Governance for Peace in East Timor
Background
This project is funded by an ARC grant, with Anne Brown and Rebecca Spence (UNE), as Chief Investigators, and the Brisbane City Council, Caritas and a Brisbane community based organization supporting a region of East Timor (BETADC) as partners. The project researches the interaction of local peacebuilding efforts and national and international community peacebuilding. National and international peacebuilding has to a significant extent focused on the building of state political and economic institutions, generally drawing straightforwardly and ahistorically from liberal models of political order and structure. While this focus is important, and liberal models offer much of fundamental value, there has been relatively little attention to local indigenous conceptions of political order and what constitutes the community, or the peace, that is in need of rebuilding (although attention to these dimensions is now growing.)This research focuses on the local level of working with the aftermath of protracted conflict, and on indigenous or local approaches to rebuilding working communities. It has two broad dimensions. One, undertaken by Rebecca Spence, looked at the community linking projects between Australian local governments and East Timorese communities and local agencies. This has produced a report, available to East Timorese and Australian local authorities, and a number of publications. The other dimension, currently ongoing and undertaken by Anne Brown, with Alex Gusmao, explores local understandings of community order and paths to peace. This involves customary and Church-based structures of legitimacy and sensibility, and subsistence economic forms, in interaction with East Timorese' current and past experience of state governance and market economics. Work produced from this collaboration will be available in English and Tetum.
