0s, Indonesia had become the world’s largest exporter of LNG and plywood, the second largest producer of tin (after China), the third largest exporter of thermal coal (after Australia and South Africa), and the third largest exporter of copper (after the US and Chile)” (Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 12). Regional dynamics, along with East Timor’s independence and the radical increase of private investments in primary resources in the country, left locals without any opportunity to obtain wealth.
Corruption materialised in preferential treatment in exchange of political support became a key grievance of Indonesian society that was always faced to tolerate government’s actions thanks to their impressive industrial results. Unequal resource distribution drove the four main Indonesian regions (Aceh, Papua, Riau and East Kalimantan) to rise and start seeking justice by their own hand. “In other resource-rich regions, indigenous people have experienced relative deprivation in relation to the richness of their land (Tadjoeddin et al. 2001) and the living standards of the increasing number of migrant groups (Brown, 2005)” (Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 16). The sentiment of ‘aspiration to inequality’ (Tadjoeddin, Widjajanti, Satish, 2001, pages 283-304) functioned as the main driver of people’s grievances in the resource-rich regions. Even though the internal dynamics between government, private companies and communities (even community versus community violent acts driven by religious differences and also by violent insurgent groups like Free Aceh Movement, better known as GAM) caused a large-scale armed conflict, it may be interpreted that the goals of each party was the feasibility of resources but this was wrongly read, as the secessionist feeling was always conducted by alleviating society’s grievances. Unlike many other cases in the Global South, the GAM rebel group was driven at first by ideological and ethnical reasons, and natural resources were used from time to time to contribute to its revenue, as criminal acts where potentially more effective for its finance. Control of natural resources was not the first complaint of Indonesian society, but the distribution of the resources was the main driver of this conflict.

After the detection of the people’s grievances as Stewart remarks, the government started to address the conflict by using other tools that referenced to the greed-grievance framework. Decentralisation laws passed in 1999 and applied in 2001, the special autonomy laws for Aceh and Papua (first approved in 2001 and revised in 2004) and the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the Helsinki Peace Agreement between GAM and representatives of the Indonesian government led to more effective peace building in Indonesia, after the failed attempts of p