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

• Author: Johnston, Melissa
• Position: Book review

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 "critical" narratives of peacebuilding and statebuilding which has depicted the UN as an incompetent straw man, whose hubris and mistakes exacerbated conflicts and violence. Scambary convincingly argues that synchronic and variable-driven accounts focused on UN failures are incomplete. Instead, the book describes a complex continuum of violence, historicizing the various violent groups and their place in Timorese state formation. These various conflicts, spilling from within families and local communities into national politics and international NGOs, often took place outside the scope of the UN mission.

The book is based on Scambary's deep involvement and long experience in Dili, as well as his knowledge of the indigenous language Tetun. One telling part of Scambary's narrative describes how he got access to local sources for insights that informed his research and allowed him to question the "commonsense" readings of violence, the state and civil society: "People who were affluent, educated, law-abiding citizens were often connected by marriage or blood to...