On what's working

Building organized buffer zones around isolated peoples' territories is the most effective protection strategy under the principle of no contact.

Because direct engagement with isolated peoples is neither possible nor appropriate, the most effective protection approach is to support the communities living around them. "What we do is strengthen those in the buffer zone, as a fence,” Surti says. The buffer zone is also the entry point for all outside actors — companies, donors, and projects — and if it is not organized, informed, and coordinated, it becomes a vulnerability rather than a protection.

PPMAN's approach has been to establish Indigenous hubs in North Maluku, dedicated spaces where buffer-zone communities receive training in law and policy, develop safety protocols for their own advocacy work, and build the systems needed to protect isolated peoples in their territory. The hubs have not yet reached all buffer zone communities in North Maluku’s vast geography, but the model is working where it has been implemented.

Legal victories are possible, but they require the right combination of evidence, expertise, and community knowledge.

Surti describes two significant legal victories that have shaped her practice. The first was AMAN's 2012 constitutional review of Indonesia's forestry law, which resulted in a landmark ruling that customary forests are no longer classified as state forests — a fundamental shift in how Indigenous land rights are recognized in Indonesian law. The second was her direct involvement as a lawyer in the case of the Awyu people of Papua, where a company had sued the state and named the Indigenous community as a co-defendant. Surti and her legal team were able to demonstrate that the company's actions were an attempt to delegitimize Indigenous law and territorial claims, and the court ruled in favor of the Indigenous community.

For Surti, the key elements that make legal defense effective are consistent across cases: customary territory maps, local government regulations or decrees recognizing Indigenous communities, forest designation documents, credible witnesses, and expert testimony. She is also clear that legal defense cannot succeed without strong community organizing: "If the organizing is weak, we will definitely lose in court."

On barriers

Without legal recognition, Indigenous peoples cannot defend their rights, and governments are free to act without consequence.

One of the most urgent situations Surti describes is that of the O'Hongana Manyawa people in North Maluku, an isolated Indigenous people whose territory has been devastated by large-scale nickel concessions. Because they are not affiliated with the Ternate Sultanate, they are not recognized as Indigenous peoples by local authorities. Members of the community have been accused of killing outsiders, brought to trial, and sentenced to death. The O'Hongana Manyawa can no longer practice their traditional system of life rotation — the seasonal movement through their territory for farming, hunting, and resource gathering — because their living space has been so severely diminished by extractive concessions.

The broader pattern Surti identifies is one of deliberate non-recognition: when the state does not acknowledge the existence of indigenous peoples, it feels free to grant extractive concessions in their territories without legal consequence. Indonesia still has no national Indigenous peoples' law. The movement has been fighting for legal recognition since 2010 without success, leaving communities without the foundational legal protection they need.

Fragmentation among advocacy organizations undermines the communities they are trying to protect.

When multiple organizations claim to represent the same community without coordination, it creates confusion in legal proceedings and gives extractive companies an opening to exploit those divisions. "If there is no coordination,” Surti says, “that is a doorway to further criminalization, because companies will read that as fighting amongst yourselves." Surti calls for funders and international organizations to require coordination before providing support for advocacy work.

On the intersection of climate and PIACI rights

Conservation must be indigenous-led; otherwise it becomes another form of dispossession.

Surti sees the connection between climate initiatives and Indigenous rights as essential but complicated. Indigenous peoples are the most effective stewards of the territories that climate policy depends on; they have the knowledge systems, the cultural practices, and the deep relationship with ecosystems that make genuine conservation possible. Climate change poses a cascading threat to isolated peoples: loss of territory leads to forced relocation, which leads to loss of food sources and traditional medicine, which leads to population decline and eventual loss of existence. "When their existence is lost, it will be easier for companies to expand their concessions, and these people will disappear,” she says.

But when the state implements conservation without Indigenous peoples, it becomes another tool of dispossession: territories are designated as conservation areas, Indigenous peoples are prohibited from entering, and economic benefits such as carbon credits flow to the state and companies rather than to the communities that have protected those forests for generations. For Surti, climate and conservation frameworks only work if they are genuinely Indigenous-led, with Indigenous communities retaining control over their territories and receiving the benefits of conservation.

On consolidating PIACI as a global category

The global definition of PIACI is strategically valuable, but it must be flexible enough to apply across vastly different contexts.

Surti's view of the global PIACI category is pragmatic and grounded in the specificities of the Indonesian context. She sees the international network as genuinely valuable, but she says that the UN definition, while useful as a starting point, cannot be applied wholesale to Indonesia. Voluntary isolation in Indonesia often has specific historical causes — colonial-era conflict, disease, trauma — and the decision to make or avoid contact is one that communities have made deliberately and that must be respected on its own terms.