Local Wisdom-Based Conflict Management in the Muna Ethnic Community: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

This study analyzes local wisdom-based conflict management in the Muna ethnic community, focusing on land disputes and the opportunities and challenges of integrating customary mediation with Indonesia’s formal legal system. An empirical socio-legal design with a qualitative descriptive-analytical approach was employed in Muna and West Muna Regencies. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews, field observation, focus group discussions, mediation documents, customary records, and relevant legislation, and were validated through source, technique, and time triangulation, member checking, peer discussion, and audit trail. The findings show that land relations are embedded in communal-genealogical legitimacy and social recognition, while disputes are driven by ambiguous customary boundaries, undocumented oral inheritance, transfers without administrative evidence, and overlaps between customary and state-law claims. Among 73 disputes analyzed in the underlying research, boundary interpretation and inheritance were the two largest recorded sources of dispute. Customary mediation is socially effective because it relies on deliberation, consensus, kinship restoration, trusted customary leaders, and Muna values such as pobhini-bhiniki kuli, poma-maasigho, poangka-angkatau, and popia-piara. Its opportunities lie in strong social legitimacy, constitutional recognition of customary communities, restorative orientation, low social cost, and potential collaboration among customary institutions, village government, land authorities, and communities. However, its effectiveness is constrained by weak documentation, uneven formal recognition, changing intergenerational values, asymmetric power when disputes involve external actors, limited mediator capacity, and the gap between social legitimacy and administrative land evidence. The study proposes an integrative conflict-management strategy in which customary mediation performs historical-social verification and relationship restoration, while formal institutions provide documentation, registration, enforceability, and legal certainty. This hybrid arrangement positions local wisdom not as a substitute for state law but as a strategic conflict-management resource for substantive justice and prevention of recurring land disputes.