Before 2003, the province covered all of Western New Guinea and was called Irian Jaya - renamed from Irian Barat in 1973, which had been renamed from something Dutch before that. In 2002, the territory adopted "Papua" as part of a special autonomy law, and immediately the map started splitting. West Papua came off first in 2003. Two decades of pressure for more subdivision culminated on 30 June 2022, when the government carved Central Papua, Highland Papua, and South Papua from the old province's body, leaving modern Papua as the northern belt from Waropen Regency in the west to Keerom Regency in the east, plus the island groups in Cenderawasih Bay. Six Papuan provinces now sit where one used to be. Whether this is decentralization or fragmentation depends on who you ask.

The new Papua consists of eight regencies - Jayapura, Keerom, Sarmi, Mamberamo Raya, Waropen, Biak Numfor, Supiori, and Yapen Islands - plus the capital city of Jayapura, which was separated from Jayapura Regency on 2 August 1993 to become a province-level administration. The regencies use the term distrik for subdivisions instead of the kecamatan used elsewhere in Indonesia. It's a small linguistic flag, but an intentional one: Law 21/2001 on Papua's special autonomous status reserves local terminology as part of what makes this province not quite like the others. The head of a distrik is kepala distrik, not camat. Papua negotiates its Indonesian identity in the smallest words.

Papua holds special autonomous status - one of seven Indonesian provinces with such standing, alongside Aceh, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and the other Papuan provinces. The provincial government has authority over most administrative matters except foreign affairs, defense, monetary policy, religion, and justice. Special autonomy funds flow in from Jakarta. And yet the province has low fiscal capacity of its own - about 55 percent of 2008 revenues came from transfers and the special autonomy fund itself. A unique institution, the Papuan People's Assembly (Majelis Rakyat Papua), was created in 2005 as a coalition of Papuan tribal chiefs, religious leaders, and women's representatives with arbitration and cultural-advocacy authority. The assembly has real powers the rest of Indonesia does not offer. Whether it has been enough, and whether autonomy is meaningfully delivered on the ground, remain contested questions in Papuan politics.

The mid-2024 population of the current Papua - under its new smaller borders - was 1,060,550, roughly evenly split between men and women. Most of those people live within a few hours of Jayapura, strung along the northern coast. Inland, the terrain is rugged, the roads few, and the villages small. Christianity is the majority religion, at just over 70 percent - mostly Protestant, with a significant Catholic minority - following generations of missionary activity. Muslims make up about 30 percent, concentrated in the cities and often with roots in the transmigration programs that moved families from Java and other crowded Indonesian islands toward the eastern frontier. Indigenous Papuans and migrant Indonesians sometimes share neighborhoods, sometimes live in parallel. The politics of who counts as local is a daily question, not a theoretical one.

Geographically, Papua stretches from 2 degrees 25 minutes south to 9 degrees south and from 130 to 141 degrees east. Its northern edge is the Pacific Ocean. To the south lies Highland Papua, carved off in 2022 and containing the central cordillera. Central Papua now holds the island's southwestern approaches. To the east is Papua New Guinea, marked by the country's only land border - a line that continues, in daily fact, across villages where families live on both sides. Cenderawasih Bay fills the province's western shore, full of islands whose people have been maritime for millennia. Papua is many things at once. It is young as an administrative unit, ancient as a place.