Activism and Aid: Young Citizens' Experiences of Development and Democracy in Timor-Leste.

• Author: Bexley, Angie
• Position: Book review

Activism and Aid: Young Citizens' Experiences of Development and Democracy in Timor-Leste. By Ann Wigglesworth. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016. Softcover: 146pp.

In Activism and Aid, Ann Wigglesworth delivers a clear and highly readable account of young Timorese' experiences in development and democracy during the first decade of TimorLeste's independence. The context of the book sits squarely within the domain of development literature, which seeks to question the effectiveness and relevance of international interventions that lack grounding in local realities.

Timor-Leste was pegged as the United Nation's (UN) "success story", a country that was democratically established in 1999 after twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation. In the same year, the country descended into a political crisis to the perplexity of international players. The historically-devoid approach of the UN in its mandate to establish a bureaucracy post-Indonesia until 2002 positioned Timor-Leste at "ground zero". Timor-Leste was variously described as a "clean slate" in which to import "democratic" development agendas. Timor-Leste was not, of course, a clean slate. While the capital city Dili and much of the rural infrastructure was burnt to the ground, its people's ways of thinking about the world and its ideas for an independent Timor-Leste were not simply swept away. Wigglesworth's book exposes the inconsistencies of these processes.

The core material of the book was drawn from the author's doctoral fieldwork in mid-2006, although she also draws on her multiple engagements with the country from 1997 onwards as a development consultant. The book sets out some ambitious aims. Firstly, to "analyse the first ten years of development through the experiences of younger citizens"; secondly, to provide a "critical assessment of the application of development knowledge and role of international agencies"; and lastly, "explores the entangled nature of development theory, national economic development, civil society, gender, development studies, youth and conflict, customary society and democracy" (p. 5). For the most part, the author delivers on her aims.

Activism and Aid draws on, and contributes to, understandings on the latest development agenda that emphasizes participation as being the key to effectiveness. "Active citizenship", as Wigglesworth notes, is a "relatively new contribution to the development lexicon" and is "supposed to enable people to participate...