Local Governance in Timor-Leste

Local Governance in Timor-Leste PDF Author: Deborah Cummins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317634659
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Across many parts of the postcolonial world, it is everyday reality for people to cross regularly between state-based and customary governance, institutions and norms. This book examines this phenomenon in the context of the villages of Timor-Leste, and the state-building efforts that have been conducted by the Timorese government and international development agencies since the vote for independence in 1999. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in the remote, rural areas of Timor-Leste, the book provides a critical analysis of the challenges that communities face when navigating coexisting customary and state-based structures and norms in a context where customary law continues to be the central guiding force. It also explores the various creative ways in which local leaders and community members make sense of their local governance environment. It then draws on these insights to provide a more nuanced, contextualised account of the impact of institutional interventions, state-building and democratisation within these villages. While set in the context of state- and nation-building efforts following Timor-Leste’s vote for independence, the book also provides a broader examination of the issues that arise for the postcolonial state adequately meeting the needs of its citizens. Further, it explores the challenges that are met by communities when incorporating state influences and demands into their everyday lives. Expanding the scope of empirical Timor-Leste scholarship by moving beyond anthropological description and providing the first detailed political analysis of local-level governance in contemporary Timorese communities, this book is a valuable contribution to studies on Asian Politics, Governance and International Studies.

Local Governance in Timor-Leste

Local Governance in Timor-Leste PDF Author: Deborah Cummins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317634659
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Across many parts of the postcolonial world, it is everyday reality for people to cross regularly between state-based and customary governance, institutions and norms. This book examines this phenomenon in the context of the villages of Timor-Leste, and the state-building efforts that have been conducted by the Timorese government and international development agencies since the vote for independence in 1999. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in the remote, rural areas of Timor-Leste, the book provides a critical analysis of the challenges that communities face when navigating coexisting customary and state-based structures and norms in a context where customary law continues to be the central guiding force. It also explores the various creative ways in which local leaders and community members make sense of their local governance environment. It then draws on these insights to provide a more nuanced, contextualised account of the impact of institutional interventions, state-building and democratisation within these villages. While set in the context of state- and nation-building efforts following Timor-Leste’s vote for independence, the book also provides a broader examination of the issues that arise for the postcolonial state adequately meeting the needs of its citizens. Further, it explores the challenges that are met by communities when incorporating state influences and demands into their everyday lives. Expanding the scope of empirical Timor-Leste scholarship by moving beyond anthropological description and providing the first detailed political analysis of local-level governance in contemporary Timorese communities, this book is a valuable contribution to studies on Asian Politics, Governance and International Studies.

Local Governance in Timor-Leste

Local Governance in Timor-Leste PDF Author: Deborah Cummins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317634667
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Across many parts of the postcolonial world, it is everyday reality for people to cross regularly between state-based and customary governance, institutions and norms. This book examines this phenomenon in the context of the villages of Timor-Leste, and the state-building efforts that have been conducted by the Timorese government and international development agencies since the vote for independence in 1999. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in the remote, rural areas of Timor-Leste, the book provides a critical analysis of the challenges that communities face when navigating coexisting customary and state-based structures and norms in a context where customary law continues to be the central guiding force. It also explores the various creative ways in which local leaders and community members make sense of their local governance environment. It then draws on these insights to provide a more nuanced, contextualised account of the impact of institutional interventions, state-building and democratisation within these villages. While set in the context of state- and nation-building efforts following Timor-Leste’s vote for independence, the book also provides a broader examination of the issues that arise for the postcolonial state adequately meeting the needs of its citizens. Further, it explores the challenges that are met by communities when incorporating state influences and demands into their everyday lives. Expanding the scope of empirical Timor-Leste scholarship by moving beyond anthropological description and providing the first detailed political analysis of local-level governance in contemporary Timorese communities, this book is a valuable contribution to studies on Asian Politics, Governance and International Studies.

Stateness and Democracy in East Asia

Stateness and Democracy in East Asia PDF Author: Aurel Croissant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108495745
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Comparative analysis of case studies across East Asia provides new insights into the relationship between state building, stateness, and democracy.

Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000 - 2017

Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000 - 2017 PDF Author: James Scambary
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004396799
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000-2017, James Scambary analyses the complex interplay between local and national level conflict and politics in the independence period. Communal conflict, often enacted by a variety of informal groups such as gangs and martial arts groups, has been a constant feature of East Timor’s post-independence landscape. A focus on statebuilding, however, in academic discourse has largely overlooked this conflict, and the informal networks that drive Timorese politics and society. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Scambary documents the range of different cultural and historical dynamics and identities that drive conflict, and by which local conflicts and non-state actors became linked to national conflict, and laid the foundations of a clientelist state.

Rethinking Human Rights and Peace in Post-Independence Timor-Leste Through Local Perspectives

Rethinking Human Rights and Peace in Post-Independence Timor-Leste Through Local Perspectives PDF Author: Ying Hooi Khoo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811637792
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
This book offers perspectives from the ground on human rights and peace in Timor-Leste. By highlighting the local voices, this book draws on their experience and expertise in engaging with questions concerning the nexus between human rights, peace and development. It posits that these concepts no longer mean absence of conflict, and argues that sustainable peace must be built from rights frameworks to protect the locals’ interests in the processes. Acknowledging the lack of autonomy on local actors in peace-making contexts, the book emphasizes the urgent need to facilitate the creation of political and social structures that can support and offer contextual rights and dignity for the Timorese community.

Peace as Government

Peace as Government PDF Author: Ramon Blanco
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498581781
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Peace as Government: The Will to Normalize Timor-Leste brings a problematization of post-conflict reconstruction processes by bridging two theoretical approaches that are often placed in diametrical opposite epistemic poles – the analytical tools developed by Michel Foucault and the English School. The author argues that peace operations have a very precise function in the international scenario – the fostering and the maintenance of a (neo)liberal order in the international society. He evinces that this particular function of peace operations is developed through the will to normalize post-conflict states and their populations. In order to advance his argument, the author analyses the United Nations’ (UN) engagement with Timor-Leste, since no other country had the large number of peace operations, the wide range of spheres of engagement or the depth of involvement that the UN had in Timor-Leste. The author evinces that this will to normalize Timor-Leste is rendered operational though the mechanism of government, the conduct of conducts in a Foucauldian sense, functioning in two levels. At the international level, the government operates through discipline, rewarding and punishing the Timorese state seeking to shape its behaviors as an individual in the international society. At the national level, the government operates through biopolitics, which functions through the attempt of shaping the life-supporting processes of the Timorese population.

Transformations in Independent Timor-Leste

Transformations in Independent Timor-Leste PDF Author: Susana de Matos Viegas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315534991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
1999 was a decisive year in the long history of the people of Timor-Leste, whose future was open when they voted for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum. Its results left no doubt that the Timorese considered themselves to be a nation wishing to have their own state, which they would rule. This book examines a vast array of transformations that have taken place over the past decades. It puts forward the idea of "cohabitations", which aims at inscribing the mutual influences arising from the existence of distinct social processes not only side by side but in their mutual influences and entanglements, sometimes resulting from effective clashes, some others from peaceful manipulation of social and cultural differences. From this analytical viewpoint of evolving power dynamics of cohabitations, experts in the field investigate issues that have been contentious in the recent past and analyse the challenges that present-day Timor-Leste is facing. Structured in three parts, the contributions address issues of governance, land, as well as the transformation in the traditional culture including conceptions about identity and exchange, and transformations in the ritual and religious experiences of becoming a nation rooted in self-determination. For the first time bringing together original contributions by the most notable experts on Timor-Leste in a cohesive and comprehensive way, the book will be of interest to academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Law Studies, History and Political Science.

Land and Life in Timor-Leste

Land and Life in Timor-Leste PDF Author: Andrew McWilliam
Publisher: ANU E Press
ISBN: 1921862602
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Following the historic 1999 popular referendum, East Timor emerged as the first independent sovereign nation of the 21st Century. The years since these momentous events have seen an efflorescence of social research across the country drawn by shared interests in the aftermath of the resistance struggle, the processes of social recovery and the historic opportunity to pursue field-based ethnography following the hiatus of research during 24 years of Indonesian rule (1975-99). This volume brings together a collection of papers from a diverse field of international scholars exploring the multiple ways that East Timorese communities are making and remaking their connections to land and places of ancestral significance. The work is explicitly comparative and highlights the different ways Timorese language communities negotiate access and transactions in land, disputes and inheritance especially in areas subject to historical displacement and resettlement. Consideration is extended to the role of ritual performance and social alliance for inscribing connection and entitlement. Emerging through analysis is an appreciation of how relations to land, articulated in origin discourses, are implicated in the construction of national culture and differential contributions to the struggle for independence. The volume is informed by a range of Austronesian cultural themes and highlights the continuing vitality of customary governance and landed attachment in Timor-Leste.

Post-Conflict Social and Economic Recovery in Timor-Leste

Post-Conflict Social and Economic Recovery in Timor-Leste PDF Author: Andrew McWilliam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000026019
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This book presents a rich ethnography of post-conflict social and economic recovery in East Timor following the end of Indonesian military occupation of the territory in 1999. It offers a longer-term analysis of the pathways to rebuilding and restoring local community life, and the budding prosperity that has flowed from participation in spontaneous circular labour migration and the remittance benefits that have followed. Based on extensive comparative literature and field-based empirical research, the book explores the protracted process of cultural and economic revival following a generation-long period of military repression and a sustained struggle for national independence. With a focus on the experiences of Fataluku ethno-linguistic communities in Timor-Leste, the study offers nuanced perspectives on the legacies of conflict and local forms of governance, the revitalisation of customary exchange and ancestral religion. Presenting both an optimistic and alternative narrative in which a traumatised population finds new hope and emergent prosperity, this book highlights a renewed concern with inter-generational well-being and widespread aspirations for prosperity and material benefits following decades of deprivation. It is also an analysis of post-conflict resilience against the odds, illustrating the adaptive possibilities of tradition in the context of globalisation and expectations of modernity. As a major contribution to understanding the emergence and expansion of informal transnational labour migration out of East Timor, this book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy makers of contemporary Timor-Leste, Southeast Asian Politics, Southeast Asian Culture and Society, Development Studies, Anthropology and Conflict Studies.

Women and the Politics of Gender in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste

Women and the Politics of Gender in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste PDF Author: Sara Niner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317327896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book presents a wide-ranging overview of the position of women in Timor-Leste, 15 years after the country secured its independence. It considers the role of women in Timor-Leste’s history, explores their role in the present day economy and politics, and discusses their contribution to culture and society. The contested meaning of gender itself is investigated in the contemporary culture of this new society. It applies a wide range of different feminist theories and approaches, and concludes with a discussion of what new directions gender studies in Timor-Leste might take.