Indigenous Institutional Parabela in Managing Customary Land Conflicts in Buton: A Conceptual Exploration of Community Resilience, Traditional Leadership, and Institutional Rhetoric

Customary land continues to serve as a central site of contestation in Indonesia's legally plural agrarian landscape, where state regulatory expansion frequently intersects with Indigenous governance systems.This study conceptually examines the Parabela institution in Buton, Southeast Sulawesi, through the analytical lens of Indigenous Institutional Theory (IIT) to understand how it maintains authority and manages customary land conflicts amid increasing administrative pressures.Drawing on qualitative insights, scholarly literature, and conceptual analysis, this research investigates three key dimensions of institutional persistence: community resilience, traditional leadership, and institutional rhetoric.The findings reveal that Parabela's effectiveness is rooted in multi-layered community resilience grounded in ancestral ties, ritual obligations, and adaptive strategies that incorporate selected administrative tools.Traditional leadership emerges as a central mechanism of governance hybridity, where leaders exercise dual legitimacy genealogical and negotiated-to mediate between customary norms and state frameworks.Institutional rhetoric functions as a powerful discursive tool that reframes land conflicts as moral and cosmological struggles, strengthening internal cohesion and influencing external negotiations.This study contributes to Indigenous governance scholarship by demonstrating that institutional endurance results not from static tradition but from dynamic interactions between cultural legitimacy, adaptive leadership, and discursive power.The research highlights the importance of recognizing Indigenous institutions as substantive governance actors and argues that integrating institutions like Parabela into formal land governance processes is essential for achieving more equitable, culturally grounded, and sustainable conflict resolution in Indonesia.