Good fences make good neighbors, American poet Robert Frost once wrote.

And while the maxim has been coopted time and again by Indonesian officials and literati, the delimitation of borders remains an issue that is often overlooked, despite being a key aspect in Indonesia’s Global Maritime Fulcrum (GMF) vision.

Early on in his term in office, at the ninth East Asia summit hosted by Myanmar in late 2014, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo unveiled the ambitious maritime aspirations of the GMF with a pledge to capitalize on Indonesia’s geographic advantages.

The archipelago straddles the Pacific and Indian oceans, with nearly 100,000 square kilometers of inland seas and claims of around 2.9 million sq km of exclusive economic zone (EEZ) waters — but the nation had for too long “turned its back on the ocean”, the President said at the time.

Historically, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has underpinned Indonesia’s territorial integrity as the “land of a thousand islands”.

Yet, the grand vision of the GMF itself was only translated into policy when Jokowi signed Presidential Regulation No. 16/2017 on the National Sea Policy.

The regulation gives the mandate to the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister to fully realize the new maritime policy, codified into the main regulatory framework document and an action plan.

However, despite the new regulatory umbrella, experts have argued that policy implementation in Indonesia is always problematic because of the executive body’s inconsistencies in implementing policy.

Over the past few years, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi has placed border delimitation high on her list of foreign policy priorities, saying in her annual policy speeches that Indonesia aimed to set a good example for neighborly conduct in the region, which observers take as a reference to the ongoing South China Sea disputes.

The numbers, however, invariably show how much work remains in resolving the country’s outstanding borders.

China, Taiwan and a number of Southeast Asian nations have overlapping claims in the disputed waters, one of the world’s busiest trade routes — but Indonesia is not among them.

Outstanding borders

Maritime delimitation was the first cluster of the five priority programs in the National Sea Policy Action Plan. Officials have said that border settlement with 10 neighboring countries would provide legal certainty to support various marine activities, such as the enforcement of sovereignty and law in the sea, fisheries, marine tourism, offshore exploration and sea transportation.

With Malaysia, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Singapore and Timor Leste, Indonesia shares territorial sea boundaries, with the zone extending 12 nautical miles from the baselines of the country’s outermost islands.

It also claims several EEZ — the area that extends 200 nautical miles from the country’s baselines — and continental shelf boundaries with Australia, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Palau, PNG, Thailand, Timor Leste and Vietnam.

According to Foreign Ministry data, just 44 percent of Indonesia’s territorial sea borders have been resolved, while the figures for the EEZ and continental shelf boundaries are higher at 54.6 and 70 percent, respectively.

Retno conceded in a recent interview that the nature of border negotiations was that they had never been easy. “It is complicated, but with persistence we can produce results that are quite significant if measured within a period of four years,” she said.

In the past four years, a lot of progress had been made through intensified negotiations with the neighboring countries, with the ministry hosting 35 negotiation talks in 2017, compared to 20 meetings from January to
October this year.

”So, on average, we had around three border negotiation meetings per month,” she told The Jakarta Post.

These talks have produced a number of outcomes, such as the ratification of the EEZ agreement with the Philippines and the ratification of the maritime border segment in the east of the Singapore Strait with Singapore, both in 2017.

More recently, Retno said Indonesia and Malaysia had finally agreed on technicalities for two segments of the extended provisional territorial sea boundary in the Sulawesi Sea and the Malacca Strait, as well as the crossing line for the Sulawesi Sea border.

”Not to mention, we have agreed in a record of discussions to delimit our maritime boundaries with India. These are some concrete things that we can achieve in negotiating maritime and land boundaries,” she said.

Indonesia currently had five active border negotiations, said Damos Agusman, the ministry’s director general for legal affairs and international treaties. These include talks on the territorial sea boundaries with Malaysia in the Malacca Strait and the Sulawesi Sea, as well as EEZ delimitation with Palau, Vietnam and India.

“Our priority is to resolve the [issues] in the border areas that have the potential for conflict,” he told the Post recently.

“For instance, there is no potential conflict at our borders with Australia and Palau, […] but there is potential for conflict in Ambalat, which is why we have to finalize the border in the Sulawesi Sea.”

Ambalat, which is claimed by both Indonesia and Malaysia, is a deep-sea block in the Sulawesi Sea that is rich in oil and gas reserves, according to geological studies.

One estimate by Exploration Think Tank Indonesia places 764 million barrels of oil and 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in only one of nine points in Ambalat.

Beyond 200 miles

In addition to negotiating unresolved issues over territorial sea and EEZ borders, Indonesia is also currently looking into delimiting its territory beyond the 200 nautical miles limit by claiming the extended continental shelf in western Sumatra, southern East Nusa Tenggara and northern Papua.

According to UNCLOS, a country can claim a continental shelf boundary of up to 350 nautical miles from their baselines.

The countries wishing to delimit their outer continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles must submit scientific proof of their claims to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

The Foreign Ministry’s director for political, security and territorial treaties, Bebeb Djunjunan, said Indonesia had submitted a study for the western Sumatra shelf and it was approved without objection. Meanwhile, the government was conducting studies for the East Nusa Tenggara section.

For the section north of Papua, he said the study was ready and Indonesia was prepared to submit its report to the commission next year.

“Our problem now is that PNG and Micronesia have already tabled their joint submission, and we’ve declared that we won’t accept the commission’s decision based on it,” Bebeb said earlier this month.

If approved, Indonesia will have control over all resources on and under the continental shelf, whether alive or not. This gives Jakarta the right to conduct hydrocarbon exploration and drilling work.

However, an approval will not grant control over the water column — where marine organisms live — above the shelf that is beyond the country’s EEZ boundaries.

Land borders

While maritime boundary delimitation is arguably harder to manage and determine than land demarcations, which are mostly inherited from the colonial era, unresolved land borders do bring their own set of complications.

Indonesia shares land borders with Malaysia, Timor Leste and PNG, but the latter is the only country with which Indonesia has resolved all its outstanding border issues, including at sea.

Having inherited their border disputes from past colonial masters, Indonesia and Malaysia currently have nine unresolved segments along their land border on Borneo Island, due to the ambiguity of the agreements made by the Dutch and the British at the time.

The five eastern segments are located between North Kalimantan and Sabah, and four are in the west, between Sarawak and West Kalimantan.

In October, Indonesia and Malaysia agreed in principle to resolve two out of five outstanding border problems (OBPs) in the eastern sector of Kalimantan, while a demarcation survey for another three, including on Sebatik Island, will be held in the coming months.

Malaysia pinned the blame on Indonesia for a recent skirmish along the border that involved the arrest of Malaysian illegal loggers, even though the Indonesian Military said the dispute “had been resolved in an amicable manner”.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arrmanatha Nasir said the issue would be raised in an upcoming defense ministers-led General Border Committee meeting.

In a review of its achievements this year, the Defense Ministry said it had built a total of 999.5 kilometers of road along the border with Malaysia in Borneo, complete with border security posts and other facilities.

Meanwhile, Indonesia and Timor Leste have been negotiating border issues since 2002, soon after the latter formalized its independence from Indonesia following a UN-supervised referendum held in 1999.

Indonesia and Timor Leste have agreed on more than 900 coordinates as border points, but two land border areas remain unresolved.

Popular

Acid attacks highlight growing danger for Indonesian activists

Lawmakers urge modesty for regional leaders after Samarinda unrest

Reading the 2026 fuel adjustment: A middle-class story