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View all search results'Pesta Babi' and the fear of a thinking Papua
By dismantling the state's engineered conflict narrative, the Pesta Babi documentary has terrified elites who realize that a critical, thinking Papua is an existential threat to the extraction of its wealth.
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A military officer blocks a projector to shut down a public screening of the documentary Pesta Babi on May 12, 2026, at Khairun University in Ternate, North Maluku. Authorities halted the event under the pretext that it lacked an official permit. (x.com/@Dandhy_Laksono)
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ince the Pesta Babi (Pig Feast) documentary began circulating in April, dozens of screenings have reportedly been intimidated, surveilled or shut down. This heavy-handed reaction reveals a simple truth: Those with economic and political stakes in Papua fear the awareness the film brings.
While Pesta Babi exposes an oligarchy propped up by militarism that corrodes indigenous communities' living spaces, its real power lies in how it reshapes the public imagination. Long presented as natural and inevitable, Papua's complexity is revealed to be "engineered" - and therefore something that can be dismantled.
Separatist conflict plays a key role in this engineering. Whatever its reality as an armed conflict, it functions as a dominant narrative that diverts attention from a much wider crisis: extractivism.
When the armed rebel group TPNPB/OPM is construed as a monolithic enemy to be eradicated, the plunder of nature and human rights violations against indigenous Papuans (orang asli Papua or OAP) proceed quietly in the shadows of that narrative.
Those in power fear only two things: knowledge and collective action. Both rest on education - and it is precisely here that the system in Papua is broken.
Why is education so difficult to sustain there? Is it the conflict that keeps teachers absent, or the chaotic disbursement of scholarships funded by Special Autonomy (Otsus) allocations? Conflict has also forced thousands to flee, cutting off access entirely. Ultimately, we must ask: Are knowledge and education regarded as threats to the status quo? Is there a structural fear of a critical OAP?
This is where Paulo Freire’s (1970) concept of "conscientization" (conscientização) becomes vital. For Freire, conscientization is the process by which the oppressed move from a naive consciousness - which accepts reality as a given - toward a critical consciousness capable of reading reality as a construction of power that can be questioned and changed.
