AbstractTimor-Leste has been facing the arduous task of building a viable nation-state since the country's 2002 restoration of independence. The dual challenge consists of interdependent efforts at nation-building and state-building. The author discusses both terms with regard to their relevance to public education and economic development. He raises the question of why nation-building and state-building experience rather contrary prioritisations in these functionally close policy fields. In the educational sector, government activities demonstrate Fretilin's orientation towards Portuguese-speaking countries. The introduction of Portuguese as an official language has accentuated existing lingual and generational cleavage lines. Economic policy in Timor-Leste, however, tends to be more pragmatic and less ideological. The article aims to make an innovative contribution to the interrelationship of nation-building and economic development by addressing important issues on the agenda such as the exploitation of oil, agriculture, tourism, the economic dependency on the former oppressor Indonesia, and foreign aid. The author argues that economic growth will eventually shape the future format of the East Timorese nation as either a new self-confident political player or a withdrawn peasant nation.
East Timor gained formal independence in 2002. Its extended history of internal displacement through colonial territorialisation strategies and conflict has produced an array of contesting land claims, informal land use and occupation, and socio-political conflict. Correspondingly, the Timor-Leste (or East Timor) government has looked to formal land registration and titling to resolve historical and contemporary tensions over land. The proposed national land laws concentrate on land ownership, which overlooks the social relations at work to shape local land access and livelihoods. A case study of a rural village, Mulia, forcibly resettled during the Indonesian occupation, demonstrates how settlers negotiate access to customary land for livelihoods despite ongoing land conflicts with the customary landowners. Settlers have continually adapted to broader economic and political constraints to create diverse and multi-local livelihoods, and established a moral economy between themselves, landowners and the local spirit realm. This paper argues that formal land titles are unlikely to resolve the ambiguities and complexities of diverse forms of access to and ownership of land.
Este artigo, recorte da tese de doutorado da autora, mostra o papel social do rádio em Timor-Leste, bem como o protagonismo das mulheres comunicadoras, outrora guerrrilheiras, desde a independência do país. Embora a presença feminina na mídia timorense seja ainda bastante tímida e haja necessidade de transpor inúmeras barreiras, inclusive o uso da língua portuguesa, elas enfatizam a relevância dessa participação e o reconhecimento do trabalho radiofônico nos espaços recentemente conquistados. Entre reflexões sobre a voz e a palavra em ambientes de "oralidade mediatizada", vão se revelando aspectos culturais de um povo que busca adequar-se a uma nova realidade sem abdicar de suas tradições. A pesquisa foi realizada em campo, entre 2005 e 2006, e materializou-se através de levantamentos documental, bibliográfico e entrevistas (história de vida e relatos testemunhais).
Timor-Leste has made impressive progress over the past decade in reducing national poverty levels. Geographically, however, this progress has been highly uneven across the country. In addition, concerns exist regarding gender gaps based on broader socioeconomic dimensions, such as access to economic activities, education, health, and power and agency. In response, the Government of Timor-Leste has set a goal of eradicating extreme poverty by introducing more socially inclusive and gender sensitive policies and programs. However, the existing sex-disaggregated statistics and consumption based poverty estimates resulting from the 2014 Survey of Living Standards only provide district-level disaggregation. This limits the government's ability to identify and target pockets of extreme poverty and gender disparity across the country below the district level. To address this gap, the World Bank, in close collaboration with the General Directorate of Statistics Timor-Leste, has generated a new set of sex-disaggregated poverty statistics at the village (suco) level. This work takes a more thoughtful approach to gender-sensitive poverty analyses, beyond the usual household headship, by employing individual-level characteristics of education, health, employment, and power and agency. The analyses employ a small-area estimation (SAE) approach to link the data in the 2015 Population and Housing Census with the 2014 Survey of Living Standards and the 2016 Demographic and Health Survey. The suco-level poverty maps confirm an already known pattern that poverty headcount rates are much higher in western areas of the country. The maps also reveal new findings that were not previously known, namely that there is far more variation in poverty rates within than between districts. For example, while the Dili district-level poverty rate is 29 percent, its suco-level rates range from 8 to 80 percent. Analyzing poverty and gender equality by the gender of the household head, female-headed households are less likely to be poor than those headed by males. However, if poverty and genderequality are assessed using spatially disaggregated evidence of five individual-level gender indicators (education, health, labor force, and power and agency), two interesting patterns emerge. First, poorer areas have higher levels of abuse and domestic violence against women, and females are at a greater educational disadvantage, despite narrowing gaps in the literacy rate among school-aged children and school enrollment. Second, there is an inverse relationship between gender-related labor force gaps and poverty rates: the prevalence of a female labor force disadvantage is higher in more economically developed sucos. However, women do not appear to be disadvantaged in terms of health measures and this pattern has no correlation with poverty. Poverty does not appear to be related to women's autonomy to make decisions. The overall findings suggest the importance of using sex-disaggregated individual level analysis, beyond the male/female household headship, to better assess poverty of women and men and gender disparity. This analysis goes beyond traditional consumption-based poverty analysis by integrating a gender dimension to better capture the standard-of-living and gender disparities in the country. These findings can be used to inform the design of policies and programs that target poverty at the suco level, and to improve resource allocation designed to raise the living standards of the poor, balance the targeting of poor areas and poor people, and close gender gaps in the five dimensions studied here. The poverty maps could also provide a cost-effective way to add value to existing census and survey data, and also serve as a substitute for fielding expensive new censuses or surveys.
For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country's political leaders, revenue from the country's oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulated ambitious plans for state-led development projects and rapid economic growth. Paradoxically, these modernist visions are simultaneously informed by and contradict ideas stemming from custom, religion, accountability and responsibility to future generations. This book explores how the promise of prosperity informs policy and how policy debates shape expectations about the future in one of the world's newest and poorest nation-states.
This article explores the relationship between truth commissions and gendered citizenship through a case study of Timor-Leste. It examines how, 10 years after the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has completed its work, women's citizenship remains constrained by, and negotiated within, deeply gendered narratives of nation-building that are informed by historical experiences of the resistance struggle. The power of these narratives—which foreground heroism rather than victimisation—underscores the need to situate truth commissions as part of an ongoing politics of memory. Despite the power of political elites to shape this politics, the continued marginalisation of sections of society within official narratives is also providing an impetus for alternative truth-telling efforts that seek to broaden public perspectives on the past. By promoting new narratives of women's experiences of the conflict, these projects might be understood as attempts to negotiate and transform gendered conceptions of citizenship in the present and for the future.
This article explores the relationship between truth commissions and gendered citizenship through a case study of Timor-Leste. It examines how, 10 years after the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has completed its work, women's citizenship remains constrained by, and negotiated within, deeply gendered narratives of nation-building that are informed by historical experiences of the resistance struggle. The power of these narratives—which foreground heroism rather than victimisation—underscores the need to situate truth commissions as part of an ongoing politics of memory. Despite the power of political elites to shape this politics, the continued marginalisation of sections of society within official narratives is also providing an impetus for alternative truth-telling efforts that seek to broaden public perspectives on the past. By promoting new narratives of women's experiences of the conflict, these projects might be understood as attempts to negotiate and transform gendered conceptions of citizenship in the present and for the future.
There is an inherent tension between traditional norms and survey protocols for quantitative data collected in the developing world. Unexpected interactions between the interviewer and respondent can lead to interviewer effects in the data, particularly in the case of subjective or sensitive questions. This paper makes use of a unique data set available from Timor-Leste containing subjective and objective questions to study these effects. In addition to their age and gender, data were collected from the interviewers regarding their opinions on the subjective questions prior to fieldwork. Fixed effects and mixed effects logit models are used to examine the main effects and interactions between interviewer and respondent characteristics. More objective measures serve as a pseudo control group. The paper finds interviewer effects in the both subjective and objective data, but the magnitude is considerably stronger for subjective questions. The paper also finds that female respondents are more susceptible to influence based on the interviewer's beliefs. Despite methodological shortcomings, the study highlights the need to consider more fully the impact of traditional cultural norms when conducting quantitative surveys in the developing world on topics that are outside the standard objective questions.
In Timor-Leste, the lia na`in(lian = word; na`in = lord, master) – leaders of customary practice – are becoming key to tradition, to "kultura" (culture), an emerging area of public cultural policies. Traditionally associated with the local communities and the mountains, they are the ones that know and pronounce the words that uncover the origin of the world, and the relationship between mankind, nature, and ancestors. Since 20 May 2002, when political power was handed from the United Nations to the Timorese authorities, several episodes have illustrated that the involvement of the lia na`in has shifted from their traditional local contexts to national ones. From small-scale sociopolitical agents, the lia na`in became a resource as buffers of conflict or of reconciliation, as council members of the suco, the smallest administrative division, and as actors in national state ceremonies, taking part in the process of (re)creating the nation's cultural identity. The purpose of this article is to discuss the role assigned to lia na`in in state affairs and the nation, particularly the role concerning conflict resolution. The argument, I propose, is that the participation of the lia na`in, as a ritual authority, in state-sponsored ceremonieshas become a major resource of credibility to the new national authorities.
UID/ELT/00657/2019 ; In Timor-Leste, the lia na`in (lian = word; na`in = lord, master) – leaders of customary practice – are becoming key to tradition, to "kultura" (culture), an emerging area of public cultural policies. Traditionally associated with the local communities and the mountains, they are the ones that know and pronounce the words that uncover the origin of the world, and the relationship between mankind, nature, and ancestors. Since 20 May 2002, when political power was handed from the United Nations to the Timorese authorities, several episodes have illustrated that the involvement of the lia na`in has shifted from their traditional local contexts to national ones. From small-scale sociopolitical agents, the lia na`in became a resource as buffers of conflict or of reconciliation, as council members of the suco, the smallest administrative division, and as actors in national state ceremonies, taking part in the process of (re)creating the nation's cultural identity. The purpose of this article is to discuss the role assigned to lia na`in in state affairs and the nation, particularly the role concerning conflict resolution. The argument, I propose, is that the participation of the lia na`in , as a ritual authority, in state-sponsored ceremonies has become a major resource of credibility to the new national authorities. ; publishersversion ; published
This article examines modern process of agriculture in Timor-Leste in the period of 1982 and 2007. The modern agricultural system has been conducted in the 1980s, when the Indonesian government worked together with a non-governmental organization (NGO), namely the East Timor Agricultural Development Program (ETADEP) to overcome famine during the civil war in the region. The Indonesian government and the NGO ETADEP have modernized farmers by using tractor machines to cultivate the land, but at that time 95% were categorized as traditional farmers. Thus, it was difficult for them to implement modern agriculture at that time. This article uses the historical method which includes four stages, including heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography. The modern process of agriculture in Timor Leste has been conducted since 1982 when was marked by the implementation of the Mass Guidance program (BIMAS). Through the Bimas program, the government has succeeded in developing farmers' business credit to facilitate the credit provision in the form of agricultural tools and inputs to the farmers. After its independence, Timor-Leste faced new challenges in food self-sufficiency. The adoption and adaptation of new technologies in organic farming, such as the Intensive Design System (SRI) and Integrated Crop Management (ICM) are organic farming technologies. However, SRI and ICM replaced the modern agricultural system which had been adopted from Indonesia. Since 2007, the implementation of both the SRI and ICM models have been continued to date. The Timor-Leste government has made great efforts to implement SRI and ICM organic farming eventhough the implementation of both models is considered troublesome for farmers and indirectly resulted the failure of food self-sufficiency policy in Timor-Leste.
