Agrarian Livelihoods at Risk: Land Acquisition Conflicts and Local Resistance in the Trans Sulawesi Railway Project, Indonesia

This article explores the socio-political and ecological dimensions of land acquisition in the context of Indonesia's Trans Sulawesi Railway Project, focusing on Salenrang Village in Maros Regency, South Sulawesi. Grounded in a critical ethnographic method, the research examines how affected agrarian communities respond to dispossession through differentiated strategies, ranging from passive acceptance and conditional negotiation to symbolic and moral resistance. These responses are shaped by unequal access to land tenure recognition, fragmented compensation mechanisms, and exclusion from participatory decision-making processes. Drawing on political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and the theory of everyday resistance, the study situates infrastructure development as a contested terrain where state-led modernization intersects with local livelihood systems and socio-cultural meanings of land. Findings reveal that the railway project not only disrupted rice farming and aquaculture-based economies, but also undermined community agency, intensified distrust toward governance institutions, and reconfigured social-environmental relations. Compensation was widely perceived as unjust and opaque, triggering everyday forms of resistance that reflect deeper claims to recognition and procedural justice. By engaging with grounded rural experiences, this article contributes to broader discussions on infrastructure-induced land conflict, rural marginalization, and the political ecology of development in Southeast Asia. It calls for reimagining infrastructure governance through inclusive, context-sensitive approaches that acknowledge local knowledge systems, ecological interdependence, and the plural values of land.