Among the cruel vectors within this spectacular sorting process is the constant refrain in the media that the expulsions are being conducted for the benefit of those expelled. Often tied to discourses of risk reduction, infrastructure fragility, or urban upgrading, the expulsion of the urban poor under “normalization” appropriates a pastoral logic of governmentality as its public face, only to remove this mask once residents have been coerced into new and typically untenable settlements, revealing the logic of precarization at stake in the process. With one of the highest rates of urbanization in the world, the fanatical hope of cleansing the city of urban poverty by repeatedly attacking and antagonizing the urban poor is ruthlessly cynical. However, even more cynical is another common refrain made popular by city officials: these residents—the urban poor living in kampungs or other difficult-to-formalize socio-spatial arrangements—should just go back where they came from.

With approximately 17,000 islands and a population of 240 million, the archipelago of Indonesia is a geographically massive country; some of its major islands, such as Borneo, Sumatra, and New Guinea, are among the largest in the world. While the megacity of Jakarta is suffocating in the smog from tens of millions of cars crawling through its interminably congested streets, these faraway islands can no longer provide an opportunity for going back to the nurturing countryside. This is because—starting with a development grant from the World Bank in the late 1970s, and intensifying rapidly ever since Suharto’s downfall in the late 90s, and the influx of international palm oil companies in the early 2000s—a voraciously corrupt state-company-apparatus has transformed the region from one of the most diverse rainforest ecologies in the world to an unfathomably large carpet of monoculture oil palm plantations. As a handful of the super-rich increase their financial and political power, the livelihoods of countless human and nonhuman inhabitants depending on the natural wealth of the Indonesian countryside are discarded into precarity.