Research

The broad focus of the research has been on the process of nation-formation in Timor-Leste. The research concentrates particularly on the period since 1999, from when we see the emergence of a recognised sovereign nation-state. We maintain an interest in Portuguese colonialism and in the Indonesian occupation to the extent that they help us understand the contemporary character of Timor-Leste.

With a focus on the postcolonial period, our research moves across the disciplines of political science, sociology, and anthropology, as we research the nature of the intersection between different patterns of social integration and transformation: the customary, traditional, modern and postmodern.

Within these two areas of focus—the independence era and social transformation—we have tended to concentrate on three sets of intersecting themes: identity and change, community and polity, security and sustainability.

Identity and Change

The transitions from a colony to an occupied territory, then to a UN-administered territory and finally to a nation-state, have each had significant impacts on patterns of East Timorese identity. Intersecting with these broader political transitions in the status of the territory has been immense and uneven shifts between what we refer to as ‘customary’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ patterns of social integration. For instance, while the Portuguese in effect limited the effects of modernisation to an elite level, the Indonesian attempts came with extraordinary violence in order to ensure dominance and a fuller transition of Timorese society. In the contemporary period, the customary remains important at the same time as new demands are made to abandon the customary in order to guarantee the sustainability of the modern nation-state. Such tensions in patterns of identity formation, and how they can influence particularly the character of nation-formation in Timor-Leste, have been at the forefront of the Timor-Leste Research Program.

While such broad themes have resulted in a variety of subsidiary research projects and analyses, including on development, security and justice, a key area of research has been gender. Various projects with a range of local communities, NGOs and international organisations have sought to both map out and understand how gender as an identity is understood in Timor-Leste, especially in the context of modernising East Timorese social relations. Gender often becomes a focus for tension at moments of acute social change and upheaval, and as such our work has focused particularly on the ways in which gender programming has impacted on local communities.

Community and Polity

Research has focused primarily on understanding two forms of community: first, at the most localised level, community settings such as the aldeia; and, second, at a more abstract level, the community of the nation. At both levels we ask how the community is constituted—what is it that makes people identify with and feel integrated into a given sense of community? At a local level, we find many communities in Timor-Leste organised in dominance across the customary and traditional, often with very little penetration by the state or other modern institutional forms. This begins to change, however unevenly, as rural centres are consolidated into the national form, and much more so in urban centres such as Dili.

The question of polity comes to the fore in the research as way of asking about the nature of power-relations within society—not just within the customary, traditional or the modern levels of the social, but also the nature of the intersections between them. This enables us to ask about the changing nature of social relations within different forms of community, and whether the most localised forms are dominated by face-to-face relations or the abstract national community dominated by the state.

Security and Reconciliation

Framed by the above two sets of themes—‘Identity and Change’ and ‘Community and Polity’—much of the research has concentrated on patterns of conflict and resolution.

Security is treated far more broadly than what is often meant by terms such as ‘security sector’, relating here more to the subjective sense of risk or threat by people in their daily lives rather than concentrating on how the means of violence within Timor-Leste are controlled or institutionalised. Reconciliation has similarly focused on the more generalised possibilities within East Timorese society to create, adapt and sustain patterns of community in the post-independence period. This research on ‘security and reconciliation’ has taken on two principle focuses.

At the national level, the role of the Truth and Reconciliation process has been a central consideration, in part as one process within the broader area of transitional justice which seeks to end the cycles of violence and conflict. A second area of research interest at the national level has been on state-building, especially in the context of the 2006–2008 socio-political crisis, with an emphasis on how the attempts to build a new governing apparatus has had an impact on reconciling the divisions in the new nation.

At a local community level, the focus of research has been on understanding how communities that may appear to face immense challenges still prove to be durable; that is how they sustainably reconcile immediate day-to-day challenges and more broadly different patterns of social integration. This focus of analysis has concentrated particularly on local conflict resolution processes, production, mobility and history so as to examine the resilience of such forms of community, not least in the wake of forced migration during the Indonesian occupation and massive social changes in contemporary Timor-Leste. 

These two themes also tie into notions of sustainability, a thematic that has been central to both the work of the Globalism Research Centre and the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University in various sites across the Asia-Pacific. By ‘community sustainability’ we mean the ways in which communities hold themselves together in a durable and coherent form over a period of time, even in the face of substantial challenges and under periods of intense change.