Gendered exploitation in Halmahera’s nickel mining: A feminist perspective

Mining activities in Halmahera, Indonesia, have accelerated economic growth while simultaneously intensifying poverty among local women and contributing to the emergence of a commercial sex economy in mining areas. This paradox reflects the structural dynamics of extractive capitalism, in which patriarchal systems disempower women through the erosion of subsistence livelihoods, exclusion from formal employment, and the commodification of their bodies within an economy over which they have a little control. This article presents a conceptual and doctrinal-cum-socio-legal analysis based on documentary sources, including legislation, court decisions, policy instruments, statistical data, government and NGO reports, as well as secondary scholarship. Employing a feminist socio-legal approach, the article integrates four theoretical perspectives: intersectionality, epistemic injustice, feminist political economy, and constrained agency. It advances three principal arguments. First, women in Halmahera’s mining areas experience double invisibility, as the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity marginalises their experiences within legal and policy frameworks. Second, this marginalisation is conceptualised as structurally produced through accumulation by dispossession, the masculinisation of mining labour, and the emergence of a commercial sex market as a neglected component of extractive economies. This argument is presented as a theoretical explanation requiring future empirical investigation. Third, existing legal responses inadequately address exploitation because they often criminalise its consequences rather than transform the structural conditions that produces vulnerability. The article therefore proposes both immediate protective reforms and transformative approaches to redefine development, accountability, and justice within extractive contexts.