Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface: The Dead, the State, and the People in Timor-Leste
- Introduction: Martyrs, Ancestors and Heroes: The Multiple Lives of Dead Bodies in Independent Timor-Leste
- Part I Ancestors, Martyrs and Heroes
- Part II The Dead in Everyday Life
- PART III The Dead and the Nation-State
- Index
5 - Unfulfilled Peace: Death and the Limits of Liberalism in Timor-Leste
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface: The Dead, the State, and the People in Timor-Leste
- Introduction: Martyrs, Ancestors and Heroes: The Multiple Lives of Dead Bodies in Independent Timor-Leste
- Part I Ancestors, Martyrs and Heroes
- Part II The Dead in Everyday Life
- PART III The Dead and the Nation-State
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter makes two intersecting arguments that demonstrate the implications of the liberal peace on local efforts to address the consequences of war. Firstly, a liberal peace aims to create conditions that tend to miss ways in which peace is pursued locally, especially with regards to the veneration of the dead. A liberal peace promotes a secular, nationally constituted community with a centralised state and market economy, an approach that fails to comprehend the importance of local expressions of spirituality. This does not mean, however, that the dead are irrelevant to liberalism, though an examination of why this is the case leads to the second key claim that, somewhat paradoxically, accounts for illiberal trends in the state in Timor-Leste.
Keywords: liberal peace, cognate community, Timor-Leste, death, martyr, custom
The United Nations-sanctioned intervention in Timor-Leste in 1999 occurred at a time when liberal peacebuilding efforts were in the ascendancy around the world. The end of the Cold War resulted in a UN Security Council far less encumbered by superpower rivalry, leading in turn to a sharp rise in the number and scale of peace interventions (Paris 2004). As did Kosovo the same year, Timor-Leste symbolised the apotheosis of liberal interventionism as the United Nations Transitional Authority in Timor-Leste (UNTAET) became the territory's governing authority. UNTAET was granted sovereign power and tasked with creating the political and economic structures to enable the transition to national independence. In response to the violence and devastation wrought by the vacating Indonesian military and militia, the approach of UNTAET – alongside other donors, state agencies, and civil society organisations – continued broadly along the same trajectory as earlier interventions as peace was imagined in liberal terms (Richmond 2006, 292; Richmond 2008, 186-189; Selby 2013, 57).
While UNTAET formally closed when Timor-Leste became an independent nation-state in May 2002, subsequent UN missions continued until the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) ended in 2012. While this final withdrawal signalled a confidence in the consolidation of the East Timorese state, there are limits to the extent to which this may be understood as the attainment of peace per se.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Dead as Ancestors, Martyrs, and Heroes in Timor-Leste , pp. 137 - 158Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020