Browsing by Subject "Timor-Leste"
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Item Open Access Guns, gender and petroleum: a critical analysis of the underlying dynamics of Timor-Leste’s development trajectory(Routledge, 2023-10-20) Buldanlıoğlu Şahin, Selver; Verkhovets, S.This article examines the underlying political economy context of the uneven development outcomes in post-conflict Timor-Leste. We use a modified version of a structural political economy approach that is situated in a Gramscian understanding of the state-society relationship. This approach conceptualises development as a process of historically specific class-based and gender-based contestations over the distribution of resources that result in particular forms of socio-political orders maintained through a combination of institutional and ideological mechanisms of wealth generation. Our analysis of whose interests have been prioritised and marginalised in post-independence Timor-Leste is based on a systematic examination of three major factors: regulation of class relations, organisation of gender relations, and the governance of the petroleum industry. We conclude that despite some important improvements in the formation of formal democratic institutions in Timor-Leste, the processes of the distribution of power and access to resources remain far from being inclusive prioritising a class-based group of male-dominant elites that manipulates institutions to advance their interests and use a hegemonic gender ideology to justify and maintain these existing unequal arrangements in the prevailing socio-political order. Thus, the development outcomes in Timor-Leste are strongly connected to the political-economic processes from a larger historical perspective.Item Open Access Timor-Leste's foreign policy: securing state identity in the post-independence period(G I G A Institut fuer Asien-Studien, 2014-10-20) Sahin, S. B.This paper examines some of the major ideational aspects of Timor-Leste’s foreign policy orientation in the post-independence period. Drawing upon the constructivist accounts of state behaviour, the paper situates Timorese leaders’ foreign policy decisions in the broader context of their search to position the fledging nation in the global political order. It argues that Timor-Leste’s insecure state identity has shaped its leaders’ foreign policy preferences in the post-independence period. This identity can be examined by separating it into two parts: the construction of spatial boundaries and the creation of a temporal “other”. The former is evidenced by the leadership’s rhetorical emphasis on the country’s Portuguese heritage and their prioritisation of ASEAN membership, both of which are closely related to the consolidation of the young nation’s political and cultural identity. The creation of a temporal other, as illustrated by the rise of political discourse emphasising sovereignty, reflects a wider transitional process that is embedded in the country’s transformation from colony to independent state under international supervision as well as the state’s transformation from “fragile” or “failing” to “stable”. A detailed analysis of the basic aspects of TimorLeste’s insecurities as a constitutive element of its foreign policy becomes instrumental to understanding the country’s nation-state-building experience since its separation from Indonesia in 1999, as it enters a new phase of socio-political structuring following the withdrawal of the international security presence in 2012.