues they have in terms of economic development practice. In this, we draw from the recent work of Jessop and Oosterlynck who explore the ‘path-shaping potential of economic imaginaries (in their different forms and varying content)’ in an effort to ‘explain why only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized and thereby come to co-constitute economic subjectivities, interests, activities, organizations, institutions, structural ensembles, emergent economic orders and their social embedding, and the dynamics of economic performance’ ( 2008, p. 1156). Our discursive preference for economic-geographical ‘imaginaries’ thus offers a useful tool for framing post-tsunami, post-conflict developments in ways that may not be easily explained by market logic or global capitalist forces.

Our case study of the large-scale reconstruction of Indonesia’s long-troubled province of Aceh places economic, geographical, political and historical imaginaries rather than practices at its center as one comparatively underexplored means of understanding the potential of neoliberalization. In considering varieties of capitalist imaginaries in the case Aceh, we have decentered strong neoliberal imaginaries to open up discussion of competing economic imaginaries that do not necessarily sit comfortably alongside the market logic of ‘disaster capitalism’ or global capitalist forces. We have shown how the developmental practices of even putatively ‘neoliberal’ organizations operating in Aceh have defied the wholesale import of neoliberal imaginaries. In this, we have centered our discussion of Aceh upon four hybrid economic-geographical imaginaries that mix neoliberal and alternative imaginaries as locally contextualized phenomena. First we explored how the imagined economy of inward investment has featured prominent neoliberal discourses, as promulgated by powerful actors such as Aceh’s provincial government, the World Bank and various INGOs. Yet such imaginaries have failed in practical ways to connect with the private sector, especially amidst the persistence of predatory imaginaries of Indonesian state institutions among the local population. Second, we have considered the role of imaginative resources centered on historical trade routes, tourism and the development of the Sabang Free Port and how these resources figure into imaginaries of Aceh’s connectedness with the outside world. The third set of imaginaries revolves around the perceived limitations and economic opportunities presented by Aceh’s special autonomy arrangements with Jakarta. We have illustrated how Aceh’s special place within the Indonesian Republic was aimed at the attainment of a negotiated settlement to the protracted armed conflict between GAM rebels and Indonesian security forces. As such, it did not have as its primary or even secondary target processes of neoliberalization, but rather the reassertion of Aceh’s political status within Indonesia. Finally, we considered the politics of imagining Aceh as a diverse and fractious entity for economic development within Indonesia.