Lia Kent

Political reconciliation in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville: the dark side of hybridity

ABSTRACT In recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operations, little attention has been paid to examining whether or not they also bring unintended negative consequences. Drawing on the cases of Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville, this article examines the potentially dark side of hybridity. It demonstrates that, in each of these cases, hybrid approaches to political reconciliation have brought both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side of the equation, hybridity has seen imported international approaches to reconciliation adapted to meet local demands and ensure resonance with local populations. On the negative side, however, the misappropriation and instrumentalisation of local practices within hybrid approaches has served to damage their legitimacy and to jeopardise their contributions to reconciliation. The article thus concludes that the existence and extent of this dark side necessitates a re-evaluation of how hybrid approaches to political reconciliation are planned and implemented.

Sounds of Silence: Everyday Strategies of Social Repair in Timor-Leste

Abstract. Transitional justice discourse and practice is imbued with assumptions about the liberatory power of speech, and constructs silence as a marker of absence, pathology or continuing repression. This article unsettles these assumptions by examining some of the ‘everyday’ ways in which East Timorese people are seeking to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation. Close attention to everyday strategies and practices of social repair brings to the fore the ‘civil’ and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions of silence, while also underscoring the significance of relational and embodied forms of communication in the Timor-Leste context. I conclude that, rather than viewing silence as a ‘problem’, more attention should be paid to its diverse meanings, and to the rich realm of everyday life in which they are embedded.

Sexual violence and hybrid peacebuilding: how does silence speak?

Abstract This paper reflects on the gendered impacts of hybrid peacebuilding processes in Timor-Leste and Bougainville. We consider the interplaying local and global influences that shape how womens stories of conflict-related sexual violence are received, and consider the silences that often shroud these experiences. In contradiction to the global push to expose sexual violence as part of peacebuilding efforts, we offer a more ethnographically focused examination of womens silences. Our analysis challenges mainstream accounts of the way silence ‘speaks’ to the shame of conflict-related sexual violence and has relevance to broader debates about hybrid approaches to conflict resolution.

A New Era? Timor-Leste After the UN

Overview Timor-Leste has made impressive progress since its historic achievement of independence in 2002. From the instability that blighted its early years, the fledgling democratic country has achieved strong economic growth and a gradual reinstatement of essential social services. A decade on in 2012, Presidential and Parliamentary elections produced smooth political transitions and the extended UN peacekeeping presence in the country came to an end. But significant challenges remain. This book, a product of the inaugural Timor-Leste Update held at The Australian National University in 2013 to mark the end of Timor-Leste’s first decade as a new nation, brings together a vibrant collection of papers from leading and emerging scholars and policy analysts. Collectively, the chapters provide a set of critical reflections on recent political, economic and social developments in Timor-Leste. The volume also looks to the future, highlighting a range of transitions, prospects and undoubted challenges facing the nation over the next 5–10 years. Key themes that inform the collection include nation-building in the shadow of history, trends in economic development, stability and social cohesion, and citizenship, democracy and social inclusion. The book is an indispensable guide to contemporary Timor-Leste.

Hybridity in peacebuilding and development: a critical approach

Abstract The concept of hybridity has been used in numerous ways by scholars across a range of disciplines to generate important analytical and methodological insights. Its most recent application in the social sciences has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage. This article, which introduces the collection on Critical Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development, examines whether the value of hybridity as a concept can continue to be harnessed, and how its shortcomings might be mitigated or overcome. Specifically, we seek to demonstrate the multiple ways to embrace the benefits of hybridity, while also guiding scholars through some of the potentially dangerous and problematic areas that we have identified through our own engagement with the hybridity concept and by learning from the critiques of others. This pathway, which we have termed ‘critical hybridity’, identifies eight approaches that are likely to lead scholars towards a more reflexive and nuanced engagement with the concept.

Transitional Justice in Law, History and Anthropology

It has become almost axiomatic to suggest that societies emerging from protracted periods of conflict need to find ways to ‘come to terms with’ past human rights abuses. In recent decades, a set of mechanisms and tools known as ‘transitional justice’ has been developed with the goal of assisting states to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes. These mechanisms seek to ascribe individual criminal responsibility for past acts, enact punishment, provide opportunities for truth-telling, produce historical records of conflict and deliver reparations to victims. At its core, transitional justice works discursively to establish a break between the violent past and a peaceful, democratic future, and is based upon compelling frameworks of resolution, rupture and transition. Over the past two decades, transitional justice, both a field of interdisciplinary scholarship and as practice, has seen an extraordinary rise. There has been a proliferation of war crimes courts and tribunals around the globe and a growing number of truth commissions. Transitional justice is now firmly entrenched as part of peacebuilding interventions that seek to promote stability, liberal democracy and a market economy in post-conflict societies, and has become ‘an article of faith as a catalyst for reclaiming societies in political and social imbalance and dysfunction’. This Special Issue on Transitional Justice in Law, History and Anthropology unsettles many of the assumptions of transitional justice theory and practice by critically reflecting on the analytical frameworks of justice and injustice; history and record; healing, transition and resolution its proponents take for granted. Drawing together contributions from the disciplines of law, history and anthropology, Melissa Demian and I seek to open up critical conversations around these frameworks by exploring how they operate across time and space, as well as disciplinary boundaries. We adopt a broad view of transitional justice, recognising that a range of related mechanisms have been used in different geographical locations to respond to different reports of historical injustice. We acknowledge, too, that what are now termed ‘transitional justice mechanisms’ join a list of many other legal and quasi-legal mechanisms