Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000-2017.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Johnston, Melissa

Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000-2017. By James Scambary. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019. Hardcover: 252pp.

Over the past few decades, the successes and failures of United Nations' (UN) peacebuilding missions have provided grist for the scholarly mill. The case of Timor-Leste--which has seen attacks on UN staff, strongmen, militia, witchcraft, spying, ninjas, police and rivalries within the army--is indeed a captivating story and a fascinating topic for scholarly studies about peacebuilding and state formation in post-conflict societies.

While there have been many studies on the machinations of high politics and different aspects of rural communities in Timor-Leste, few studies have looked into the subnational conflicts across urban and rural areas that characterize daily life in the country. James Scambary's book, Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000-2017, admirably tackles this middle ground, and adds a welcome critical view to the existing literature on the conflicts in Timor-Leste. His study, based on extensive fieldwork, demonstrates how violent gang and social conflicts do not follow "master narratives" of divisions between the police and the military, strongmen tussles or youth disaffection, but are rather multi-scalar and diachronic. Most instructive is the section "The UN Made Me Do It" (p. 7), which lays out the dominant...