Gendering Peace: UN Peacebuilding in Timor-Leste 9780815365198, 9781351261043

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Women resisting, women organising
3 Participating women
4 Protected women
5 Still resisting, still organising
6 From liberal to post-liberal peace: what’s gender got to do with it?
Conclusion
List of interviews
Index

Citation preview

Gendering Peace

In 1999, after 24 years of violent military occupation by Indonesian forces, the small country of Timor-Leste became host to one of the largest UN peace operations. The operation rested on a liberal paradigm of statehood, including nascent ideas on gender in peacebuilding processes. This book provides a critical feminist examination of the form and function of a gendered peace in Timor-Leste. Drawing on policy documents and field research in Timor-Leste with national organisations, international agencies and UN staff, the book examines gender policy with a feminist lens, exploring and developing a more complex account of ‘gender’ and ‘women’ in peace operations. It argues that gendered ideologies and power delimit the possibilities of building a gender-­ just peace and contributes deep insight into how gendered logics inform peacebuilding processes, and specifically how these play out through the implementation of policy that explicitly seeks to reorder gender relations at sites in which peace operations are deployed. By utilising a single case study, the book provides space to examine both international and national discourses and contextualises its analysis of Women, Peace and Security within local histories and contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of gender studies, global governance, international relations and security studies. Sarah Smith is Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her work has been published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs, Global Change, Peace and Security, E-International Relations and Manchester University Press.

Routledge Studies in Gender and Global Politics

This series aims to publish books that work with, and through, feminist insights on global politics, and illuminate the ways in which gender functions not just as a marker of identity but also as a constitutive logic in global political practices. The series welcomes scholarship on any aspect of global political practices, broadly conceived, that pays attention to the ways in which gender is central to, (re)produced in, and is productive of such practices. There is growing recognition both within the academy and in global political institutions that gender matters in and to the practices of global politics. From the governance of peace and security to the provision of funds for development initiatives via transnational advocacy networks linked through strategic engagement with new forms of media, these processes have a gendered dimension that is made visible through empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated feminist work. Series editor: Women, Global Protest Movements and Political Agency Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher Gender, Emancipation, and Political Violence Rethinking the Legacy of 1968 Edited by Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher Gendering Peace UN Peacebuilding in Timor-Leste Sarah Smith

For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Gender-and-Global-Politics/book-series/GGP.

Gendering Peace UN Peacebuilding in Timor-Leste

Sarah Smith

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2019 Sarah Smith The right of Sarah Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smith, Sarah (Sarah J.), 1983– author. Title: Gendering peace : UN peacebuilding in Timor-Leste / Sarah Smith. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in gender and global politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018025688 Subjects: LCSH: Women and peace—Timor-Leste. | Peace-building—Timor-Leste. | United Nations—Timor-Leste. | Women and human security—Timor-Leste. | Gender in conflict management—Timor-Leste. Classification: LCC JZ5578.2.T56 S65 2019 | DDC 303.6/6082095987—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025688 ISBN: 978-0-8153-6519-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26104-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 Introduction

vii ix 1

2 Women resisting, women organising

29

3 Participating women

57

4 Protected women

83

5 Still resisting, still organising

113

6 From liberal to post-liberal peace: what’s gender got to do with it?

138

Conclusion

162

List of interviews Index

167 169

Acknowledgements

I wish to extend my gratitude to all those who gave their time to this research as interview participants, and to those who provided support, both academic and non-academic, in Timor-Leste. Selecting Timor-Leste as the case study for this research is best described as ‘a series of happy accidents’, but I am nonetheless fortunate to have done so. Researching in this area has led me to connections and friendships I now cherish, and I would especially like to acknowledge Hannah Loney and Sara Currie. A heartfelt thank you to Hannah Loney and Christine Agius for reading and commenting on some of the chapters that follow. You have both helped immensely in completing this manuscript. A sincere thank you as well to Laura Shepherd, for her support of this publication, and the anonymous reviewers who helped clarify my thinking in the proposal and subsequent manuscript in ways that I am extremely grateful. I would also like to acknowledge my partner, Joel Broad, who I must admit did not make the first draft of these acknowledgements because (we both agreed) he did not ‘do’ anything. But that’s just it. You give me nothing but space, patience and love. You are my rock and my tether in turbulent times. I am proud to be your partner. Finally, but by no means least, I would like to acknowledge the feminist activists, scholars and agitators who have come before me, without whose work I would have no language to write in.

List of abbreviations

ABRI AGE APODETI ASDT CAVR CEDAW CEP CNRT CNRT DPKO Falintil F-FDTL FOKUPERS Frelimo Fretilin GAU GFFTL HIPPO INGO

Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia – Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia Advisory Group of Experts Associacão Popular Democratica Timorense – Timorese Popular Democratic Association Associacão Social Democratica de Timor – Social Democratic Association of Timor Commissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Community Empowerment Project Conselho Nacional de Resistência Timorense – National Council of Timorese Resistance (umbrella resistance organisation established 1998, dissolved 2001) Conselho Nacional da Reconstrucão Timorense – National Congress of Timorese Reconstruction (political party established 2007) United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor Falintil-Forças Armadas de Defesa de Timor-Leste – Failintil-Defence forces of Timor-Leste Forum Komunikasi Untuk Perempuan Lorosae – East Timorese Women’s Communications Forum Frente de Libertação de Moçambique – Mozambique Liberation Front Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente – Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor Gender Affairs Unit Grupo Feto Foinsa’e Timor Lorosa’e – East Timor Young Women’s Group High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations International Non-Government Organisation

x  List of abbreviations InterFET IRC LADV LGBTQ MFA MINUSTAH MONUC NAP NGO OCHA OIOS OMT OPE OPMT PNTL RDTL SEA SEM SEPI SGBV SRSG TCC TNI UDT UNAMET UNDP UNFPA UNGA UNHCR UNICEF UNIFEM UNMIBH

International Force in East Timor International Rescue Committee Law Against Domestic Violence (Timor-Leste) Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer Movimento das Forças Armadas – Armed Forces Movement (Portugal) United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti United Nations Mission in Democratic Republic of Congo National Action Plan (implementing Women, Peace and Security) Non-Government Organisation United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services Organização da Mulher Timorense – Organisation of East Timorese Women Office for the Promotion of Equality Organização Popular da Mulher Timorense – Popular Organisation of East Timorese Women Polícia Nacional Timor-Leste – National Police Timor-Leste República Democrática de Timor-Leste – Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (the acronym used by the UN for incidents involving their own staff) Secretary of State for the Support and Socio-Economic Promotion for Women (formerly SEPI) Secretary of State for the Promotion of Equality (now SEM) Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Special Representative of the Secretary-General Troop Contributing Country Tentara Nasional Indonesia – Indonesian military União Democratica Timorese – Timorese Democratic Union United Nations Mission in East Timor United Nations Development Program United Nations Population Fund United Nations General Assembly United Nations High Commission on Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Development Fund for Women (now UN Women) United Nations Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina

List of abbreviations  xi UNMIK UNMIL UNMISET UNMIT UNOTIL UNPOL UNSC UNTAET UN Women VPU WPS

United Nations Mission in Kosovo United Nations Mission in Liberia United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste United Nations Office in Timor-Leste United Nations Police United Nations Security Council United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor United Nations Development Fund for Women (formerly UNIFEM) Vulnerable Persons Unit Women, Peace and Security

1 Introduction

In October 1999, after 24 years of violent military occupation by Indonesian forces, Timor-Leste became host to one of the largest United Nations (UN) peace operations, one whose efforts rested on a liberal paradigm of statehood. The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was also one of the first peace operations to include a Gender Affairs Unit, an early embodiment of Women, Peace and Security frameworks, the inaugural resolution of which was adopted one year after the establishment of ­UNTAET. UNTAET held executive and legislative authority in the territory, and so Timor-Leste did not gain formal independence until 2002. This was not the end of UN operations, though, which maintained a presence in the country until 2012; presidential and general elections held in 2017 were the first to be organised without UN assistance.1 Throughout the 13-year period of peace operations, ‘gender’ was a feature on the UN agenda. Missions subsequent to UNTAET saw gender and Women, Peace and Security adopted and implemented across various platforms, with focus on areas that often reflected broader international trends at the time. Indeed, the years from 1999 have held significant developments for both the post-conflict recovery of Timor-Leste and for Women, Peace and Security within the UN. Given this convergence, this book examines gender – as a policy, practice, goal and constitutive logic – in successive UN peace operations in Timor-Leste. Thirteen years of UN intervention make Timor-Leste an important case study for examining how both gender policy and gendered power operate in the liberal peace paradigm. While Timor-Leste is hailed as a success story of peace- and state-building, even a cursory glance at data on the position of women, and inequality broadly, provides a telling insight into the limitations and possible contradictions of these efforts. There is a common set of data that is often pointed to in assessing gender equality and ‘gender relations’ in Timor-Leste. In regard to formal equality, it boasts the highest representation of women in parliament in the Asia-Pacific region, a position that was cemented following the first general elections in 2001, and one that has been maintained since. The new country was quick to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and enshrined equality between women and men in its constitution. In 2010,

2 Introduction with the support of the UN operation at the time, a Law Against Domestic Violence was implemented, seeking to curb high rates of family violence. Economically, women are marginalised, although this must be considered in the context of minimal economic development for the broader population as well, especially for those who reside outside the capital, Dili, where much of the state-building efforts have been focused. Yet the arguments in this book suggest that such indicators are not the only measure by which peace operations can be assessed as gendered and gendering. The arguments here demonstrate limitations in how ‘gender’ is conceptualised and practiced in peace operations, examining in particular the ‘gender component’ of peacebuilding – the policy and practice of gender, how it has been incorporated into peace operations, who it captures and touches, what subjectivities are made visible and which obscured – in the case study of Timor-Leste. It demonstrates that gendering peace operations is not so much something to ‘achieve’ as an ongoing process that occurs both explicitly (such as in gender policy) and implicitly (via the gendered logics that inform how security and peace are understood). It focuses on the actions and activities of the UN in implementing gender policy, which as an institution has sought to define the practice of peacebuilding (Call 2008, 6). As mandates for UN peace operations have expanded, the term ‘liberal peace’ has been applied to such efforts, as the operations adopt the hallmarks of instituting a liberal democratic state. Since the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, such efforts have included a gender component that seeks to reshape gender relations in the model of liberal equality. Gender is understood as referring to the socially, culturally and politically constructed and constitutive assumptions attached to women and men based on perceived gender dichotomies. These constructions and assumptions produce a “gendered social life” (Harding 1986, 17–18). There are multiple variations of this gendered ordering; gender relations and identities are negotiated, inscribed and reproduced through day-to-day interactions, through national and international political discourse, in institutions and by individuals. As well as understanding efforts to build peace as gendered – that is, it is constituted by gendered identities and is informed by gendered logics – it is also ‘gendering’, in that peace operations rely on and reproduce dualistic understandings of gendered subjects (Shepherd 2010, 76) that critically intersect with race, class and ethnicity (Martin de Almagro 2017). In its institutional use, the term ‘gender’ has been applied to the areas, units, policies and practices that stem from successive Women, Peace and Security resolutions, and more often than not pertain exclusively to ‘women’. The examination of the gendered component of peace operations is conducted in tandem with situated analysis of the case of Timor-Leste to show that actors, agents, structures and subjectivities at mission sites are not simply subject to a gendered peace, but also work towards and articulate goals in terms of rights, equality and peace. In this regard, the book

Introduction  3 examines the position and role of national women’s organisations – while noting limitations with this categorisation, discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow – that partnered with successive UN peace operations in ­Timor-Leste. This layer of analysis is essential in understanding how a gendered and gendering peacebuilding process is situated and contextualised and in examining who is captured in the liberal vision of gender that has been attached to international interventions to building peace. Two connected arguments are made. First, international peace interventions serve a gendering function, consistent with the broader liberal paradigm within which they sit and the visions of statehood these interventions embody. The gender component of peace operations serves to define ‘women’ and how and where they ‘fit’ into the state, and it obscures those issues, activism and subjectivities that do not reflect this framework. In the case of Timor-Leste, limited notions of women’s protection and participation, two key pillars of Women, Peace and Security, were implemented and were often done so in isolation from each other. In this regard, the book pays attention to the intersections of race and class as well as gender. It is argued that it is not possible to consider the gendered/gendering nature of peace operations without attendant consideration of the racialised politics of power and histories of colonialism and imperialism. The second argument is that the gender component embedded in peace operations is negotiated via extant relations of power between differently located actors. The negotiation discussed here complicates dichotomous understandings of ‘international’ and ‘local’ that populate significant amounts of policy and scholarly literature, although this is not to dispute the need for processes that are contextually relevant. As the 2015 Global Study on the implementation of resolution 1325 argued, “instead of universal practices, there is a need to understand local realities and a greater need for localisation of national and international programmes” (Coomaraswamy 2015, 168). Likewise, Laura Shepherd and Nicole George have argued for “meaningful recognition of localised histories” (2016, 298) in implementing Women, Peace and Security. While not disputing these calls, the analysis and arguments here challenge flattened one-dimensional understandings of both ‘local’ and ‘international’ and present a more detailed account of how power circulates between and within such constructed spaces. The case study provides an opportunity to pay attention to localised, and disputed, histories. The remainder of this chapter is structured into four parts. The next section details the development of the liberal peace paradigm within post-Cold War and post-9/11 geopolitics, which has seen the emergence of an array of concepts in seeking and instituting peace and security: new wars, humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, the conceptual merging of security and development, and corollary academic theorising on international relations and security. The discussion then moves to the gender component of peace operations and how this has evolved in policy and practice, examined through the lens of critical feminist theory. The third section

4 Introduction introduces the case study of Timor-Leste, as the experience of 24 years of violent military occupation provides essential context to examine the building of a gendered peace post-occupation. In keeping with the above, this section and the chapters that follow pay attention to ‘localised histories’. Finally, an outline of the book and the arguments within is given.

Building peaceful states The practice of building and keeping peace has evolved markedly in the post-Cold War era. In a now well-told story, the abating of Cold War tensions led to a perfect storm of opportunity and context in which liberal interventionism could find its rationale. A relatively freer Security Council established more peacekeeping missions and ones with much broader mandates. There was space for rethinking security and insecurity among academic and policy circles, away from narrow traditional understandings of security pertaining to strategic/military security between states. Both the referents of security and what was understood to constitute a threat expanded (Buzan 1983; Fierke 2015, 44–85), although states remain the chief referent and actor in global security debates. The causes and consequences of ‘new’ conflict were understood as multifaceted and complex, connected to a globalising political economy, identity-based and largely protracted (Kaldor 2013). Conflicts in Somalia, Sierra Leone, Congo and Sudan, as well as the break-up of Yugoslavia, all seemed to confirm this narrative (Kaldor 2012). Conflict, in these cases, was often viewed as connected and related to issues of underdevelopment and illiberalism – poverty, inequality and weak state institutions were all seen to contribute, and conflict in turn made these issues more endemic. Thus, practices of peace- and state-building expanded beyond negotiating ceasefires between armed groups; they should additionally institute representative state institutions and, ideally, initiate processes of human development. Best representing the conceptualisation of a ‘nexus’ between security on the one hand and development on the other, the term ‘human security’ appeared in the 1994 UN Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report. The report argued for the reorientation of security around individuals and contended that what really threatened most humans were issues of poverty, hunger, health, environmental degradation, political repression, community violence and the insecurity inherent in conflict zones (UNDP 1994; see also Boutros-Ghali 1992). This formulation of human security connects human rights concerns with the more traditional focus on state security, in that increases in human development and material living standards are argued to lead to a decrease in violent conflict, following the ‘new wars’ logic. From this view and situated within bourgeoning normative contexts such as humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect, traditional peacekeeping was no longer sufficient to respond to complex and protracted

Introduction  5 conflicts with poorly defined ‘battlefronts’. Conflicts in Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia provided fertile proving ground in which peacekeeping mandates, and the logics of building peace that underpin them, were broadened, tested and rethought. UN failure in the latter two cases – now well documented (see Wills 2009, 28–38) – somewhat tempered these early expansionary peacekeeping visions. Inquiries established by the UN found significant shortcomings in the operation and implementation of these missions and exposed gaps between the rhetorical commitments of expanding peacekeeping functions and the conceptual and material resources made available to the missions in practice (UNGA 1999; UNSC 1999d; Bellamy & Williams 2010, 93). These peacekeeping failures led to what Bellamy and Williams (2010, 93) have described as a period of “hesitant introspection” by the UN and the rising prominence of prioritising humanitarian agendas over state sovereignty (see Annan 2000; Orford 2003, 1–13).2 In this way, liberal interventionism figured as a means to the security of the individual and, in turn, the state and the international state system. Underpinning the rationale of expanded, reformed peace operations are philosophical traditions holding to liberal ideologies on both the form and function of states and what constitutes and perpetuates ‘peace’. Liberal ideologies are fundamental to contemporary approaches to building peace, and it is for this reason that the practice is referred to in the literature as ‘liberal peacebuilding’. The liberal peace, broadly speaking, incorporates the cornerstones of liberalism and a modern liberal democratic state; that is, democratisation, rule of law, human rights and a free and globalised market (Heathershaw 2008; Newman, Paris & Richmond 2009; Richmond & Franks 2009). What is referred to in academic literature as liberal peacebuilding is institutionally referred to as multidimensional and/or integrated peace operations, and indeed, Timor-Leste is considered an example of successful multidimensional approaches to peacekeeping (see UN 2013). There are a number of assumptions underpinning the ideology of liberal peace. One is that of the democratic peace theory, which holds that liberal democratic states are unlikely to go to war with each other (Doyle 1983). Michael Doyle, for instance, claims that “even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with non-liberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another” (1983, 213). Although the arguments are often opaque, there are two elements to the liberal peace’s causal theory: first, that institutional restraints prevent war between democracies, either through public opinion or checks and balances in domestic political institutions; and second, that democratic “norms and culture”, such as a shared commitment to peace, account for the absence of war between democratic states (Layne 1994, 6). The foundation of democratic peace theory is generally attributed to eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and his 1795 thesis The Perpetual Peace (see Doyle 1983; Layne 1994; Owen 1994). Democratic peace and democracy promotion reached its zenith as a foreign policy tool in the United States’

6 Introduction invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, launched ostensibly under the rubric of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. The demonstrable falsity of these claims is routinely evidenced by critical perspectives that challenge the naturalised power obscured and reinforced in liberal interventions, discussed in more detail below. The norms perpetuated in liberal peace operations hold that conflict is something internal to and located within the conflict-affected, fragile or failed state (see Orford 1997). Rebuilding institutions and relations within these sites then will produce and uphold a sustainable peace, a logic that patently ignores relations of (inter)dependency and power – such as between the ‘global north’ and ‘global south’– as causal in conflict. This logic follows similarly to that of modernisation assumptions in development theory, and indeed in part constitutes the merging of security and development fields (see Duffield 2010; Stern & Öjendal 2010). The ‘security-development nexus’ from this perspective “emerges as the juncture through which the conditions of and for security mutually reinforce those for development and progress” (Stern & Öjendal 2010, 17). Not only has the nexus been rendered dysfunctional in underdeveloped, failing or conflict-affected states, but such failure also threatens those (developed) states where both security and development are perceived as achieved. This is perhaps best reflected in Kofi Annan’s claim that [e]xtreme poverty and infectious diseases threaten many people directly, but they also provide fertile breeding ground for other threats, including civil conflict. Even people in rich countries will be more secure if their Governments help poor countries defeat poverty and disease. (cited in UN 2004, vii) In development circles, as economic prescriptions for development popular in the 1970s and 1980s failed to deliver any substantive change to the progress of poor nations, this failure was attributed to weak governance structures and lack of capacity within those states (Hickel 2014, 1357–1358). Thus development expanded to include governance reforms as well (consistent with liberal norms of polity) and, influenced by Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, defined ‘human’ development as that which improved the capabilities, choices and functions of individuals (Hickel 2014, 1358). Human development and governance components have similarly become attached to liberal peace interventions, and the long period of intervention in Timor-Leste shifted periodically from traditional military security and peacekeeping concerns to broad-based human development. The aim of liberal peace interventions is to transform conflict and post-conflict societies into well-functioning, internationally legitimate states, and the human development aspect rests on and reproduces a vision of modern neo-liberal subjecthood. In essence, liberal peacebuilding “posits a very specific vision of how a free society should be constructed and how its component parts should

Introduction  7 interrelate” (Hughes 2009, 218). Yet critical perspectives contend that the institutional shift from traditional peacekeeping to complex peace operations has not meant a transformation of the international political economy nor its outcomes for postcolonial, poor and weak states (Orford 1997; Jabri 2013). Through a Foucauldian governmentality frame, peacebuilding embodies a transformative principle that seeks to transform the “dysfunctional and war-affected societies that it encounters on its borders into cooperative, representative and, especially, stable entities” (Duffield 2001, 11). The shift from peacekeeping to multidimensional peace operations is, as Jabri claims, a shift in the UN’s remit towards the reshaping and transformation of societies, one that would correct the failure of states, reforming them so they can govern internally as well as participate in the global political economy (2013, 10). For this reason it is also vital to historicize peace operations in relation to colonialism and imperialism (Agathangelou & Ling 2003), discussed in more detail in the following section. From critical feminist perspectives, the form and function of peace operations can be challenged, given they operate on the patriarchal and militarised logics of statehood, politics and economics. Despite the humanitarian rhetoric, it remains that militarised responses are justified as the most legitimate, if not only, response, which has negative implications for the security of those in the states that are subject to such interventions (Orford 2003, 11–12).

Gendering states, gendering peace With the adoption of the Women, Peace and Security agenda and the mainstreaming of gender throughout UN peace and security operations, gender relations and the position of women relative to men has become deeply embedded in the rhetoric of peace and stability. This book is very much indebted to the works of feminist and critical scholars who have identified gendered identities and ideologies as profoundly influenced by, and influencing of, instances, processes and labels of conflict, war and peace (­Tickner 1992; Enloe 2000, 2014; Hansen & Olsson 2004; Shepherd 2008; Sjoberg & Via 2010). Feminist international relations and security work has unpacked taken-for-granted categories and ontologies, ones that have worked to obscure the operations of gendered power. Feminist scholars have established a field of literature that re-visions security and peace from a feminist perspective, have challenged the absence of women’s voices and women’s experiences from international security politics, and have exposed gendered power in international relations (Blanchard 2003). There are many ways that ‘gender’ is understood and utilised within this scholarship. Feminist and gender perspectives have brought significant attention to the particular experiences, vulnerabilities and contributions of women in war and peace. During and after conflict, gendered inequalities between women and men manifest in particular forms of gendered insecurity and violence for women, both direct and structural (True 2012,

8 Introduction 136–160). Others have critiqued traditional war narratives that perpetuate a historical blindness to the diversity of women’s experiences in war and the violence committed against them. These critiques have exposed that women are admitted into traditional war narratives in only essentialised ways that serve the continuance of war and violence; that is, wars are fought to protect vulnerable citizens, namely women and children (Stiehm 1982; Sjoberg & Gentry 2007; Enloe 2014). As Sjoberg and Gentry argue, “states perpetuate a gendered ‘protection racket’ which marginalises women while appearing to foreground their interests” (2007, 4). As women’s actual experiences of war have historically been disregarded, so too have they been marginalised in post-conflict reconstruction and had their access to formal peace processes limited. In post-conflict moments, there is a dominant rhetoric of ‘returning’ to or ‘restoring’ an idealised pre-conflict past (Pankhurst 2008a, 2008b). Yet, as feminist security scholars have shown, for women this can mean the reinstitution of gender norms, often via the stabilisation of the state, that have traditionally subordinated them to patriarchal power (Handrahan 2004, 440; Pankhurst 2008a). Scholars have concomitantly delineated norms of ideal-type masculinities that imbue these same discourses and which foreground men’s roles and experiences, perpetuating patriarchal power (Enloe 2014). Gendered structural relations and militarism weave hegemonic understandings of both masculinity and femininity, wherein masculine symbols and traits are privileged over the subordinated feminine (Tickner 2001). This does not necessarily mean all men or masculinities are privileged, but rather that all feminised statuses are devalorised (Peterson 2010, 18). Thus, it is important to pay attention to gender as a structural power, one that mediates experiences and structures the position of individuals and groups in relation to each other. Here, gender is not simply referring to assumptions about individual behaviour but is more broadly “a way of categorizing, ordering, and symbolizing power, of hierarchically structuring relationships among different categories of people” (Cohn 2013, 3). According to Harding, a gendered social life is produced through the distinct yet related processes of “assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies” and, in turn, appealing to these categories to order social activity, such as in the gendered division of labour (1986, 17–18). In addition to ‘making women visible’ and exposing the gendered structures that mediate individual experiences in conflict processes, more critical perspectives provide an ontology of gender that refutes claims of an essentialised experience or subjectivity and, indeed, directly challenges theorising that does so (see Harding 1986, 27–28; Wilcox 2011). Also interested in discourse, identities and ideologies, this view highlights productive (gendered) power. Judith Butler’s oft-cited concept of performativity is instructive here, which posits that there is nothing prior to or essential in gendered experiences and bodies, but rather gendered identities and beings are constantly (re)produced via performance and interaction (2006). In this view, gender is

Introduction  9 not an internal ‘thing’ that resides within the body but is always external, discursive, performative and culturally mediated. Drawing on post-structuralism and semiotics, it is argued that discourse constitutes meaning, privileging some knowledge while subjugating others, and producing and making knowable only that which is signified through discourse and symbolism (Foucault 1972; Shepherd 2008). Whereas structural (gendered) power highlights the structural (extant) positions of individuals, as well as the role of structural relations in shaping social experience and opportunity, productive power “is the constitution of all social subjects with various social powers through systems of knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general social scope” (Barnett & Duvall 2005, 20). Through systems of signification, meaning-making and performance (Foucault 1972; Butler 2006), gender is discursively constructed and made knowable in a way that makes visible some subjectivities while obscuring others (Shepherd 2008). Likewise, gendered ideologies, systems and subjects are themselves reproduced through practices and articulations of security (Shepherd 2007). Such analytic tools have been applied to conflict and peace broadly, and to the Women, Peace and Security agenda specifically, examining the co-constitution of gender (and gendered bodies), violence and security (Shepherd 2007, 2008; Wilcox 2011). Women, Peace and Security, and its set of discourses, holds productive power itself, reifying a certain ‘woman subject’ (Shepherd 2008; Martin de Almagro 2017). As Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski argue, “[w]e ‘know’ that when we speak woman, we re-constitute her, we construct and delimit her through our stories about her” (2009, 619). Such analytic tools are essential in examining the operation of gender policy in peacekeeping, as they expose the gendered power that lies behind how issues are constructed and who or what becomes the subject of such policy prescriptions. These different epistemologies and ontologies of gender provide useful frames to examine both gender policy and logics in peace operations. While the adoption of the Women, Peace and Security agenda has certainly added ‘women’ and (rhetorically) ‘gender’ (see Stern & Zalewski 2009) to the UN’s peace and security operations, it has done little to dislodge structural hierarchies that have historically produced gendered, and other, relations of power. Moreover, the policy resides within a distinctly gendered institution in that the UN and its security operations are “productive of ideas about appropriate masculinities and femininities which in turn have a wider cultural impact than the bounds of the institution itself” (Cohn 2013, 15). Given how gender policy is assigned and attached to particular subjects, post-structural perspectives point to how gender programming itself operates to constitute gendered subjectivities and gendered bodies (Wilcox 2011). This frame can be linked with critical perspectives on peace operations wherein ‘gender’ is understood and practised within the confines of neo-liberal rationalities (Reeves 2012) and makes “possible new techniques within an overall economy of power in North-South relations” (Doty 1996, 128).

10 Introduction A notable achievement of feminist transnational activism, Security Council resolution 1325 and subsequent resolutions on Women, Peace and Security have led to ‘gender’ becoming embedded in the discourse and practice of peace operations, seeking chiefly the protection, participation and empowerment of women. The Women, Peace and Security agenda has coalesced around the pillars of protection, prevention, participation, and relief and recovery (Porter & Mundkur 2012, 29–31; Oudraat 2013, 618). Yet in 2015, the Global Study on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda found that gender considerations continue to be given insufficient scope in practice, that women continue to be marginalised in peace processes and in post-conflict reconstruction, and that sexual and gender-based violence continues throughout conflict and post-conflict zones, with little admonition for perpetrators (Coomaraswamy 2015). There are evident limitations, then, in how this gender policy has been practised and in the extent of its implementation, attributable to institutional norms that see gender as a ‘soft’ issue (thus productive of relational and hierarchical conceptualisations of gender) and that continually subordinate gender perspectives to militarised and patriarchal security assumptions. The way ‘gender’ is conceptualised and operationalised in peace operations structures how, when and why (some) women and ‘women’s organisations’ gain visibility and access to institutional peacebuilding processes. There have been a further seven Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace and Security since resolution 1325, and these demonstrate the refinement of how Women, Peace and Security, and gender, in peace operations is understood. Each resolution has both inward- and outward-facing dimensions (Dharmapuri 2013, 6–7), meaning each seeks to institute gender equality within the UN as an institution, and in host populations through peace operations. In addition to these resolutions, in 2010 then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon developed a seven-point action plan for women’s participation in peacebuilding (UNGA & UNSC 2010). It stated that women were “crucial to shoring up the three pillars of lasting peace: economic recovery, social cohesion and political legitimacy” (UNGA & UNSC 2010, 3) and the action plan it developed to achieve these goals is closely aligned with the strategies espoused by Women, Peace and Security resolutions, namely increasing the number of women in senior and other positions and gender expertise at senior levels of the UN; reviewing existing protocols; demonstrating how all UN-funded programs benefit both men and women, and ensuring a percentage of UN funds go specifically to programs addressing gender and/or women; improving women’s representation in post-conflict governance; and preventing and responding to sexual and gender-based violence, including improving legal support services. Adding women to existing structures without changing the ways those structures operate takes a characteristically liberal feminist approach to women’s participation; that is, it seeks formal representative equality between men and women without questioning the gendered ideologies that

Introduction  11 underpin the unequal distribution of power or how these responses perpetuate a socially produced category of ‘woman’ that is unequal and violable (Brown cited in Shepherd 2007, 242). Heidi Hudson has called this a “liberal additive” approach (2012). As demonstrated in the chapters that follow, it also leads to technocratic solutions in which gender work becomes women’s work and this work, in turn, is marginalised. Claire Duncanson has argued as well for stronger critiques of neo-liberalism as part of the Women, Peace and Security agenda (2016, 16), which highlights how peace operations circumscribe Women, Peace and Security via their perpetuation of a globalising patriarchal neo-liberalism. What this means then is that while ‘gender’ increasingly appears in peace operation discourse and policy, there is no explication of gendered ideologies, structures or discourses and how they are themselves constitutive of peacebuilding practice (Shepherd 2017). Gender analyses also need to be nuanced, with attention to intersections of race, class and geography. Peace interventions have been viewed by many as a neo-colonial practice that attaches conflict to particular sites, obscuring interconnections with a global political economy and to powerful (‘developed’) states that contribute the largest proportions to global arms manufacturing (Pugh 2004; Darby 2009; Meger 2016; Shepherd 2016). From this view, the Women, Peace and Security agenda serves to reinforce interventions by rehearsing colonial narratives of saving victimised ‘Third World women’ from the deprivations of conflict and, implicitly and explicitly, from the violence of uncivilised men who populate these conflict landscapes (Mohanty 1988; Kapur 2002; Pratt 2013). This critique is positioned within broader challenges to liberal world order, ones that bring to the fore historic inequalities between communities and peoples and the perpetuation of these via international institutions and interventions, foreign aid and democracy promotion (Doty 1996, 127–144; Orford 1997). Like colonial projects before them, a rhetoric of protecting victimised Third World women is embedded within the discourse of intervention, even though militarised interventions subvert feminist aims and can ultimately exacerbate gendered insecurities (Hunt 2006; see also Orford 2002, 276). The most prominent case here is that of US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the War on Terror, framed in the immediate post-9/11 period as wars for women’s rights (Shepherd 2006; Lee-Koo 2008). Yet violent, militarised, and now protracted war-mongering has done nothing to secure the rights of women nor collective security in a context of ongoing conflict, degraded infrastructure, economic decline and political fracturing (Cornell 2002; AlAli & Pratt 2009). The discourse of ‘protecting women’ served to support the military and political aims of, primarily, the US, which had little to do with the needs and interests of Afghan or Iraqi women, did not pay attention to the extant gender orders within these sites, and reproduced gendered ideologies that inform foreign policy and power politics (Shepherd 2006). In addition, there is a ‘politics of space’ in peacebuilding discourse and practice (see Orford 1997; Shepherd 2017). Peace interventions are characterised

12 Introduction as occurring broadly between two categories of actors: ‘local’ and ‘international’. These categories rest on the raced and gendered politics of power discussed above, locating conflict and instability in ‘local’ structures and agents, while the ‘international’ can objectively intervene, institute various political, military and economic changes, and depart, with any remaining instability due to local governance issues. Obstacles to building peace are located in the local realm, and this is also true of the Women, Peace and Security aspect, as extant “discriminatory social norms” and patriarchal cultures present obstacles to the smooth translation and implementation of ‘gender’ in peacebuilding (see for instance UNGA & UNSC 2010, 7). In addition to institutional discourses and practices, it is important to pay attention to how such policies connect with, order, instrumentalise or are instrumentalised by, and empower or disempower different groups and individuals at peace operation sites. Audrey Reeves (2012) and Elisabeth Prügl (2004) have both argued that the disciplinary power propagated by international institutions both co-opts and empowers feminist knowledge, challenging those frames that deploy a zero-sum analogy. It is ostensibly those in conflict zones that should benefit the most from Women, Peace and Security, not simply by ‘making war safe for women’ but through the amelioration of gendered practices that perpetuate conflict and instability. How individuals in different locations utilise (or do not utilise) Women, Peace and Security, or how they engage with it in peace operations within national borders speaks to the multiple narratives that can be told of Women, Peace and Security beyond what may traditionally be thought of as its institutional home and textual shortcomings (Pratt & Richter-Devroe 2011, 496–499; Basu 2016). For instance, the advocacy of national actors in Ukraine led the government to adopt a National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace and Security (Order of the Cabinet of Ministries of Ukraine 2016). In another case, the experience in Ireland demonstrates the politics in defining ‘post-conflict’ space and peace processes generally: while both Ireland and the UK have adopted NAPs, neither sufficiently responds to the post-­conflict demands of Northern (and southern) Irish women and their experience in peace processes (Hoewer 2013). Indeed, no iteration of the UK NAP on Women, Peace and Security has made reference to the conflict in Ireland (see HM Government 2018 for the most recent NAP). In addition to feminist work querying the nature of security, works on the gendered nature of the state and of nationalism are also significant, given that, as described in the previous section, the state is the focus of the peacebuilding efforts of international institutions (Peterson 1992; Tickner 1995; Pettman 1996, 2–17; Yuval-Davis 1997; Young 2003; Kantola 2007). The state remains the dominant referent and lens through which conflict, peace and security are understood and sought. Much like in the case of Women, Peace and Security, feminists have had an uneasy relationship with the state, oscillating between “embracing the state as the only institution that can realize women’s human rights and redress patriarchal structures,

Introduction  13 and critiquing the state as a site of masculinist power that legitimizes these patriarchal structures through domestic and foreign policies” (Parashar, ­Tickner & True 2018, 2). In postcolonial sites, independence has not necessarily produced states that have protected their citizens from abuses and provided the freedom envisioned in anti-colonial movements (ibid, 1). These gendered lenses on the state as both avenue and obstacle for gender equality and women’s freedom are essential in examining the gendered and gendering nature of peace operations in Timor-Leste. It is not simply the UN missions and international donors that have produced obstacles to gender security, but the institutionalising of a patriarchal state and the power therein. Soumita Basu has argued that in taking the actions, or deliberate non-­ actions, of differently placed actors on Women, Peace and Security seriously, we can understand the agenda as ‘written’ beyond its so-labelled ‘international’ or institutional location (2016). Rather than assessment of the ‘good or bad’ character of gender programming in peace operations – although it will become evident that my stance is often critical – this book seeks to engage with the types of engagements between feminist movements and international institutions, the kinds of agencies they make possible, the way in which hegemonies and hierarchies are being questioned or reproduced in these engagements [and] the way in which institutions are being radicalised and movements tamed. (Prügl 2004, 80, emphasis added) As will be discussed throughout, this book primarily falls on the side of movements being tamed rather than institutions radicalised.

Timor-Leste: occupation, intervention, independence Timor-Leste3 comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, with the western half, West Timor, being a province of Indonesia. Timor-Leste was colonised by the Portuguese, who came to the island as early as 1514, establishing the first colonial settlement there 50 years later (Dunn 2003, 13). James Fox has described the entire Timor Island, both the eastern and western halves, as a diverse landscape peopled by a diverse population and therefore “not one place but many” (2000, 1). For much of the colonial period, Timor-Leste remained a neglected outpost of Portugal’s empire, providing little in the way of monetary or geographic gains besides excellent trade in sandalwood. As Cummins notes, it is misleading to claim that Timor-Leste was subject to colonial rule for over 400 years given the lack of control exerted over the territory until consolidation in the early twentieth century (2014, 20). Power struggles between different groups – Portuguese and Dutch colonialists, local elites – characterised much of the early colonial period. There was some Portuguese interference in local politics, however,

14 Introduction and political tensions were exacerbated through the practice of indirect rule, with the Portuguese inserting themselves into political arrangements by, for example, using village chiefs to collect taxes when Portuguese coffers required (Jolliffe 1978, 48; Dunn 2003; McWilliam & Traube 2011). In 1974, political events in Portugal opened space for East Timorese demands of decolonisation and independence. Following an overthrow of Portugal’s monarchy in 1910, a right-wing dictatorship, the Estado Novo (‘new state’), was established in 1926 under Antonio Salazar, who remained head of state until 1968. Salazar was “ideologically and culturally traditional, anti-liberal, Catholic [and] ultra-­ conservative”, rejecting democracy and instituting a dictatorial regime (Pinto & Rezola 2007, 358). As Western Europe boomed in the 1960s and 1970s, Portugal’s economy stagnated (Story 1976). The Estado Novo ignored demands for decolonisation from its overseas territories, which included Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, as well as Timor-Leste. On 25 April 1974, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) overthrew the Salazar regime in a coup d’état that became known as the Carnation Revolution. The MFA opposed the regime’s stalling of decolonisation in Portugal’s African territories and had refused to fight in the resultant wars (Story 1976, 421). In Timor-Leste, the Carnation Revolution triggered processes of decolonisation as Portugal’s military and political influence in the country was significantly weakened. In this context, East Timorese political parties began to form, differentiated mostly by their positions on Timor-Leste’s future status: as an independent country, as maintaining ties to Portugal, or as having independent status within Indonesia (Hill 1976; Joliffe 1978; Dunn 2003, 45–65). One of these political groupings, the Associacão Social Democratica de Timor (ASDT – Social Democratic Association of Timor), would later become Fretilin (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor), which was, and remains, symbolic of East Timorese resistance to Indonesian occupation and ­constituted the pro-independence front. The União Democratica Timorese (UDT  – Timorese Democratic Union) initially favoured continuing links with Portugal, whereas the Associacão Popular Democratica Timorense (APODETI) favoured integration with Indonesia (Hill 1976). At this time Indonesia was headed by the Suharto Government, which had gained power following an anti-Communist coup and then consolidated its control with the mass killing of roughly 500,000 supposed communists and their supporters in 1965 and 1966 (Candio & Bleiker 2001, 67). In the climate of the Cold War, this fact crucially gained support for Indonesia from the US and its allies, and Australia especially did not want a newly independent, fragile, and potentially Communist-leaning state on its borders. Indeed, in the lead up to their military occupation of Timor-Leste, Indonesia had been establishing a pretext for the invasion by purporting that Fretilin represented potential communist leadership (Candio & Bleiker 2001, 65; CAVR 2005, section 3.6).

Introduction  15 Following a brief civil conflict between Fretilin and UDT, and sensing the imminent Indonesian invasion, Fretilin claimed the independence of Timor-­Leste on 28 November 1975, hoping this would cement the illegality of any military occupation in the eyes of the international community. On 7 ­December 1975, Indonesia launched an assault on the capital, Dili, and subsequently gained control of the territory (see Jolliffe 1978, 1–11). The UN, although largely impotent, did not condone the invasion, stating the I­ ndonesian incursion was against the principles of the UN Charter and the right of the East Timorese people to self-determination (UNSC 1975), and they reiterated this again in 1976 with another Security Council resolution calling for withdrawal of Indonesian forces from the territory. In the 1980s, however, interest in Timor-Leste waned and “Australia [in particular] played an active role in thwarting the General Assembly discussion of the issue” (Maley 2000, 65). International actors did little and, indeed, were largely complicit in ­Indonesia’s initial invasion and the following decades of oppressive occupation in Timor-­ Leste. Australia denied publicly its intelligence on Indonesia’s intent to occupy, even when five Australian journalists were killed during Indonesian military incursions in the western border regions of Timor-Leste (Ball 2001). As an ally in the anti-Communist camp of Cold War international relations, successive Australian governments recognised Indonesian sovereignty over Timor-Leste (Ball 2001). The Indonesian occupation period in Timor-Leste was characterised by oppressive military tactics, disenfranchisement of the East Timorese population, large-scale internal displacement and widespread human rights violations. Upper estimates of the death toll are approximately 200,000 East Timorese deaths (Candio & Bleiker 2001, 66). The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR – Commissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação) established in Timor-Leste reported the military strategy of the occupation regime: Once committed to military intervention, ABRI [Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia – Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia] was dominant during the early years of the occupation: by increasing military violence they sought to achieve the political objectives of pacification and integration. To do this, they brought the conflict to every level of East Timorese society, involving East Timorese men, women and children in combat, intelligence torture and killings to control the population. By the late 1980s, when full-scale military conflict shifted to clandestine resistance…the military again sought violent solutions to the problem. Death squads and paramilitaries in the mid-1990s became forerunners to the widespread militias formed in 1998–1999. (CAVR 2005, section 4.1, para 1) The resistance movement, sustained throughout the 24-year occupation period, can be grouped into three fronts: (1) the armed front – the military

16 Introduction wing of Fretilin, known by its acronym Falintil (Forças Armadas da Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste – Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor); (2) the clandestine resistance – the civilian support base that spread throughout the country (and internationally), which provided Falintil access to material resources, carried messages in and out of Falintil bases and obstructed Indonesian forces where possible; and (3) the diplomatic front – representing Timor-Leste in the international arena and continually campaigning for recognition of Timor-Leste’s sovereignty and right to self-determination in forums such as the Security Council and UN Conferences on Women. International connections with resistance fronts were maintained throughout the occupation period, especially among a network of diaspora in Mozambique, Australia, Indonesia and the US. Perhaps the most well-known face of the diplomatic front was José Ramos-Horta, who continually lobbied the UN and its member states to support Timor-Leste’s goal of self-determination. In the 1990s, the international political climate began to shift. Indonesia was increasingly urged to hold a referendum on the question of Timor-Leste’s future and their legitimacy in Timor-Leste began to erode (Maley 2000, 66–67). The security situation in Timor-Leste, however, remained ominous, with the Indonesian military and the militia they supported violently repressing internal demands for independence. Indonesia and Australia repeatedly claimed that the militia were actually East Timorese-formed groups who wanted integration with Indonesia, rather than the Indonesian military-­created and supported proxies they were (Ball 2001; Candio & Bleiker 2001). Key events in Timor-Leste brought international awareness to the violence occurring in the territory and to the question of Timor-Leste’s future. The Santa Cruz massacre occurred in 1991, in which hundreds of peaceful protesters gathering at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili were fired upon by Indonesian armed forces. The presence of two international journalists, Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn, who managed to smuggle out footage of the massacre, meant the brutal footage was internationally publicised and significantly decreased the legitimacy of Indonesia’s position on Timor-Leste. In 1999, following a series of peace dialogues, an agreement was signed be­ greements tween the UN, Indonesia and Portugal, known as the 5th May A (UNGA & UNSC 1999). This agreement stated that a referendum would be held to determine the future status of Timor-Leste, outlining a framework for ‘special autonomy’ for Timor-Leste within the Indonesian Republic. The framework was to be put to the East Timorese population for consideration in a referendum: if accepted, the UN would initiate the “procedures necessary for the removal of East Timor from the list of Non-Self Governing Territories… and the deletion of the question of East Timor from the agendas of the Security Council and General Assembly” (UNGA & UNSC 1999). If rejected, the Government of Indonesia was to terminate its occupation of Timor-Leste and arrangements were to be made for a “peaceful and orderly transfer of authority in East Timor to the United Nations” (UNGA & UNSC

Introduction  17 1999). The agreement held that the UN was to establish a support mission in Timor-Leste to facilitate the referendum – the UN Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) – with a mandate that had provisions for civilian police officers to advise Indonesian police officers and to supervise ballot boxes; military liaison offices to maintain contact with Indonesian armed forces; a political component to monitor and assess the fairness of the referendum; an electoral component for voter registration; and an information component to explain to the East Timorese population the terms of the referendum and the proposed autonomy framework (UNSC 1999a). It was therefore a political mission with no peacekeeping capacity, and, under the 5th May Agreement, Indonesia was to retain responsibility for security. There was no precedent for the UN conducting a vote as outlined in the 5th May Agreement and under such circumstances – that is, “with an abundance of spoilers and no credible security guarantees” (Maley 2000, 67–68). The results of the ballot, eventually held on 30 August 1999, were decisive: of Timor-Leste’s eligible voting population, 78 per cent rejected the proposed autonomy framework, thus casting their vote for independence. The backlash against the referendum outcome was swift and violent, following a predetermined plan that aimed to reverse the referendum result by demonstrating the inherent instability of Timor-Leste (Fernandes 2004, 76–85). Indonesian-supported militia followed a ‘scorched earth’ policy, while the Indonesian military – in charge of the security situation under the 5th May Agreement – stood by. Thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands were forced across the border into West Timor, and many more were internally displaced. The aftermath of the referendum result was the culmination of months of intimidation and violence that had been building throughout 1999 (see Dunn 2001). UNAMET had neither the mandate nor capacity to cope with such violence. UNAMET offices were attacked and staff were under siege inside the Dili-based UN compound after the referendum result was announced (Martin 2000). Numerous accounts characterise the final days of UNAMET as ones of fear, particularly when the mission was instructed to withdraw international staff, leaving local personnel to an almost certain death (­Martinkus 2001; Cristalis 2009). On 15 September 1999, a multinational Australian-led peacekeeping force was authorised by the UN Security Council: the International Force for East Timor (InterFET). InterFET was mandated with supporting ­UNAMET and is viewed as largely successful in responding to the immediate security situation in Timor-Leste. In the mandate that authorised InterFET (UNSC 1999b), the UN Security Council welcomed the organisation of a transitional administration to which authority in Timor-Leste would be transferred. In October 1999, UNAMET was replaced with UNTAET, under which InterFET was subsumed. UNTAET represents a watershed moment for the development of comprehensive, integrated peace operations, beyond the realm of traditional

18 Introduction peacekeeping, incorporating significant development and state-building goals. UNTAET came under the authority of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and is thus institutionally defined as peacekeeping, yet its mandate and role took on key functions of state-building, especially given its hold on legislative and executive authority until 2002. There was little precedent for a mission the same size and scope as UNTAET, although a handful of transitional administrations have been undertaken elsewhere (Bellamy & Williams 2010, 255–278). The transitional administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) became an unofficial model and development plan for UNTAET (Lemay-Hebert 2011, 192–193). For its duration, UNTAET held executive and legislative authority over Timor-Leste, with power centralised in the hands of the transitional administrator, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General: the late Sergio Vieira de Mello. Security Council resolution 1272 (UNSC 1999c) allowed de Mello, as transitional administrator, to enact new laws and regulations and to amend, suspend or repeal existing ones. UNTAET also worked in close partnership with the World Bank, which took responsibility for spending on development and reconstruction (La’o Hamutuk 2000). As Timor-Leste was not an independent country until 2002, the World Bank instead granted funds via UNTAET for reconstruction programs (La’o Hamutuk 2000). In October 1999, the World Bank led a Joint Assessment Mission, partnering experts with East Timorese counterparts to assess the reconstruction needs in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. The subsequent report was tabled at a donor conference in Tokyo on 17 December 1999, co-chaired by Sergio de Mello and the World Bank’s Vice President Jean-Michel Severino. At the Tokyo donor conference, a total of US $522.45 million was pledged: US $148.98 million for humanitarian activities and US $373.47 million for civil administration, reconstruction and development (UN 2000). Following independence and the end of UNTAET, the UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET, 2002–2005) was established. Broader peacebuilding, state-building and development roles were severely scaled back in UNMISET compared to UNTAET; however, the significant military component remained, and UNMISET maintained control of the National Police Force (PNTL – Polícia Nacional Timor-Leste) until 2004. ­UNMISET was established as Timor-Leste gained its independence, and as such, the mission was mandated to provide support to the country’s new governance structures along with its centralised policing role. UNMISET was operational until 2005, when it was succeeded by the UN Office of Support in Timor-Leste (UNOTIL), a small political mission designed to support capacity-building in state institutions and the PNTL. UNOTIL was established under the authority of the Department of Political Affairs, rather than the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, which meant peacekeeping had officially ceased in the country and peacekeepers had departed. UNOTIL represented what was supposed to be the drawdown of UN involvement in Timor-Leste. However, in 2006 a violent crisis broke out in

Introduction  19 response to political grievances within the PNTL and also between the PNTL and the national military, which were loyal to particular political elites (UN Special Commission 2006). Both UNTAET and UNMISET instituted weak security institutions in Timor-Leste for the sake of political expediency, thus making the 2006 crisis both foreseeable and a possible consequence of inadequate peacebuilding (Rees 2003). The resulting instability led to a renewed militarised international security presence in Timor-Leste. In 2006, the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT, 2006–2012) was established, which reclaimed control over PNTL and was a security sector–focused mission. The predominant priority of successive UN peace operations in Timor-Leste remained a traditional security focus: ensuring the integrity of the state’s borders and monopolising the use of force in the state’s hands. While peace operations have evolved from traditional peacekeeping, they are very much imbued with a military understanding of security, statehood and, consequently, peace, and this has also been the case in Timor-Leste. In general, peace operations in Timor-Leste have focused their attention more readily on the national space, thus reflecting the liberal peace model that seeks to reconstruct a state with a central administration that exercises authority over a bounded territory, the Westphalian state (Paris 2002, 654). In Timor-Leste, this has meant that the associated activities, outcomes and benefits have remained centralised in the capital. A study released in 2005 on the economic impact of UNTAET and UNMISET found that 80 per cent of the economic benefits had remained in Dili, with a majority of the local job creation occurring in the centre (Carnahan, Gilmore & Rahman 2005, iii; Moxham & Caparic 2013, 3124). In addition, the main benefactors were the well-educated and those with some wealth already (Carnahan, Gilmore & Rahman 2005, iii). This centralisation of peace operations, both politically and economically, has had significant implications in terms of the gendered and gendering nature of the peace being built and, additionally, is reflected in the operation of national politics to date.

Overview of the book This book seeks to move beyond debates of what ‘works’ in liberal peacebuilding, a debate that seems mostly informed from the perspectives of those outside of sites of intervention. Throughout this work, I was forced to confront the claim that ‘it is not possible to say anything meaningful about peacekeeping from one example’. I do not dispute the insightful and necessary contributions from works that conduct their analysis across multiple case studies, those that work chiefly in policy documents and/or those that trace the institutional lineage of peace operation development; indeed, this book is indebted to these works. Rather, I claim that it is in fact possible to say something meaningful about the impact and practice of peace operations from the ‘one example’ of the people and groups within them

20 Introduction who “have interpreted or engaged the practice and agents of intervention” (­Sabaratnam 2011, 798). This book examines the gender policies and discourses that were produced within the context of peace operation intervention in Timor-Leste. In seeking to examine how gender policies ‘worked’ at the site of peace operations, it quickly became apparent that these policies mingled with the sociopolitical history and context of where they operated. In this way, adopting a single case study – although I would challenge the idea that Timor-Leste, or any state, is a ‘single’ viewpoint, experience or subject – provides space for examining the operation of the liberal peace project in tandem with the social and political history of Timor-Leste, and for acknowledging the multiple influences that impact how peace interventions are understood or experienced.4 In addition to research in secondary sources, I conducted 31 individual and 2 group semi-structured interviews with East Timorese women’s organisations and NGOs, with UN peace operation and agency staff, INGOs and government ministers (see list of interviews).5 Interviews were primarily conducted in Timor-Leste over two research periods in 2012 and 2013. Participant interviews were incorporated into the research design in order to gather knowledge that “only those with certain experiences can know” (Ackerly & True 2010, 168). Following a feminist research ethic, which “demands that we apply the same criteria to the analysis of documents from institutional or elite sources as from lower-status organizations, groups or individuals”, data collected from multiple sources was given the same consideration (Ackerly & True 2010, 179). The book structure reflects the themes that emerged from interviews, namely the policy development and tensions that coalesced around participation and protection, the two central pillars of Women, Peace and Security, as well as the struggles and desires of East Timorese activists who sought change within and through peace operations and within their own government and society. I do not claim to present a precise account of ‘women’s experiences’ in Timor-Leste, but rather bring to the fore the historical and continued activism for gender equality and for peace in Timor-Leste. I pay especial attention to activism and advocacy that coalesced explicitly around women’s rights and gender equality or which was propagated by self-identified ‘women’s organisations’. The next chapter provides the historical and political backdrop to the East Timorese case in terms of women’s activism, involvement in the resistance struggle for independence, and the establishment of pre-independence women’s organisations. It was this context into which peace operations were deployed, and it was subsequently these organisations and collectives that they engaged with in Timor-Leste in gender projects. Part of this examination is the process of getting ‘gender’ onto the UN agenda, in Timor-Leste and more broadly, and indeed, the two are intertwined. East Timorese women’s activism was central to the appearance of a Gender Affairs Unit in the first significant peacebuilding intervention in the country, and there were strong debates throughout on what gender equality was and how it should

Introduction  21 be achieved. This history has been largely overlooked by framings that characterise peace operations as ‘bringing’ gender to Timor-Leste and thus ‘creating’ a women’s movement. Chapters 3 and 4 critically examine two mandates of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, women’s participation/representation and women’s security, respectively, with particular reference to their operation in ­Timor-Leste. In regards to participation, analysis of Timor-Leste demonstrates how the ideological framework of liberal peacebuilding circumscribes women’s participation in peace operations. Rather than a panacea for gender inequities, participation follows the liberal tradition of adding women without any fundamental change to gendered relations of power and the policies ignore the broader socio-political context at the mission site. Chapter 3 therefore examines how women’s participation was structured in national and village politics, and in security sector reform, and shaped by the confines of liberal statehood. Likewise, Chapter 4 examines the mandate of women’s protection and its centrality to the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda. In Timor-Leste, protection centred on domestic violence, particularly following the 2006 crisis period. While welcome, the focus on domestic violence is found to exclude recognition of a continuum of militarised gender violence in Timor-Leste, one perpetuated by the presence of peace support operations as well. Like women’s participation, the mandate of women’s protection is informed by racialised and gendered logics and deeply characterised by relations of power across and within state and institutional spaces. Chapter 5 serves to highlight that individuals are not merely subject to gendered peacebuilding processes, but rather engage and interact with them. This chapter pays close attention to the role of national women’s organisations in Timor-Leste, the resistance they faced (and posed), and the negotiations they undertook with international interveners, state actors and the broader population. In peace operations, women’s organisations are construed as contributing the ‘local’ perspective and are taken as representative of ‘local’ women’s activism and perspectives, which was the case in Timor-Leste. The chapter demonstrates how the gender component of peace operations, as currently conceptualised, does not allow space for divergent forms of women’s activism or intersectionality, nor does it acknowledge tensions between differently positioned actors in the national space. The argument presented here reveals a more nuanced picture in which a number of considerations are important to understanding resistance to gender, and this includes tensions between ‘local’ and ‘national’ actors and the presence of highly centralised peace operations that compound and perpetuate these tensions. Yet in institutional accounts, the weaknesses of centralised peace operations are often construed as the inherent (patriarchal) deficiencies of the post-conflict state and its population. Chapter 6 locates the preceding arguments explicitly in the literature on ‘localising’ peace – the ‘local turn’ (Hughes, Öjendal & Schierenbeck 2015;

22 Introduction Leonardsson & Rudd 2015) – which is evident in both scholarly literature and institutional reviews that seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of peace operations. The chapter examines how the figure of the local has been constructed and deployed in both peace studies and peace operations, drawing on critical feminist and postcolonial works. Despite the limitations demonstrated in the Timor-Leste case, not least in relation to the centralised nature of peace missions, the chapter finds that current conceptualisations of the ‘local’ perpetuate the same ontological and epistemological problems; it is a discursive construction that structures intervention. To date, the ‘local turn’ in peace studies has paid insufficient attention to gender (and race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexuality) as a category of analysis, as both a socially mediated and produced identity and as an organising logic, and for this reason, the categories produced within are necessarily deficient.

Notes 1 At the time of writing, the East Timorese parliament had been dissolved by President Francisco ‘Lu Olo’ Guterres and a new round of elections called due to disputes over who would take parliamentary leadership after election results failed to return any party to majority power (see Murdoch 2018). The new elections were held in May 2018, as this manuscript was being finalised. Some reports suggest that political uncertainty is resulting in population movement from the urban centre to rural districts as well as internationally (such as over the border into Indonesia) for fear of conflict as a result (see East Timor Law & Justice ­Bulletin 2017). 2 Such shortcomings did not go unnoticed in other locales. As Desmond Ball explains, militias in Timor-Leste initially tried to dislodge InterFET via aggression and propaganda: “[The Indonesian armed forces] doubt InterFET’s staying power drawing analogies with Somalia [where the killing of UN peacekeepers prompted their withdrawal in 1993]” (2001, 58). 3 ‘Timor-Leste’ was the name adopted by the territory at independence. The territory was referred to as ‘East Timor’ during the Indonesian occupation period, and ‘Portuguese Timor’ during the colonial period. This book uses ‘Timor-Leste’ throughout to reflect the territory’s current name. 4 I am deeply indebted to the work of Meera Sabaratnam (2011, 2017) for this framing. 5 Interviews were conducted with Swinburne University ethics approval (SUHREC Project No. 2012/083).

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2 Women resisting, women organising

This chapter examines women’s movements in Timor-Leste as they sought independence and gender equality during the resistance era and, in turn, how these movements developed in response to the end of occupation and the beginning of international peace interventions. It is not possible to examine activism for and by women in Timor-Leste exogenous to the fight for independence. What can be termed a ‘women’s movement’ appeared in ­Timor-Leste as demands for decolonisation intensified in the mid-1970s. At that time, East Timorese political parties were established around differing positions on the future status of the country, and the first women’s ­organisation – the Organização Popular da Mulher Timorense (OPMT – ­Popular Organisation of Timorese Women), founded alongside the nationalist movement Fretilin – was established on the principle of full independence. OPMT was anti-colonial and, from 1975, tens of thousands of women were organised within the structures of OPMT during the ­Indonesian occupation period. Indeed, the roots of many contemporary civil society organisations extend into Timor-Leste’s history of political and military struggles for independence, and a number of organisations focused on women’s rights and gender equality were established during the resistance to Indonesian military occupation. Given the importance of historicising the arguments throughout the book, the chapter begins by examining the formation of women’s groups and their activities in the resistance period. During the period of Indonesian occupation, the political and social advocacy of these groups fought for independence, drew attention to the specific gendered consequences of militarisation and the subordinate status of women in East Timorese society, and also connected with transnational feminist movements that were emerging through the 1980s and 1990s. Opportunities to establish transnational connections with women’s rights movements were also opportunities to advocate for Timor-Leste’s independence in the international arena. It was this context into which UN peace operations and their gender programs were deployed from 1999, who in turn identified and sought to encourage ‘women’s organisations’ as the key partners through which to implement gender mainstreaming and equality programs.

30  Women resisting, women organising The chapter then moves to the period of UN intervention, with focus on the immediate post-occupation period and getting ‘gender’ onto the UN agenda. In this period, women’s organisations and activists found that the arrival of a large peace operation posed significant obstacles to their visions of a gender-just peace, but it was also an avenue through which they could lobby the newly forming national government. The presence of peace operations thus provided some important allies. However, as I discuss in this chapter, the ideological, and hierarchised, separation between ‘gender’ and women’s organisations on the one hand and the political elite on the other was in part fomented by the presence of a peace operation whose ontology of statehood was informed by gendered logics of high and low politics. The chapter argues that the commencement of UN peace operations significantly shaped the landscape in which East Timorese women’s activists and organisations operated as well as prescribed and limited the means of their organising. Patriarchal norms were evident in both East Timorese and UN structures, and these intertwined at key points to challenge both women’s inclusion and the means for a more gender-just peace. In turn, though, by focusing on East Timorese organisations, it is evident that (some) organisations and activists were essential to shaping the UN’s own ‘gender agenda’, especially at a time when incorporating gender into peace operations was an inchoate notion.

Resisting As discussed in the previous chapter, a hasty decolonisation process was set in motion following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, and thus political groupings began to form in Timor-Leste around particular positions on the future status of the territory. In September 1975, the first explicitly women’s organisation, OPMT, was established as the women’s wing of Fretilin. Rosa ‘Muki’ Bonaparte, the first secretary of OPMT, announced its purpose: “to participate directly in the struggle against colonialism and… to fight in every way the violent discrimination that Timorese women have suffered in colonial society” (Bonaparte 1976). Bonaparte articulated East Timorese women’s oppression in Timor-Leste as a product of two inter-­ related factors, traditional norms and racist colonialism: “the traditional conceptions about the submission of women, and…the colonialist attitude to women” (Bonaparte 1976). OPMT was distinctly anti-colonial and drew connections with the experience of women in other colonised contexts, especially Portuguese colonies in Africa. For instance, at Angola’s independence on 11 November 1975, following a protracted nationalist conflict with ­Portuguese armed forces, OPMT released a statement noting the victory over “Portuguese colonialism and international imperialism” (OPMT 1975, 6). A small number of members, including Bonaparte, had been awarded scholarships to study in Portugal in the late colonial period. Many of the students returned to Timor-Leste following the Carnation Revolution and

Women resisting, women organising  31 brought back their insights gained from reading revolutionary literature and learning of other liberation struggles, particularly those of Portuguese colonies in the African context (Loney 2016). At its conception prior to Indonesian occupation, OPMT demanded liberation from the colonial system. At its establishment, OPMT was as much about the liberation of the East Timorese people as it was about women’s emancipation and, indeed, expressed these as mutually reinforcing goals; as Bonaparte explained: The principal objective of women participating in the revolution is not, strictly speaking, the emancipation of woman as woman, but the triumph of the revolution, and consequently, the liberation of woman as a social being who is the target of a double exploitation. (Bonaparte 1976) By “double exploitation”, Bonaparte was referring to the oppression of women as East Timorese under a patriarchal colonial society and the marginalisation of women within East Timorese society as well. An early OPMT statement wrote that members “know their fight doesn’t stop with independence” (OPMT 1975, 6). Given the focus on East Timorese society as well, it is worth discussing briefly what constitutes ‘traditional’ gender conceptions in Timor-Leste, the ideas of which persisted into the post-occupation and independence periods (Loney 2018). ‘Traditional’ gender norms are often framed as the most formidable barrier to the implementation of gender equality as envisioned in peacebuilding and development narratives post-occupation (see for instance UNFPA 2005, 7). In my own research, the words ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ were used frequently in participant interviews, with both national and international participants, when discussing obstacles to the implementation of their programs. Exactly what these traditional roles are, however, is harder to define. Considering the diversity of East Timorese societies, there are variations between different ethno-sociolinguistic groups (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 11; Niner 2011). ‘Traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ gender conceptions in Timor-Leste, like elsewhere, are fluid and have changed over time, and the country’s history of intervention plays a significant role here. National participants were far more likely to discuss the fluid nature of ‘culture’ and the potential for change, whereas international staff often spoke of traditional norms as inflexible. Given histories of occupation and intervention, there are difficulties in delineating distinct boundaries around ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ gender norms in Timor-Leste, which has led to contestation and politicisation in the post-occupation period (Niner 2011, 2013). Anthropologists have described a masculine/feminine dichotomy where the feminine has ritual authority and the masculine political authority (see also Niner 2011; Kammen 2012), and thus, in turn, decision-making is described as the domain of men

32  Women resisting, women organising (Niner 2011). This idea was reflected during participant interviews, with women often described as ‘passive’, ‘shy’ and ‘withdrawn’ in meetings and in ceremonies. As one former resistance member has described: In the past, and as it is today in Timor, opportunities are available only for men. Sure women can get an education but the majority of people believe that women should stay at home, women should not make decisions, women should not meet and speak up. (Aurora Ximenes. Interview with Michael Leach, 24 March 2010, Dili) Ultimately, what is understood as traditional in Timor-Leste must be considered in the light of histories of patriarchal colonial authority, military oc­ ortuguese cupation and international peace operations (Niner 2013, 2011). P colonialism was committed to Catholicism, and the Church continues to have significant influence on practices relating to family planning and marriage (Cristalis & Scott 2005). Regarding Indonesian occupation, Hannah Loney has documented the impact of state-sanctioned notions of femininity in Indonesia’s New Order regime in Timor-Leste, such as the establishment of state-led women’s organisations and programs to ‘modernise’ Timor-­ Leste as its newest province (2018). Thus, each intervention has entailed specific notions of how gendered relations should be ordered in modern societies. In the post-occupation period, the heavy use of the word ‘gender’ by the UN and development actors has resulted in a backlash, in national politics and in daily life, in which ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ is positioned in direct opposition to ‘gender’, with the latter viewed as an imposition seeking to change women’s traditional status. This backlash against gender will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, but it highlights the ongoing contestation and politicisation over what does or should constitute ‘gender norms’ in Timor-Leste. East Timorese women’s activists have long sought to challenge women’s marginalised position in Timor-Leste, in traditional, colonial, post-occupation and militarised contexts. Early Fretilin articulations of an anti-colonial nationalism included the language of equality between women and men, and OPMT and returned students from Portugal were instrumental in this regard (Loney 2012, 22). For example, Article 14 of the Constitution that was read out by the Fretilin Central Committee on 28 November 1975 guaranteed the parity of rights to men and women and also stipulated that it was the duty of each citizen, regardless of sex, to participate in the revolution (CAVR 2005, section 3.9, para 211). Socialist, Marxist and democratic theory influences were evident within Fretilin, and indeed, it was these influences that Indonesian authorities claimed made Fretilin a Communist threat, thus justifying their occupation of the territory to the international community in the context of the Cold War (Candio & Bleiker 2001). OPMT challenged practices of polygamy and barlake – most commonly translated as dowry or bride price1 – and both were outlawed within Fretilin

Women resisting, women organising  33 for being exploitative (Pinto & Jardine 1997, 47). OPMT’s manifesto identifies the causes of women’s oppression as both cultural and structural (da Silva 2012, 149). In the period between the establishment of OPMT and ­Indonesian invasion, a language of women’s emancipation, rather than equality, dominated, which was linked to the notion of Timor-Leste’s emancipation and independence. Thus, for OPMT, women’s emancipation was ideologically linked to the independence of the territory and the right to self-rule. Despite the emergence of a language of equality, women continued to be subordinated within Fretilin, and only three women sat on Fretilin’s Central Committee (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 27). In her fieldwork in Lospalos, Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes spoke with resistance era OPMT members and found that women were essentially ‘multitasking’: they were part of every stage and structure of the resistance front, but they also maintained responsibilities related to domesticity and child rearing (2009). As the resistance struggle wore on, Fretilin’s commitment to women’s equality diminished, and women “had to straddle the uneasy divide between their right to equality and their central role in maintaining Timorese culture and traditions in the wake of Indonesian invasion” (Braithwaite, Charlesworth & Soares 2012, 170). This pattern has been observed elsewhere, where women’s rights are rhetorically supported in national liberation struggles and fluid gender roles are utilised in support of such struggles. In practice, though, commitment to women’s equality remains comparatively marginalised, garnering little action beyond rhetorical support. Once the conflict or liberation struggle draws to an end, women’s rights are then marginalised and a women’s platform is lost from the post-conflict political agenda (Pettman 1996, 33–45). In Mozambique, for example, a former Portuguese colony and support base for the East Timorese resistance, the revolutionary Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Mozambique Liberation Front) declared women were fundamental to the revolution and its victory. Yet the political elite abandoned women’s issues at independence, and women’s gendered experiences of conflict were obscured in the interests of national reconciliation (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 111). Fretilin members were killed during the initial days of the Indonesian invasion in December 1975, and OPMT members were likewise targeted. Rosa Bonaparte and other members of OPMT were singled out as the Indonesian military advanced: The Indonesian troops had taken over Dili… right at the start they killed the Secretary-General of OPMT [Rosa Bonaparte]. They killed Rosa Muki Bonaparte [near the port]. Nicolao Lobato’s2 wife, [Isabel Lobato], she was killed over here. Both of them died on the spot… [But] even if the Secretary-General and others were killed, [OPMT] decided: “Never mind, we will choose someone else and go to the mountains”. So, we went to the mountains, the war had already begun, the enemy was starting to surround us. (Aurora Ximenes. Interview with Michael Leach, 24 March 2010, Dili)

34  Women resisting, women organising In the early years of occupation, OPMT members worked in the ‘bases of resistance’ in which, from mid-1976, Fretilin had organised the areas of ­Timor-Leste under its control into six administrative sectors (CAVR 2005, section 5.2). OPMT provided support networks and spaces for women to work together, as well as the opportunity for women to engage in active combat and clandestine activities (Alves, Abrantes & Reis 2005; Cristalis & Scott 2005; da Silva 2012, 152–159). During the bases of resistance period, OPMT ran women’s emancipation programs, and gendered roles shifted and were utilised in support of the resistance struggle: Women were encouraged to get involved in education, health, agricultural production and the production of items to be used by the military… Crèches were built in order to make it possible for women to carry out these activities. Men and women took turns in looking after the children in crèches… In some areas, courses were run to prepare women for marriage… The aim was to create nationalist families with respect for men’s and women’s rights… Through these courses future brides also learned to challenge colonial and feudal attitudes and preconceptions about women, and to defend the dignity of both women and men. (CAVR 2005, section 5.2, para 43–44) Within OPMT, commissions were established which dealt with separate areas of OPMT’s work, such as logistics, education, and health and hygiene (Alves, Abrantes & Reis 2005, 17–18). Indonesia’s military invasion had caused mass internal displacement, and Fretilin was left to provide for the large number of displaced peoples in these areas, a task which OPMT’s activities were central to: If we prepared cornmeal we would distribute it to all of the groups… we had control over health and hygiene. We did not count the number of people we had, as there were so many people. Seven or eight households would make up one section… it was called a squadron from a military perspective. In one squadron, there was a commander and one representative of OPMT. All of us desired independence. (Soares in Sequeira & Abrantes 2012, 52). The bases of resistance period came to an end in 1978 as the occupation intensified and Indonesia was able to consolidate its control over the territory, due largely to arms sales from the United States in the 1980s. Previously there had been disputes within the Fretilin Central Committee on whether civilians within the resistance bases should be made to surrender, while ­Falintil – the armed front – remained in the mountains. However, the decision was made naturally when Indonesian forces were able to o ­ verwhelm the territory militarily, destroying resistance bases (CAVR 2005, section 5.3). Some OPMT members remained in the mountains with Falintil, while others organised from surrendered areas to provide food, medicine,

Women resisting, women organising  35 information and shelter to communities and to those who remained in the mountains. Outside of formal OPMT structures, women were contributors to each of the resistance fronts – armed, clandestine and diplomatic – that were formalised at the 1981 Fretilin conference. With the end of the bases of resistance, the conflict of the occupation period during the late-1970s and 1980s was characterised by small – but symbolically important – bands of guerrilla Falintil fighters maintaining the armed front, which were supported by the clandestine front, or local population. There was a distinct gendered division of labour during this time in terms of the different resistance fronts, with women making up a majority of the clandestine base, and familial and kinship relationships were crucial to providing material support for the armed (mainly male) guerrillas (Loney 2018). This division often placed women in a precarious situation: their presence in the areas under Indonesian control made them targets for Indonesian military aggression, often because of their real or perceived connection to Falintil fighters who remained in the jungles.3 The work undertaken by women, men and youth outside of the ‘armed’ resistance front was crucial in maintaining commitment to resistance against Indonesian occupation for 24 years, and in eventually gaining independence. Important changes occurred in Indonesia and Timor-Leste in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, more albeit limited space opened for human rights organisations to be established. In Indonesia, which had suffered due to the Asia Financial Crisis in 1997, Suharto’s regime was weakening, leading to his resignation in 1998, which ushered in the reformasi (reform) period. These changes impacted the situation in Timor-Leste. The most well-known women’s organisation established in this time was the Forum Komunikasi Untuk Perempuan Lorosae (FOKUPERS – East Timorese Women’s Communications Forum), a grassroots women’s advocacy organisation established in July 1997. FOKUPERS, established because there was “no institution which [took] care of women victims or [acted] to improve the conditions of women”, was concerned with war widows, women prisoners and ex-prisoners, survivors of rape and wives of political prisoners (OMT 1998). FOKUPERS was a registered organisation rather than a clandestine operation, made possible because of the changes brought to the Indonesian political landscape in the reformasi era, and its establishment was facilitated by Indonesia’s signing and ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (OMT 1998). In 1998, OPMT’s sister organisation for youth was set up, the Grupo Feto Foinsa’e Timor Lorosa’e (GFFTL – East Timor Young Women’s Group) and also continues its activities today. In the run up to the referendum vote, GFFTL focused on voter education in the villages and rural districts. There were also changes to the resistance structures during this time. In 1998, a united resistance front was established to include members from all political affiliations, not simply Fretilin: the Conselho Nacional da Resistência Timorense (CNRT – National Council of Timorese Resistance). With this, the women’s wing was also reorganised into the Organização da Mulher

36  Women resisting, women organising Timorense (OMT – Organisation of Timorese Women). Like CNRT, OMT welcomed women from all political parties as well as those with no political affiliation, and it built on the original structure of OPMT (de Fatima 2002). At the National Conference of Fretilin held in Sydney, 1998, OMT made clear its anti-militarist sentiment, its understanding of the transnational dimensions of Indonesia’s military occupation of Timor-Leste, and the potential UN role in facilitating a peaceful transition to independence, making the following demands: 1. We propose that all Developed Nations should suspend all military aid to Indonesia, in order to halt the oppression, particularly of Timorese Women; 2. We propose to the European Union that a ceasefire should be called for between warring parties: the Guerrilla Forces and the Indonesian Armed Forces; 3. We propose a cease-fire overseen by the UN, with the participation of multi-national forces for peace and with the participation of international organisations such as the Commission for Human Rights, Amnesty International and other related organisations; 4. We propose that with the cease-fire, Indonesian troops should withdraw within different phases and eventually there could be a decommissioning of arms by the Guerrillas Forces… (OMT 1998) The ability to advocate for women’s rights was of course heavily proscribed in the occupation environment. As the above statement from OMT indicates, by the late 1990s, independence activists were couching their demands in rights-based, as opposed to revolutionary, language. The East Timorese resistance gained and consolidated transnational connections through this period as well. East Timorese student activists in Indonesia came into contact with Indonesian pro-democracy activists, who were also struggling for change during the Suharto era and after his resignation (Interview 21). It was not simply East Timorese-led organisations that were established in this time, as the regime of occupation likewise included state-led women’s organisations, ones that aimed to ‘modernise’ the territory and linked with Suharto’s New Order ideology in Indonesia. The patriarchal family was framed as a central pillar in order to develop the territory, which I­ ndonesia claimed had been neglected during Portuguese colonialism (Loney 2018). As Loney explains, “wives of civil servants were required to join Dharma Wanita (Dutiful Women) [while] at the village level, women were organized into branches of the Family Welfare Movement”, which had the acronym PKK (2018, 92). One participant, the founder and former director of a national NGO in the late 1990s, reflected on these organisations and, although not to discount the physical and material suffering exacted by the militarised occupation, felt that they had acted to open some space for East Timorese women:

Women resisting, women organising  37 The war liberated women, the Indonesian occupation, because ­Indonesian women were very active. I could see, you know, from the head of the [Indonesian] women’s organisation Dharma Wanita, who operated [in Timor-Leste]…because it was the public service every ministry, every department had a Dharma Wanita [representative], it was the national ­women’s organisation. But here they were very, very active. (Interview 21).4 Diaspora connections outside of the territory were also crucial. International connections with those in support of Timor-Leste’s independence were maintained throughout the occupation period, especially among a network of diaspora and refugees in Mozambique, Australia, Indonesia and the United States, and through Church connections. Members of the women’s political wings and of burgeoning women’s organisations were connected to transnational feminist activism. Individuals who established and worked in NGOs during the 1990s lobbied the international community and the UN specifically to bring attention to the consequences of occupation generally, and the gendered impact of militarism specifically. Former Secretary of OPMT and founding member of FOKUPERS Domingas ‘Micato’ Fernandes Alves has described her work in bringing international attention to the particular suffering of women in occupied Timor-Leste: I started sending articles abroad about the situation of women in ­ imor-Leste. I wrote to a Timorese woman in Sydney…I wrote to the T French President, François Mitterand, and to the United Nations. In 1995, I compiled a report about the suffering of Timorese women in the resistance [and] under the control of Indonesian armed forces…The report was submitted to the Beijing women’s conference. I was subjected to interrogation twice for sending documents abroad. (Alves 2010, 84) The international conferences on women presented key platforms on which East Timorese could draw attention to the situation of armed occupation and a forum in which they could articulate their desire for independence. A message sent to the Beijing Conference in 1995 from a member of the clandestine resistance reads: We appeal to you, as women, as mothers, as sisters and as wives, to say a word and to act in your own countries, in all your capacities, power and strength, for the dignity of East Timor, for the dignity and freedom of all the East Timorese women… Our fight for freedom will go on as long as there is no freedom to live as free human beings, as women, as individuals, as a nation and as people of East Timor. (Lighur 1995)

38  Women resisting, women organising Those in the diaspora were able to attend sites of transnational feminist activism, such as the NGO forums that ran parallel to the international conferences of the UN’s ‘Decade for Women’ (Roynestad 2003, 3). The conferences presented a platform for East Timorese attendees to lobby for international support for their country’s independence and offered opportunities to further disseminate information about life under Indonesian occupation, as well as increase attention to the particular consequences of that occupation for women (Smith & Loney 2016). East Timorese attendees learnt about the struggles and strategies for self-determination of women in other regions and countries; and in turn, East Timorese women found support from others regarding their own concerns (Hill 2012, 218). Interestingly, it was also these conferences that lay the groundwork for key international platforms on gender in global governance, such as the Beijing Platform for Action, the Namibia Plan of Action and, subsequently, resolution 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security agenda. East Timorese women generally, and the activists within existing NGOs, would find themselves the focus of, and key partners in, the resultant policy approaches in the post-occupation era under successive UN peace operations. From the late 1990s, the international political climate on the ‘­Timor question’ began to shift. Indonesia was increasingly urged to hold a referendum on the question of Timor-Leste’s future and, as Suharto’s leadership in Indonesia crumbled, so too did the Indonesian footing in Timor-Leste (Maley 2000, 66–67). When Suharto resigned in 1998, East Timorese activists were influenced by the changing political climate; as one participant described: When Suharto was forced to resign, we just sat down and said, “well, you know, it looks like independence is possible. I mean, the main obstacle is gone…it didn’t go completely…but he was out of power and things could change in our favour, and we need to think about development.” We had no idea how to go about it. (Interview 21) In this period peacemaking efforts intensified as well, and women’s organisations also sought involvement with the dialogues that were being carried out under UN auspices. Before the referendum, the UN had taken over a series of intra-East Timorese dialogues and had also overseen the negotiations for the 5th May Agreement that stipulated the terms of the referendum. Representatives from the various women’s organisations had struggled to gain equal footing in these peacemaking mechanisms. In the first round of UN organised intra-East Timorese Dialogues, only one East Timorese woman was included and the final round had increased that participation to three out of 45 (Rede Feto 2000). The marginalisation of women from peace processes was an issue that was not seriously addressed by either the UN or East Timorese political leaders. (Roynestad 2003, 3–4)

Women resisting, women organising  39 Nonetheless, women’s organisations continued to work to the extent that they could in the deteriorating security situation, and the establishment of the United Nations Mission in East Timor little alleviated this issue. FOKUPERS compiled a report on the commission of sexual violence in the country and presented it to the head of that mission, Ian Martin (Interview 20). In the weeks leading up to and immediately after the 1999 referendum, FOKUPERS, for instance, documented over 180 cases of rape in the districts around Dili (Schmaedick 2001). As discussed in the previous chapter, the period leading up to the referendum was one of intense physical danger and insecurity, as the Indonesian military worked to scare the population from voting against integration.

Organising Following the decisive referendum result and in the aftermath of ­Indonesia’s ‘scorched earth’ withdrawal, East Timorese activists and organisations sought to engage with the significant international presence entering their country. For women’s organisations, they sought participation with their own political leaders and advanced an agenda to institute women’s rights and gender equality mechanisms across peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities. Organisations established during the resistance period continued their activities, and women’s rights activists continue to articulate their movement as connected to clandestine resistance. As one participant described: The women’s movement came from the clandestine [time], it was very strong. So that’s why we continue. And we still feel it; we still feel the spirit of the hero, the women that have already passed away. So we started from the clandestine [time], and then, we learn how to strategise. (Interview 24) In the immediate post-1999 aftermath, these efforts were made through and within the UN’s Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), which had full executive and legislative authority from 1999 to 2002, at which point independence was restored to Timor-Leste. It is worth noting the broader context in which various organisations and collectives sought inclusion in the transitional administration, as this significantly impacted the form of inclusion of women’s organisations, individual women, and ‘gender’ as a policy platform more broadly. As numerous critiques of the liberal peace paradigm have pointed out, the modus operandi is top-heavy, centralised and lacks insight into the social, political, economic and historical contexts in which it operates (Paris 2002, 2003; Mac Ginty 2008; Westendorf 2015). A ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to peace operations can be alienating to those who both experienced the conflict and are said to be the beneficiaries of peace operations’ efforts (Autesserre 2014).

40  Women resisting, women organising This was the case in Timor-Leste: UNTAET has been described as approaching Timor-Leste as a ‘blank state’ or ‘empty shell’ (Traub 2000; Beauvais 2001), viewed essentially as lacking any recognisable liberal democratic institutions (see also Chopra 2002). In an interview in 2001, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) of UNTAET, or the ‘transitional administrator’, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, stated, What we found was a devastated country…There was no judiciary, no education system, no police, no defence force, no representative forms of government. Nothing, nothing, nothing. So, we determined our priorities, not in an arbitrary manner, but by responding to what we felt was needed in the early days of the mission. (in Millet & Rathinasabapathy 2001) As a transitional administration, UNTAET neither consulted widely nor sufficiently hired East Timorese. Women were further marginalised in this respect: of the already small number of East Timorese employed by ­UNTAET, only six per cent were women (Schmaedick 2001). Given the scale and scope of UNTAET’s mandate, the lack of involvement of East Timorese, at least beyond a limited political elite sect, was especially problematic: As UN administrator, [Sergio de Mello] knew that he would have to make a wide range of decisions in a hurry. Airports and ports had to be opened, clean water procured, health care provided, schools resuscitated, a currency created, relations with Indonesia normalized, a constitution drafted, an official language chosen, and tax, customs, and banking systems devised. Policies that normally evolved over hundreds of years would have to be decided within months of arrival – by him and his team. (Power 2008, 304) The priorities of UNTAET were to establish political structures, hold elections, maintain the integrity of Timor-Leste’s borders and normalise relations with Indonesia.5 Xanana Gusmão, resistance leader at the time of the referendum, was clearly identified as the key political interlocutor, and he, José Ramos Horta and Mari Alkatiri were the primary emissaries with the mission (Power 2008, 305–307). Samantha Power, in her biography of Sergio de Mello, has written of the “fine line” de Mello sought to walk between respecting what he saw as Gusmão’s de facto authority while wary of enshrining that authority it in the absence of elections (ibid, 306–307). This approach significantly shaped the political landscape at the time and continues to do so today. One participant reflected on the link: “Timor didn’t have any institutions [in 1999] and having the UN [UNTAET] in charge of too much, relying mainly on the whims of Xanana Gusmão and Ramos Horta…so that’s where Timor is today” (Interview 21). Mounting frustrations at

Women resisting, women organising  41 exclusion beyond this limited cohort of political elite led to public protests and demands for a process of ‘Timorisation’, and ultimately to demands for the mission’s departure. Frustration coalesced around certain issues: the lack of involvement of East Timorese nationals, the visible wage gaps between international personnel and East Timorese staff, the slow pace of development and what many took to be insensitivity towards Timor-Leste’s recent trauma (Interview 9).6 Economically as well, UNTAET and its benefits were highly centralised, which continued into subsequent missions. Peacebuilding dividends were stratified along existing class and spatial differences, and those who already had some wealth and/or education were more likely to benefit (Carnahan, Gilmore & Rahman 2005, iii; Moxham & Caparic 2013, 3124). ‘Peacekeeping economies’ have been heavily criticised within the liberal peace literature for causing inflation and creating economic bubbles that cement divides between ‘locals’ and interveners (Jennings & Bøås 2015). Certainly, in ­Timor-Leste, the financial difference between the majority of the population and those who worked within the peace operation and international organisations was perceived by the population, who supported calls for Timorisation. One participant reflected on the post-1999 period and the economic incentives driven by a large peacekeeping presence: There was so much focus on everybody who had money except the Timorese. They could make villas no matter who they are…and the Timorese until today we don’t have a local economy, a national economy, all our money comes from the oil…You say the UN gives jobs – what, security? 300, 400, 500 security people? Drivers? Translators? And so all these inflated restaurants, villas – they’ve gone. So people with money maybe also have left, owners of certain business to serve the UN at the time, certain security companies [they’ve left]…So this total discrepancy [or] fictitious economy, for mainly foreigners to serve foreigners…this total reliance on foreign goods instead of building a local-based economy. And the government follows the same model, so this is the biggest first mistake. (Interview 21) Thus, both politically and economically, UN peace operations were heavily centralised in Timor-Leste (see Smith 2015). Even though there were attempts to restructure indigenous society to facilitate future decentralisation, resources remained allocated from the top-down and sub-national authority weakened (Hughes 2009a, 2009b). These issues compounded the lack of inclusion of existing structures. Rather than simply being attributable to peace operations, both the UN and the first diaspora-led government neglected to draw on existing political and resistance governance structures (Bowles & Chopra 2008), and this included the broad-based women’s organisations of OPMT and OMT.

42  Women resisting, women organising These organisations had large bases. For instance, by the end of the occupation period, OMT had approximately 70,000 members organised into over 3,000 secretariats in each aldeia (hamlet or small village): The OMT has a matrix management structure involving seven sectors of responsibility and activity which is then further organised into a tiered structure with the following levels: aldeia, suko, zona district, region and finally a national secretariat…Each secretariat can operate independently based on local priorities and to a large extent initiatives arise at the local level…Direction and orientation can come from higher levels when and as needed…Now that the country has achieved independence…OMT continues as an organisation of national women’s unity, with essentially the same structure…It retains the ability to mobilise human resources very effectively in contributing to its work. (de Fatima 2002) However, such an organisational structure did not necessarily fit with the donor desire to engage with NGOs. With international intervention came significant donor demands for East Timorese organisations to order themselves in a manner that would facilitate the management of donor funding. In addition to the approach of ‘blank state’ that obscured existing structures – ones that had significant relevance given their operation and consolidation for 24 years under military occupation – there was disinterest on the part of the UN and international donors to work with ‘politicised’ groups or movements, an observation made by both national and international participants (Interview 17; Interview 29b).7 Organisations that had developed over the occupation period in Timor-Leste, such as Fretilin, OPMT and OMT, were, as structures organised to advocate for the liberation of the country, inherently politicised. OPMT was not well integrated into state formation and UN peace operations, especially when compared with other women’s organisations considered non- or apolitical. This could in part be due to its position as a Fretilin organisation, as Fretilin as well was sidelined in the post-occupation period in favour of UN association with key political figures such as Xanana ­Gusmão and José Ramos Horta. As the women’s wing of Fretilin, OPMT was also caught up in these tensions (Niner 2009, 215). One participant who had worked in UNTAET explained that …if the political situation, the political landscape changes, that impacts on them [women’s wings of political parties] as well. They’re not independent of that and what those effects are. And with the decline in the control that Fretilin had, I think that’s also…that impacted on OPMT. (Interview 29b) Maria de Fatima, Responsavél Géral of firstly OPMT and then OMT from 1998, explained to a conference in Adelaide the reluctance of international actors to draw on existing politicised resource networks in Timor-Leste:

Women resisting, women organising  43 Unfortunately the highly effective grassroots structure [of OMT] does not appear to meet the expectations and requirements of donor agencies, which have often focused on more conventional organisational structures (generally NGOs) specifically formed to accommodate donor funding, or the World Bank managed [program]8 which has focused on building new local government structures superceding [sic] indigenous political structures, clandestine and other social structures. OMT is marginalised from many of the economic and social initiatives taking place as a result. This has not stopped OMT from continuing its programs unaided, looking after the many widows and orphans left behind after the destruction, initiating education, health, economic and food programs, and providing shelter for the homeless. (de Fatima 2002) This issue has been identified in other cases as well. Belloni, for example, has examined the arguably neo-colonial practices of liberal peacebuilding, namely that donors will tend to fund non-political middle-class organisations “whose interests match their own” (2008, 204). In Timor-Leste, as a response to the perceived marginalisation of women and donor interest in working with ‘non-politicised’ structures, an umbrella women’s secretariat was established – Rede Feto – in 2000, which brought together 16 women’s organisations. One gender adviser explained the UN and donor preference in working with a secretariat when compared to a politicised or revolutionary organisation, such as OPMT and OMT, or even smaller organisations: That’s another consideration, is that when you do try to set up what they call these umbrella networks of women’s organisations, which [the UN] very much encourage because fragmentation occurs immediately in that post-conflict transition period, a fragmentation that, unfortunately, is largely donor driven as well. Where there’s so much funding being earmarked for emergency funding etcetera, you know that they want to get it out the front door as quickly as possible and they tend to actually approach organisations, particularly women’s organisations, to channel their funding through them. [And so the Gender Affairs Unit suggested] approaching the donors as a coordinated unit. Because the donors didn’t want to, in many ways they didn’t want to deal with this one, that one, another one with their little projects and their little proposals. And I just don’t know what happened with OPMT whether it sort of went off on its own path…There could have been sensitivity about giving them money directly because of their political affiliations. (Interview 29b) Research conducted during UNTAET similarly found that UNTAET and its Gender Affairs Unit demonstrated a preference to work with and through Rede Feto, discouraging discussion with other women’s organisations (Charlesworth & Wood 2002, 343).

44  Women resisting, women organising Filomena dos Reis, spokesperson of Rede Feto at the time, stated that the umbrella organisation was “representative of a broad cross-section of society, as there are mass-based organisations with national membership down to village level [like OMT], cultural, income-generating/small business and rights based organisations”, as well as organisations with political party affiliation, such as OPMT (in Cristalis & Scott 2005, 76). However, there was also mistrust of Rede Feto from some key women in organisations established during the occupation period, given both its “recent vintage” at the time and the view that it was a weak entity compared to other organisations like FOKUPERS, OPMT and OMT, who had large bases with direct membership (Charlesworth & Wood 2002, 343). Indeed, during fieldwork, some of the criticisms that the peace operations and UN agencies like UN Women attracted were also directed towards Rede Feto and, at the time, the Secretary of State for the Promotion of Equality (SEPI). One participant felt as follows: “Rede Feto, I find it totally useless, SEPI totally useless, because they have adopted those UN systems, and those UN [that are] here are to support them, you know, UN Women support SEPI” (Interview 21). When questioned further on how Rede Feto reflected UN systems, the participant continued “because that’s what I see in the papers every day…it’s highly expensive, zero results” (Interview 21). Immediately post-occupation, the centralised approach combined with the desire to work with non-politicised groups reflected a process identified by others as that of ‘NGO-isation’ (Jad 2004; El-Kassem 2008): that is, the undermining of women’s political activism into depoliticised structures that reflect western notions of a (feminised) civil society. Nazneen and S ­ ultan describe the process of NGO-isation as one where “issues of collective concerns are transformed into isolated projects without consideration for the economic, social and political context within which these issues arise” (2009, 193). NGO-isation, driven by donor demands, depoliticises women’s movements that are often fragmented in the process of forming civil society organisations in order to undertake an implementing role for international interveners. This move depoliticises women’s activism and relegates it squarely to the feminised realm of civil society which is invested with less political and material resources (Shepherd 2017). In post-occupation Timor-Leste, incoming peace operations and donors sought to work with depoliticised women’s organisations that focused on discrete gender-based programs, as opposed to OPMT or OMT that had forged their structures within a distinct anti-colonial and anti-militarist rhetoric, as discussed above. This issue was identified more broadly too, not just in relation to advocacy on women’s rights; as one participant stated, the whole population was essentially politicised within resistance structures at the end of the occupation and the beginning of international intervention via peace operations (Interview 17). Former politicised groups and movements formed non-­politically aligned NGOs in order to access funding and support represented through the peace operation process (Interview 17).

Women resisting, women organising  45 Despite the experience of resistance, as documented in the previous section, the knowledge this brought was sidelined as unimportant to peace operations in Timor-Leste. Moreover, those who were illiterate or lacked the requisite education and language skills to work with donors were further marginalised in this ­regard (Interview 17). As part of their early work, Rede Feto organised a series of district consultations, which culminated in the First National Women’s Congress held in Dili in June 2000. The outcome document of this First National Congress was a Platform for Action – modelled on the Beijing Platform for ­Action – which focused on lobbying UNTAET and the CNRT, UNTAET’s chief political ally, to include women in post-occupation peacebuilding. Following the First National Congress, women’s groups lobbied at the CNRT Congress, where a resolution on women’s rights was adopted unanimously (Pires 2004). This resolution called on UNTAET and the future government of Timor-Leste to support women in decision-making and established a foundation for laws against sexual and domestic violence (CNRT Resolution in Cristalis & Scott 2005, appendix 3, 179). Until this point, women’s organisations found it difficult to initially gain a footing in UNTAET’s administrative structures and to argue for space for programs that directly responded to their demands. Therefore, both the CNRT resolution on women’s rights and the Platform for Action from the First National Women’s Congress were important lobbying points for East Timorese groups, especially to UNTAET (Pires 2004, 4). In 2000, a representative of Rede Feto read a statement at a Security Council special session introducing resolution 1325. The statement spoke of women’s roles and experiences in conflict and their continued activism post-occupation in the context of a peace operation that, they felt, continually marginalised their work: It has become apparent that even with the UN’s presence in East T ­ imor, the women of East Timor still have a double battle to fight. We must combat our own society’s views of the role of women…while at the same time continuously advocating to the UNTAET and the East Timor Transitional Administration for policies and hiring practices that include women. (Rede Feto 2000) This statement is reminiscent of the ‘double battle’ faced by East Timorese women – of traditional culture and colonial society – referred to by Rosa Bonaparte at the establishment of OPMT. Rede Feto and other women’s organisations targeted the UN mission for their political, social and economic inclusion. One of the first things they did was seek formal implementation of gender awareness within the mission. Although UNTAET’s establishment pre-dated the adoption of resolution 1325, a gender unit was initially allowed for during planning, but it

46  Women resisting, women organising was dropped before UNTAET began its work, reportedly due to budgetary constraints (Whittington 2003). Its eventual reinstatement was a direct result of lobbying by East Timorese activists, with support from some key individuals within the UN: in particular, Angela King, who at the time was Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women; and Mary Robinson, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (Charlesworth & Wood 2002, 340–341). East Timorese women’s representatives met with then Secretary-General Kofi Annan to advocate the need for a gender unit in UNTAET. By mid2000, the gender unit was re-established and placed within the Governance and Public Administration pillar of UNTAET, the central pillar of the mission that would eventually hand over responsibility to East Timor’s first independent government in May 2002 (Whittington 2003, 1284–1285). As a result of this lobbying, UNTAET became the first UN peace operation to include a Gender Affairs Unit, the objectives of which were to “mainstream gender issues raised by East Timorese women, reflecting the…priorities of women at the national level in…all UNTAET activities” (Whittington 2002, 4). It focused on five core areas: capacity building, gender situational analysis and data collection, policy implementation and evaluation, rule of law, and networking and outreach (Whittington 2002, 4). Working with and through the Gender Affairs Unit was a deliberate strategy for accessing the new political elite for women’s representatives. For the East Timorese women’s movement during the transitional period, the UN was seen as a potential “bridge” to their government (Interview 24). The avenue provided by UNTAET and the Gender Affairs Unit was utilised to make gains that could then be cemented in the future independent East Timorese government. The head of one national women’s organisation explained: Because this is a transitional government [UNTAET], this is the way that you can work with them and demand them to influence our political leaders…to convince UNTAET to influence the new government and show, yeah we have capacity and our leaders, they are aware about our contributions and our political engagement…They are aware, they are very conscious about the involvement of women [and their] contribution to liberation. So this is a kind of bridge to influence our own government…And we keep going with these steps. (Interview 24) This is not to say that the “bridge” was always accessible or open, nor that UNTAET’s Gender Affairs Unit did not face its own challenges. The delayed establishment, as well as a limited budget, meant that there were very few resources available to develop the unit, and this was coupled with limited commitment to the issue “other than tokenism” (Interview 29a). As a ‘ground-breaker’, the Gender Affairs Unit in UNTAET was expected to

Women resisting, women organising  47 justify the continuation of such units, and gender policy more broadly, in future peace operations. It too was confronted with a ‘double battle’ of limited interest from both UN leadership and East Timorese political elite, as one interviewee explained: “[the Department of Peacekeeping Operations] were all but ready to get rid of this whole idea of having anything to do with gender and peacekeeping, and putting gender units or gender advisers [into peace operations]” (Interview 29a). Additionally, this is one reason the establishment of gender units can be seen to further marginalise women’s organisations and feminist activism, as they work through a gender unit that is marginalised itself within the operation. As Sandra Whitworth has noted, “a separate gender unit tends to result in local women’s NGOs liaising with the unit, while other local political actors – the majority of whom will likely be men – deal with UN officials in mainline departments and offices, the majority of whom are also men and who often enjoy more direct access to the chief of the mission” (Whitworth 2004, 131). This tendency was certainly evident in the case of Timor-Leste during UNTAET, and it extended into later missions as well. From the discussion so far, there are different yet related pressures evident. There were pressures on women’s organisations to form in a way consistent with UN and donor demands, as well as tensions within the UN on whether a Gender Affairs Unit was required and its subsequent marginalisation within the mission, undermining both the operation of gender policy within the mission and the mission’s ability to engage existing women’s organisations as partners. The discussion above on the unit acting as a ‘bridge’, as well as statements on women’s marginalisation from peace operations, demonstrates how East Timorese women’s activists and organisations were, indeed, fighting a ‘double battle’ with both the UN and East Timorese political elite. In addition, the Gender Affairs Unit itself also fed into processes of NGO-isation, centralisation, and deploticisation, working most closely with Rede Feto. Indeed, the unit reportedly edited the East Timorese women’s Platform for Action in order to make the language ‘usable’ and more effective – and there were some discrepancies between the original and the “operational” document (Whitworth 2004, 132, 138). The operational document was enshrined as UNTAET policy (Interview 29a). At the close of UNTAET, the Governance and Public Administration pillar was transformed into the first independent government and the Gender Affairs Unit was turned into the Office for the Promotion of Equality (OPE), which was placed in the Prime Minister’s Office. The Gender Affairs Unit had aided in setting a precedent for the shift into the OPE and members of the unit lobbied vocally to ensure such an office was established in the first independent government, although arguably the East Timorese government’s commitment to this was already set in the CNRT Resolution adopted in 2000. In 2007, the OPE was dissolved and SEPI was established in its place, which has since become the Secretary of State for the Support and Socio-Economic Promotion of Women (SEM).

48  Women resisting, women organising Despite the ongoing support for military strength, the operation established at independence in 2002 – the UN Mission of Support for East Timor (UNMISET) – contained a much smaller gender unit. It had only one international staff adviser, who mostly supported the newly created OPE, coordinated an inter-agency collaboration on gender, and promoted an understanding of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (Whittington 2002, 11–12). Rather than a well-staffed gender unit, UNMISET mandated gender focal points within different units of the mission (UNSC 2002). However, the mission placed less importance on gender, with many UN advisers reported as being less “gender aware” than during UNTAET and even “questioning the earlier gender-specific work of UNTAET” (Olsson 2009, 82). A review from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) confirms a lackadaisical approach to gender programming: it found that, from June 2004, there was a six-month period where there was no gender adviser, which “was detrimental for the gender mainstreaming work” of UNMISET (Ospina 2006, 11). Under UNMISET, an inter-agency UN Consultative Group on Gender was established in 2002, which brought together representatives from UNMISET’s Human Rights Office, Legal Office, Public Information Office, UNPOL, and a number of UN agencies and the World Bank (Whittington 2002, 12). The aims of the Consultative Group on Gender were to ensure that gender was mainstreamed throughout the UN’s activities in Timor-Leste, in the peace operations and in UN agencies, and to ensure this work was continued at the close of formal peacekeeping operations (Whittington 2002, 12; Ospina 2006, 33). The single UNMISET gender adviser was understandably hard pressed to adequately address the various and complex issues raised by East Timorese women’s organisations. In 2005, UNMISET’s SRSG requested the gender adviser prioritise transferring gender mainstreaming work from the mission to the UN agencies in country as UNMISET began to wind down (Ospina 2006, 33). As the end of UNMISET would be the end of formal peacekeeping, it was UN agencies that would take control of gender mainstreaming work. The incoming operation – the UN Office in Timor-Leste (UNOTIL) – was a small political mission, headed by the Department of Political Affairs, and thus did not require a gender unit. Resolution 1325 demands that gender be incorporated into peace and security work, defined as missions that are mandated under DPKO authority. As a political mission, mandated under the Department of Political Affairs, UNOTIL was deemed as not requiring a gender unit (Olsson 2009, 83). Following the significant withdrawal of support during UNMISET, this exclusion in UNOTIL resulted in the near total collapse of the East Timorese formal contemporary women’s movement, which was by this time almost entirely represented by Dili-based NGOs (Olsson 2009, 82). One participant explained that the funding and training provided from 1999 to 2004 had solidified these organisations as the main interlocutors between the women’s movement and the UN in

Women resisting, women organising  49 post-occupation Timor-Leste, but that they were dependent on ongoing material support from the missions for survival (Interview 24). Neither UNMISET nor UNOTIL gave significant support to East Timorese women’s organisations to sustain gains made during UNTAET (Olsson 2009, 82). As the focus shifted internally during UNMISET, to the mission structures and personnel behaviour, there was limited support given to either the OPE or to women’s organisations directly from the gender unit (Ospina 2006, 11). An UNMISET report from 2005 states that while the gender unit would “continue to monitor the progress on the promotion of a culture of equality in the country” the primary concerns lay with transferring knowledge and skills to ensure gender mainstreaming was continued within state structures once the DPKO mission came to an end (UNMISET Gender Affairs Office 2005). From this assessment, it is evident that as funds and interest waned with the winding down of each mission, gender work became more internally focused at the cost of dialogue with East Timorese women’s organisations. The beginning of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), established in 2006 to respond to the security crisis, saw a reinvigorated focus on gender programming, this time with especial focus on sexual and gender-based violence. This reinvigoration has been described as a “turning point” (Smith 2018). However, there remained issues of women’s organisations feeling marginalised from the mission, particularly in relation to program development and support. The director of one women’s NGO explained her sentiments regarding UNMIT’s Gender Unit: We had a big trouble, or a kind of miscommunication. When we prepare for the [2012] general election, the [UNMIT Gender Unit] invited all the members of Rede Feto to a meeting, and every member came with their own program and activities that we have conducted; this is a road map. And then for the conclusion of the meeting, we hoped that it would be some [Rede Feto] members who would implement these programs, but nothing happened. This is a big frustration…every member, we presented all these things [to UNMIT] and after they collected all this information, they grouped [the information] and put it in one road map and then [there was] no conclusion for us [that is, no programs were given to the national NGOs to implement]. Because we hoped that we are the ones who will implement [these programs]…But they hired a national consultant…This is a conflict of interest I think. When they got all this information they thought this is their thoughts, when they accumulate this information all the programs that we give to them, and then they ignore us, we are as konvidadu [guests]. (Interview 26) This specific event was additionally confirmed by the former head of a different women’s NGO (Interview 18). This issue is emblematic of concerns

50  Women resisting, women organising that were raised throughout each successive mission in Timor-Leste. It directly reflects similar sentiments expressed regarding UNTAET by national participants. Those who worked in NGOs at the end of the occupation period found themselves a significant focus of the incoming UN mission and donors, although they explained that they rarely felt as equal partners: We had all sorts of UN, every 3 months, people from same projects, same organisation…It was a huge turnover, they stole so much of our time, just to provide the same information we had given to someone else 3 months before…So I said ‘excuse me, we were just talking to someone [else]’ and they say ‘oh no, no, they’re gone’…And that was really bad because you have a turnover of personnel in a country completely destroyed…I don’t know what they did with the files because they kept coming to ask the same issues, asking the same questions, taking a huge amount of time and they just wrote reports. A lot of reports that they wouldn’t even recognise us as the source. (Interview 21) Thus, even where engagement (or ‘consultation’) with the peace operation might ostensibly occur, actual knowledge exchange or opportunity remained limited. The same participant continued, reflecting on the 2001–2002 period and the strain put on organisations to provide knowledge to the UN mission, often without financial support: I said well sorry, I’m sick and tired of people coming and wasting my time, and still want their reports. My God, let them go to the villages and do it. Get a truck, get a car and go to where we go and talk to the people and write your report but don’t come and get our reports that donors have paid for and you [UNTAET] just get them for nothing… ah we are untouchables you know, the UN, no, no we don’t give you money we just give you things…Then as time goes by they realise that you won’t do the certain things and they try to somehow persuade you to do a certain project that they need, but somehow they don’t pay a salary. At the end we became very clever and just said no. There was no point. Why discuss? [They say] we can’t give you money, ah fine but you give to companies to bring whatever…But for us, to do a proposal, to do a project that you consider that’s valuable for you or whoever? I don’t know. These kind of policies or strategies they had I really despised, I just thought it was such a discriminatory system, it was very unfair…I could say more about that but I don’t want to be so strong about it. (Interview 21) Therefore, although activism and advocacy for long-held gender equality issues continued, there was a ‘writing out’ of some women’s work from the narrative of peace- and state-building – and of their role in the

Women resisting, women organising  51 resistance – further compounding the issue of NGO-isation. This sidelining is reflected in institutional documents. Despite the work of women’s organisations in lobbying both the UN and the East Timorese national government, a DPKO review of UNTAET failed to acknowledge the role played by East Timorese women’s organisations or the prior existence of women’s collective activism in Timor-Leste: The gender unit of UNTAET [was] the first unit of its kind to be established in a peace-keeping mission. It was instrumental in mainstreaming gender in all functional areas of the mission’s work and in supporting the creation of a national women’s movement. (DPKO 2005, 35) This statement disregards the role of East Timorese women in terms of how UNTAET evolved its gender mainstreaming activities, belies the tensions that existed between East Timorese women’s activists, the gender unit and the broader peace operation and also attributes the UN with the creation of the women’s movement in Timor-Leste, which is demonstrably untrue. Moreover, not all areas of women’s activism successfully gained traction within peace operations, such as their complaints of peacekeeper harassment (see Joshi 2005), which are examined in Chapter 4. In her own case study, Emily Roynestad makes similar observations, noting that while the UN made helpful contributions, “the process [of implementing gender norms] was nonetheless driven by East Timorese women themselves, without whose determination and persistence, progress would have been less far-reaching” (2003, 2). Roynestad argues that recognising this role and facilitating it further is essential, not only because empowerment cannot happen ‘by proxy’ but also because the UN cannot always be trusted to maintain its own commitments to incorporate a gender perspective (2003). This chapter has centralised the role of East Timorese organisations, collectives and individuals in the development of gender programming in successive peace operations in Timor-Leste and historicised this action in the context of resistance to colonialism and military occupation. During the occupation period, the resistance of East Timorese women’s organisations was anti-militarist and sought emancipation of women, collectively, from the forces of imperialism and militarised occupation, as well as national liberation. None of these aims could be achieved independent from the others. From 1999, however, the form and function of peace operations circumscribed politicised feminist activism, and ‘gender’ and ‘women’ have gained visibility only in ways that perpetuate globalising patriarchal neo-liberalism and uneven capital accumulation, which will be dealt with in the chapters that follow, which pay focused attention to two key pillars of Women, Peace and Security: women’s participation and protection. In this chapter, I have remained attentive to the role played by national women’s resistance organisations and some (elite) individuals in shaping

52  Women resisting, women organising the priorities of the peace operation agendas. Although one can argue that the role may be structured in accordance with UN expectations and frameworks, it is important to establish this record in order to, first, not overlook the agency of East Timorese actors, and second, not reproduce hierarchical notions of international–local interactions in which only the ‘local’ is impacted by the ‘international’. In addition, the resistance era heritage remains salient in post-occupation Timor-Leste, both broadly and specifically for the women’s movement, and the chapter demonstrates the continuity of women’s activism in Timor-Leste, challenging a perception that its roots are tied to the commencement of peace operations.

Notes 1 Although barlake is commonly translated to mean dowry or bride price, Sara Niner has pointed out that this is a mistaken translation: “The term ‘dowry’ refers to an endowment by the bride’s family, transferred with her in marriage, representing her natal inheritance in patriarchal societies which have no tradition of independent inheritance for women… Bride-price… is a gift of payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s family, understood as compensation for the loss to the bride’s kin group of her labour and fertility…” (Niner 2012, 141). Barlake on the other hand represents reciprocal exchange: “…you give a present, you receive a present more or less the same value… But your presents are of a different kind then the present you receive, for example, I give you live things, you give me dead things. If you give me tais [cloth], gold, money, I give you pigs, cows, this is life” (Interview 22). For a more in-depth account of barlake and its centrality in indigenous marriage practices, see Niner (2012) and Hicks (2012). 2 Fretilin leader and Prime Minister of independent Timor-Leste from 28 November 1975–7 December 1975, killed in December 1978. 3 There are some accounts of women taking up arms in the resistance, such as reports of a brigade of women recruited in Bobonaro in 1975, although these accounts are often disputed (da Silva 2012, 160; Loney 2012). These reports are more limited when compared to those of women taking on domestic tasks, owing to a lack of documentary material as well as patriarchal perceptions of women and their contributions to armed resistance (Loney 2012). 4 See Loney for a more detailed analysis of the operation of Dharma Wanita in Timor-Leste (2018). 5 Indeed, on this last point, this significantly hampered efforts at transitional justice (Harris-Rimmer 2010). 6 For more on this point, see also Chopra (2002), Federer (2005), Bowles and Chopra (2008). 7 See also Belloni (2008). 8 This is a reference to the World Bank–UNTAET Community Empowerment Project, discussed in the following chapter.

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Women resisting, women organising  53 Alves, Domingas Micato Fernandes, Laura Abrantes & Filomena Reis. 2005. Written with blood. Dili: Office for the Promotion of Equality, Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. Autesserre, Séverine. 2014. Peaceland: conflict resolution and the everyday politics of international intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beauvais, Joel. 2001. “Benevolent despotism: a critique of UN state-building in East Timor.” New York University Journal of International Law & Politics 33: 1101–1178. Belloni, Roberto. 2008. “Civil society in war-to-democracy transitions.” In From war to democracy: dilemmas of peacebuilding, edited by Anna Jarstad & Timothy Sisk, 182–210 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonaparte, Rosa. 1976. “Women in East Timor: statement by the popular organisation of Timorese women.” Direct Action 4 March: 7. Bowles, Edith & Tanja Chopra. 2008. “East Timor: statebuilding revisited.” In Building states to build peace, edited by Charles Call & Vanessa Wyeth, 271–302. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Braithwaite, John, Hilary Charlesworth & Adérito Soares. 2012. Networked governance of freedom and tyranny. Canberra: ANU E-Press. Candio, Patrick & Roland Bleiker. 2001. “Peacebuilding in East Timor.” The Pacific Review 14(1): 63–84. Carnahan, Michael, Scott Gilmore & Monika Rahman. 2005. Economic impact of peacekeeping: interim report. Phase I. New York: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. CAVR. 2005. Chega! The report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste (CAVR). Dili: Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. Charlesworth, Hilary & Mary Wood. 2002. “Women and human rights in the rebuilding of East Timor.” Nordic Journal of International Law 71: 325–348. Chopra, Jarat. 2002. “Building state failure in East Timor.” Development and Change 33(5): 979–1000. Corcoran-Nantes, Yvonne. 2009. “The politics of culture and the culture of ­politics a case study of gender and politics in Lospalos, Timor-Leste.” Conflict, Security and Development 9(2): 165–187. Cristalis, Irena & Catherine Scott. 2005. Independent women: the story of women’s activism in East Timor. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations. da Silva, Antero Benedito. 2012. “FRETILIN popular education 1973–1978 and its relevance to Timor-Leste today.” PhD diss., University of New England. https://e-publications.une.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/une:11604 de Fatima, Maria. 2002. “Mobilising women for the sustainable rebuilding of East Timor.” Paper presented at sustaining our communities conference, Adelaide, Adelaide City Council, 3–6 March. www.regional.org.au/au/soc/2002/2/defatima.htm Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). 2005. Gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping operations: progress report. New York: UNDPKO. El-Kassem, Nadeen. 2008. “The pitfalls of a ‘democracy promotion’ project for women of Iraq.” International Journal of Lifelong Education 27(2): 129–151. Federer, Juan. 2005. The UN in East Timor: building Timor-Leste, a fragile state. Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press. Harris-Rimmer, Susan. 2010. Gender and transitional justice: the women of East ­Timor. Abingdon: Routledge.

54  Women resisting, women organising Hicks, David. 2012. “Compatibility, resilience and adaptation: the barlake of ­Timor-Leste.” Local, Global: Identity, Security, Community 11: 124–137. Hill, Helen. 2012. “Gender issues in Timor-Leste and the Pacific Islands: ‘practical needs’ and ‘strategic interests’ revisited.” In New research on Timor-Leste: proceedings of the Communicating new research on Timor-Leste conference, Dili 30 June -1 July 2011, edited by Michael Leach, Nuno Canas Mendes, Antero B. da Silva, Bob Boughton & Alarico da Costa Ximenes, 215–223. Melbourne: Swinburne University Press. Hughes, Caroline. 2009a. “‘We just take what they offer’: community empowerment in post-war Timor-Leste.” In New perspectives on liberal peacebuilding, edited by Edward Newman, Roland Paris & Oliver Richmond, 218–242. New York: United Nations University Press. Hughes, Caroline. 2009b. Dependent communities: aid and politics in Cambodia and East Timor. New York: Cornell University Press. Jad, Islah. 2004. “The NGO-isation of Arab women’s movements.” IDS Bulletin 35(4): 34–42. Jennings, Kathleen & Morten Bøås. 2015. “Transactions and interactions: everyday life in the peacekeeping economy.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9(3): 281–295. Joshi, Vijaya. 2005. “Creating and limiting opportunities: women’s organising and the UN in East Timor.” Challenges and possibilities: international organisations and women in Timor-Leste, 9–11 September, 29–36. Melbourne: Globalism Institute, RMIT University. Kammen, Douglas. 2012. “Queens of Timor.” Archipel 84: 149–173. Lemay-Hebert, Nicolas. 2011. “The ‘empty-shell’ approach: the setup process of international administrations in Timor-Leste and Kosovo, its consequences and lessons.” International Studies Perspective 12(2): 190–211. Lighur, Lafai. 1995. “A message to the Beijing Conference from the East Timorese women: from Lafai Lighur of the clandestine resistance.” National Council of Maubere Resistance, 6 September. www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54b/053.html Loney, Hannah. 2012. “Women’s activism in Timor-Leste: a case study on fighting women.” In New research on Timor-Leste: proceedings of the Communicating new research on Timor-Leste conference, edited by Michael Leach, Nuno Canas Mendes, Antero B. da Silva, Bob Boughton & Alarico da Costa Ximenes, 265– 269. Melbourne: Swinburne University Press. Loney, Hannah. 2016. “The emergence of an East Timorese women’s movement.” In Timor-Leste: the local, the regional, the global, edited by Sarah Smith, Nuno Canas Mendes, Antero B. da Silva, Alarico da Costa Ximenes, Clinton Fernandes & Michael Leach, 20–24. Melbourne: Swinburne University Press. Loney, Hannah. 2018. In women’s words: violence and everyday life during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press. Mac Ginty, Roger. 2008. “Indigenous peace-making versus the liberal peace.” Cooperation and Conflict 43(2): 139–163. Maley, William. 2000. “The UN and East Timor.” Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change 12(1): 63–76. Millet Fabien Curto & Radhika Rathinasabapathy. 2001. “East Timor: the building of a nation. An interview with Sergio Vieira de Mello.” Europa Magazine, November, www.usp.br/svm/textos/t-timor-05.php Moxham, Ben & Jovana Carapic. 2013. “Unravelling Dili: the crisis and state in Timor-Leste.” Urban Studies 50(15): 3116–3133.

Women resisting, women organising  55 Nazneen, Sohela & Maheen Sultan. 2009. “Struggling for survival and autonomy: impact of NGO-ization on women’s organizations in Bangladesh.” Development 52(2): 193–199. Niner, Sara. 2009. Xanana: leader of the struggle for independent Timor-Leste. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty. Ltd. Niner, Sara. 2011. “Hakat klot, narrow steps: negotiating gender in post-conflict ­Timor-Leste.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(3): 413–435. Niner, Sara. 2012. “Barlake: an exploration of marriage practices and issues of women’s status in Timor-Leste.” Local, Global: Identity, Security, Community 11: 138–154. Niner, Sara. 2013. “Between earth and heaven: the politics of gender.” In The politics of Timor-Leste: democratic consolidation after intervention, edited by Michael Leach & Damien Kingsbury, 239–258. New York: Cornell University Press. Olsson, Louise. 2009. Gender equality and United Nations peace operations in ­Timor-Leste. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. OMT. 1998. Paper presented by OMT representative at the National Conference of Fretilin, Sydney, Australia, 14–20 August. http://etan.org/et/1998/september/ sep15-21/16fretil.htm OPMT. 1975. “OPMT. Texto alusivo à proclamaçãe da independência de Angola.” O Jornal do Povo Mau Bere, 15 November, p. 6. Ospina, Sofi. 2006. A review and evaluation of gender-related activities of UN peacekeeping operations and their impact on gender relations in Timor-Leste. New York: DPKO. Paris, Roland. 2002. “International peacebuilding and the ‘mission civilisatrice’.” Review of International Studies 28(4): 637–656. Paris, Roland. 2003. “Peacekeeping and the constraints of global culture.” European Journal of International Relations 9(3): 441–473. Pettman, Jan Jindy. 1996. Worlding women: a feminist international politics. London: Routledge. Pinto, Constâncio & Matthew Jardine. 1997. East Timor’s unfinished struggle: inside the East Timorese resistance. A testimony. Boston: South End Press. Pires, Milena. 2004. “Enhancing women’s participation in electoral processes in post conflict countries: experiences from East Timor.” United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI) Expert group meeting on ‘Enhancing women’s participation in electoral processes in post-conflict countries’, 19–22 January, Glen Cove, New York. Power, Samantha. 2008. Chasing the flame: one man’s fight to save the world. New York: Penguin Books. Rede Feto. 2000. “Statement made by Rede Feto Timor Lorosa’e.” United Nations Security Council special session: the role of women in maintaining international peace and security, 24 October, Dili. Roynestad, Emily. 2003. “Are women included or excluded in post-conflict reconstruction? A case study from Timor-Leste.” Division for the Advancement of women (DAW) expert group meeting on peace agreements as a means of promoting gender equality and ensuring participation of women, Ottawa, Canada, United Nations. Schmaedick, Agatha. 2001. “Ajiza Magno discusses the next phase of struggle.” The East Timor Estafeta: voice of the East Timor Action Network 7(1): http://etan.org/ estafeta/01/winter/3tour.htm Sequeira, Bebe & Laura Abrantes. 2012. Secrecy: the key to independence. Dili: Asia Pacific Support Collective Timor-Leste.

56  Women resisting, women organising Shepherd, Laura J. 2017. Gender, UN peacebuilding and the politics of space: locating legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Sarah. 2015. “‘When gender started’: the United Nations in post-occupation Timor-Leste.” Global Change, Peace & Security 27(1): 55–67. Smith, Sarah. 2018. “Gendered identities in peacebuilding: an analysis of post-2006 Timor-Leste.” In The politics of identity: place, space and discourse, edited by Christine Agius & Dean Keep, 53–70. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, Sarah & Hannah Loney. 2016. “A new chapter for East Timorese women: seeking independence and gender equality in international networks and institutions.” Paper presented at ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, 22 March. http://bellschool.anu.edu.au/news-events/podcasts/audio/4171/ new-chapter-east-timorese-women-seeking-independence-and-gender Traub, James. 2000. “Inventing East Timor.” Foreign Affairs 79(4): 74–89. UNFPA. 2005. Gender-based violence in Timor-Leste: a case study. New York: United Nations. UNMISET Gender Affairs Office. 2005. Gender briefing kit: who’s who on gender mainstreaming within the United Nations country team in Timor-Leste, Dili: UNMISET. www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/docs/gender_briefing_kit_un_system_in_ timorleste_060420040112.pdf UN Security Council (UNSC). 2002. “Resolution 1410, 17 May.” https://­documentsdds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/387/02/PDF/N0238702.pdf?OpenElement Whittington, Sherrill. 2002. “Peace-keeping operations and gender equality in post-conflict reconstruction.” EU-LAC conference on the role of women in peace-keeping operations, Chile, 4–5 November. Whittington, Sherrill. 2003. “Gender and peacekeeping: the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor.” Signs 28(4): 1283–1288. Whitworth, Sandra. 2004. Men, militarism and UN peacekeeping. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Westendorf, Jasmine. 2015. Why peace processes fail: negotiating insecurity after civil war. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

3 Participating women

This chapter examines the notion of empowerment, or more precisely, women’s participation, as a central aspect of incorporating ‘gender’ into peace operation practice. The chapter examines efforts to empower women in terms of their participation in political decision-making and in the security sector. Taking these two programming narratives and processes together provides insight into how participation can function to exclude, as well as include, some individuals as well as draw boundaries around appropriate liberal ideals of what ‘women’s participation’ should look like. Efforts to empower women, as a homogenised category, through the participation of some individual women in the structures and aims of peace operations provides only shallow and limited outcomes. To borrow from Carol Cohn’s musings on resolution 1325, participation in the political and security programs of peace operations “does not begin to get at the pernicious, pervasive complexities of the gender regimes that undergird not only individual wars themselves, but the entire war system” (2008, 201). To this I would add that narratives of participation serve to produce the social category of (the ideal, liberal, yet subordinated) woman while obscuring the role of institutions in this reproduction. Whereas protection from violence came to be emphasised more heavily in later missions in Timor-Leste – to be discussed in the next chapter – the political and security sector participation of women was a stated goal from the outset for the Gender Affairs Unit of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and remained central to the gender mainstreaming work of later missions. It is important to consider the notion of women’s empowerment alongside the much more limited programming that focuses on ‘participation’. Participation denotes far less engagement with the structures that subordinate, as participation in these structures is positioned as both the ends and means of improving women’s status in society. Empowerment on the other hand, which has largely been dropped in favour of women’s participation in peace and security activities, requires an assessment of the structures that bind and inhibit individual and collective emancipation. As discussed in the previous chapter, the presence of heavily centralised peace operations undermines collective feminist political activism through the preferences

58  Participating women of working with depoliticised entities. This means that discourses on women’s participation occur simultaneously as feminist politicised activism is undermined. The specific vision of a depoliticised civil society paired with, but subordinated to, the national political arena posited by liberal peace ideations is inherently gendered, as the analysis that follows demonstrates. This chapter proceeds in three parts. The following section provides a critical review of the mandate for women’s participation in peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The second section then moves to examine how political participation was defined and performed in the Timor-Leste case. This analysis suggests significant policing of what participation is and whom it is for and, in turn, a gendering of liberal polity and statehood. The argument here takes into consideration participation in the national political realm and in district-level politics as indicated through the Community Empowerment Project headed by UNTAET and the World Bank in the early years post-­ occupation. The final section examines women’s participation in the security sector, arguing a gendering process in how this was understood and implemented. Therefore, in asking who benefits from participation, and drawing on post-colonial literature, the chapter argues that participation speaks more to constituting the identity of interveners, and that participation is circumscribed through the gendered and gendering logics of militarised intervention. Women’s political and security sector participation conforms to liberal notions of statehood, utilising women to construct a vision of the state that can, at times, undermine women’s empowerment and security.

Participation and empowerment in post-conflict spaces The empowerment of women underlies all international conventions aimed at reducing gender discrimination and improving equality between men and women. Empowerment is conceptualised in broad terms that speak to both physical and structural violence as well as discrimination. The Beijing Platform for Action, described in its mission statement as an agenda for women’s empowerment, commits to The empowerment and advancement of women, including the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, thus contributing to the moral, ethical, spiritual and intellectual needs of women and men, individually or in community with others and thereby guaranteeing them the possibility of realising their full potential in society and shaping their lives in accordance with their own aspirations. (UN 1995, para 12) The Beijing Platform for Action also cites the need to combat “inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision making at all levels” as an essential dimension of women’s empowerment (UN 1995, para 44), thus linking women’s participation in decision-making to their empowerment.

Participating women  59 It is important to note that there are of course contested notions of empowerment, not least because the word has been appropriated by programs and processes that reinforce, yet obscure, capitalist neo-liberal power structures and thus undermine the equality and empowerment of a number of groups and individuals (Koffman & Gill 2013). It is in the development space that ‘empowerment’ as a concept has been the subject of significant debate and critique because it reflects Western liberal notions of agency, ones that encourage individualism and the individual as the “locus of responsibility” (Madhok & Rai 2012, 646; Hickel 2014). Focusing on the individual removes responsibility from political and economic structures that can and do constrain individual prospects of empowerment, choice and participation (Hickel 2014). Moreover, framing ‘empowerment’ as something that can be instituted through intervention from exogenous actors belies the fact that it operates within global power structures that undermine equality and disempower to begin with. Empowerment as a means to ‘save’ poor women, alleviate poverty and improve economic outcomes more generally is a strong narrative in development and reconstruction. For example, in 2005, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that “there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women” (UN News 2005). More recently, Sustainable Development Goal number five – “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” – is justified by the claim that providing women and girls with equal “representation in political and economic decision making processes will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large”.1 The process of empowerment as participation, though, is better read as the incorporation of women into globalising neo-liberal structures – through insecure work for example – which perpetuates uneven capital accumulation, and is productive of gendered, and raced, inequalities to begin with (True 2012, 95–101; Shain 2013; Hickel 2014). In post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery, empowerment comes to rest on increasing the representation of women, both within peace operations and in terms of political and electoral representation in host states. Women’s participation is one of the core pillars within resolution 1325, which urges member states to “ensure increased representation of women at all decision making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management and resolution of conflict”; the resolution also asks the UN to expand the role of women in field-based operations – that is, within peace operations (UNSC 2000, 2). Similarly, the Namibia Plan of Action for mainstreaming gender in peace operations called for equal access and participation by women and men in peace agreements and ceasefires, in UN leadership, and as civilian and military personnel (UNGA & UNSC 2000). The most recent Women, Peace and Security resolution, resolution 2242, reiterated the call for increased representation and further encouraged increased aid spending on women’s empowerment projects (UNSC 2015, 4).

60  Participating women The inclusion of women in decision-making has been anchored to liberal democratic processes, an essential element of democracy. The Beijing Platform for Action states women’s inclusion as necessary “in order to strengthen democracy and promote its proper functioning” (UN 1995, para 181). Empowering women through their participation is therefore suggested as both a means and an end in instituting liberal democratic principles as part of post-conflict reconstruction, given the place of democratisation as a cornerstone of the liberal peace paradigm. Resolution 1325 commits to women’s participation in UN peace operations, in both civilian and military roles, not just as an innate right, but as a necessity for international peace and security; that is, there is no (liberal democratic) peace without the proper representation of women. Improving the representation of women in peace operations is framed as having a number of benefits beyond equal access to opportunities for women and men, such as improving the efficacy of peace operations, reducing exploitative behaviour of (male) peacekeepers, and also to ‘role model’ equality to host populations. A Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) policy directive on gender mainstreaming outlines a core principle of such work as ‘standard-setting’: “the staffing profile of DPKO and [UN] peacekeeping missions role model our institutional commitments to gender balance and equal participation of women in decision making” (DPKO 2006, 3). Similarly, a 2010 DPKO report also noted the broader standard-setting function of the UN in empowering women in host states via women’s representation as civilian and military personnel in peace operations: “female peacekeepers act as role models in the local environment, inspiring women and girls in the often male-dominated societies to push for their own rights” (Gender Advisory Team 2010, 8). Improving the representation of women in peace operations, such as in police and military contingents, is therefore argued to impact positively the empowerment of women in the places these missions deploy; contingents within peace operations act as representations of liberal democratic principles which can ‘inspire’ changes at the ‘local’ level. In this representation of how policy may function as a transferal and internalisation of values from peace operations to the ‘local’, it is possible to identify a version of mimicry, a concept that Homi K. Bhabha described as “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (1994, 85). Bhabha views mimicry as an extension of the colonial desire for “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (1994, 86, emphasis original). In the previously quoted report, women’s participation in peace operations is framed as, ideally, leading to mimicry; that is, it demonstrates the desire for groups and individuals in locations where peace operations are deployed to outwardly perform or replicate the ideals that are assumed to be represented through and in peace operations. This falsely assumes a homogenous, and universally valid, culture/representation emanating from peace operations, and says nothing of the problematic ‘performances’ or representations that

Participating women  61 2

occur within missions , such as cases of abuse, harassment and violence, dealt with in more detail in the following chapter. Mimicry is addressed again in Chapter 6, but here I raise this critique to highlight the misplaced assumption that peace operations do or can perform the ideations they are argued to embody. For instance, the rate of progress in integrating women into the UN’s workforce, especially as police and military personnel, has been described as “glacial” (Kirby & Shepherd 2016, 374–375). Interventions reproduce an ontology and logic that sees conflict and underdevelopment as attached to particular national or ‘local’ spaces, rather than a product of global interactions. Anne Orford has argued that “the privileging of the international level of governance as the bearer of human rights and democracy does not stand up to scrutiny”, wherein she examines economic liberalisation under the IMF and World Bank as causal in the Yugoslav conflicts (1997, 465). Similar arguments can be made here, by putting UN (and World Bank) interventions – in politics as well as in security – in Timor-Leste under scrutiny, with specific focus on them as ‘bearers’ of women’s rights via participation of women. This discussion is not to diminish the need for a diversity of individuals to have access to decision-making. Political and economic decision-making has long been dominated by the figure of a white heterosexual male. Rather, this discussion begins to unpack the limitations in the essentialising and depoliticised discourse of ‘adding women’. As feminist scholars have argued, not all ‘women’ – issues of assuming ‘women’ as a singular group aside – will benefit equally from measures that focus solely on participation. Krook and True have argued that as international norms on gender mainstreaming and gender balance have spread, their implementation has more readily empowered “technocrats” rather than the grassroots women envisioned in the Beijing Platform for Action, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and in resolution 1325 (2012, 121). They highlight a fundamental issue as being a disjuncture between women’s formal representation in the public arena and women’s substantive equality elsewhere, as well as the fact that the links between gender mainstreaming and women’s participation on the one hand, and the actual substantive empowerment of women on the other are ambiguous. In feminist legal scholarship, the limitations of liberal notions of equality and the gap between formal and substantive equality have been equally noted, where the liberal focus on formal equality has not produced an egalitarian society that offers gendered security (MacKinnon 1989, 157–170; Thornton 1990, 245): “Liberalism applied to women has supported state intervention on behalf of women as abstract persons with abstract rights, without scrutinizing the content and limitations of these notions in terms of gender” (MacKinnon 1989, 160). In Timor-Leste, women’s representation in parliament has been consistently achieved since elections in 2000, and this has been pointed to as a success of peace operations (Ospina 2006a, 35) and as a measure of women’s

62  Participating women equality, although it is often mediated with reference to poor gender and development indices that highlight a significant gap between formal and substantive equality (see for instance Niner 2016, 21). Yet it is also important to consider the notion of participation within the confines and context of militarised and centralised peace operations. UNTAET, and the state it sought to reconstruct, centralised authority in the hands of the Special Representative to the Secretary-General (SRSG), consulted only with a sect of political elite, and was ‘wary’ of devolving power outside of these structures. The participation of some women in these structures, in only policed and designated ways, does not change the masculine institution of either peace operations or the state, nor indeed the issues raised in the previous chapter, namely the relegation of women’s activism and gender issues to a feminised, depoliticised, subordinate ‘civil society’. Having women participate as political and security actors may legitimise the process and meet liberal demands of equity in representation, but the gendered and gendering processes of peacebuilding remain; indeed, women’s representation may instead serve as a ‘decoy’ (Eisenstein 2007). In Timor-Leste there was a politics of representation that meant women’s participation was policed and governed in particular ways, often ambivalently. The guiding principles seem not to be women’s empowered participation or the transformation of gendered structures, but rather the ideals of a global political culture that demands at least the performance of equity as an enduring element of liberal peace- and state-building.

Participating where? The participation of women in political decision-making was a focus of gender policy during the UN’s transitional administration. In its time, UNTAET sustained significant criticism for its lack of consultation and participation of East Timorese people outside elite circles, and the discussion in this section is positioned within this broader context. The mission was seen neither to consult widely nor sufficiently hire East Timorese in civil service positions, which has been suggested by some as a mechanism to safeguard UNTAET’s own centralised authority (Chopra 2000; Strating 2015, 85–89), and this issue contributed to demands for the mission’s departure. UNTAET responded to the pressure to increase national participation with a process of ‘Timorisation’, which included establishing a National Consultative Council (hereafter ‘Consultative Council’) as “the primary mechanism through which East Timorese representatives [could] participate in the decision-making process during the transitional period” (­U NTAET 2000b, 5). By June 2000, public information releases from UNTAET were claiming this as part of a broader process of “accelerated Timorisation” (UNTAET 2000c, 5).3 Outside of these mechanisms focused on the national political realm, the World Bank and UNTAET worked jointly to set up the Community Empowerment Project (CEP) at the village level.

Participating women  63 At this point then, it is possible to identify two locations or ‘levels’ at which UNTAET, and the World Bank with the CEP, was instituting political structures as part of constructing the new state: the national political realm and the ‘local’ or village level. Both of these were guarded closely, albeit in different ways. At the national level, the Consultative Council comprised seven members of the Conselho Nacional da Resistência Timorense (CNRT – National Council of Timorese Resistance), three from other national political parties, one representative of the Catholic Church, and four UNTAET representatives, including the transitional administrator Sergio de Mello, with the selection process undertaken by de Mello and CNRT members (Niner 2009, 215). Given that it was appointed and had limited actual representation of the broader populace, the Consultative Council and Sergio de Mello were challenged for excluding “representatives of women, youth groups [and] traditional leaders…In reaction, Timorese opposed such an unrepresentative body” (‘A popular challenge to UNTAET’s achievements’). It has been described as not only depriving “Timorese people of the chance to practice decision making during the transition, but created an atmosphere of mistrust and disempowerment” (Strating 2015, 87). As a result, UNTAET dissolved the Consultative Council, transforming it into the National Council, which had somewhat broader representation (see Strating 2015, 87). Whereas the Consultative Council did not have the power to approve UNTAET laws, the National Council worked as an independent legislature, established committees and could challenge and amend legislation proposed by UNTAET (Ospina 2006b, 64). There were 34 members of the National Council, nominated by leaders of CNRT and civil society organisations, and it included representatives from women’s organisations, youth organisations, political parties and Timor-Leste’s 13 districts. In establishing the National Council, Sergio de Mello made the decision that 30 per cent of the representatives would be women (Ospina 2006b, 65). The first East Timorese National Women’s Congress sought political engagement through the ‘Timorisation’ mechanisms set up by UNTAET; specifically, they requested “training in leadership and political participation [and] increased representation of women in the National Consultative Council created by UNTAET” (Whittington 2003, 1285). During UNTAET, there was significant debate on the political empowerment and representation of women, centred on whether a quota provision for equitable representation between men and women would be established as part of the new state formation. The First National Women’s Congress had requested a minimum of 30 per cent representation for women in all sectors of the transitional government. A quota system would have ensured seats for women in the Constituent Assembly, which was to prepare a Constitution for an independent Timor-Leste, and which would become the first National Parliament at independence in 2002. Examining the debate on ­ imor-Leste demonstrates how explicitly and closely ‘women’s quotas in T

64  Participating women participation’ is tied to the vision of ideal-type liberal democracies that are to be instituted by liberal peacebuilding processes, and the extent to which this rests upon and harnesses particular ideations of gendered relations. Although there are frequent claims that women must be empowered in their own right, it is impossible to separate participation in institutional accounts from the (re)creation of Western liberal polities (Al-Ali & Pratt 2009a, 8). In 2001, the National Council was to provide UNTAET with recommendations for the election of a Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly’s function was to prepare a Constitution for an independent democratic Timor-Leste and was to be elected according to UNTAET regulation (­UNTAET 2001). Not included in this regulation, which had been previously included with the establishment of the National Council, was a provision for a 30 per cent quota for women’s representation in the Constituent Assembly (Aucoin & Brandt 2010). The quota issue had proved to be a source of heated debate in the months prior. The Women’s Congress argued that for any ongoing gains to be made in terms of women’s political inclusion in Timor-Leste, both women’s representation and the foundations for a gender-sensitive government needed to be provided from the outset of the reconstruction phase. East Timorese women’s organisations, UNTAET’s gender unit and UNIFEM (now UN Women) all supported and advocated for the quota provision but faced significant challenges. This was perhaps best described by one former UN gender adviser: That was one of the objectives of the women’s platform that they would have a minimum of 33 per cent in any decision-making office of government…And the way they wanted that was by affirmative action measures, there would be quotas, there would actually be reserve seats for women. So that became a proverbial firestorm. (Interview 29a) The East Timorese Women’s Congress was stymied in its endeavour to achieve a national quota system, both from the national (male) political elite and UNTAET. The UN Department of Political Affairs in New York and UNTAET’s Political Affairs Office were opposed to and advocated strongly against a quota provision, using their relative strength and position to do so (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 80). The director of political affairs for UNTAET was also opposed to and actively lobbied against the quota provision (­Aucoin & Brandt 2010, 256). The Electoral Affairs Division in New York was firm in its opposition, threatening to withdraw the mission from Timor-Leste and not supervise the upcoming elections if the quota system went ahead (Interview 29a). A threat to withdraw UNTAET from Timor-Leste was a hefty bargaining chip used against the quota proposed by the women’s platform, ­ EDAW, a provision consistent with international principles set down in C which UNTAET was bound to (UNTAET 1999). In short, the two key UN officials tasked with monitoring elections in Timor-Leste – the head of

Participating women  65 Electoral Affairs in New York and the head of UNTAET’s Political Affairs Office – were opposed to quotas (see Hall & True 2009, 168–169). Ultimately, whether or not to formalise a quota provision was a decision to be made by the National Council, which, as discussed above, was made up of UNTAET staff and East Timorese alike, with power remaining centralised in Sergio de Mello’s hands as transitional administrator. Milena Pires argues that while East Timorese women’s attention was focused on lobbying internationally, such as to UN departments in New York, ­UNTAET personnel in Dili opposed to the quota provision were busy lobbying National Council members (2004). UNTAET officials opposed to a quota system were well placed to lobby for a decision by the National Council to be consistent with the wishes of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs in New York. UNTAET’s Political Affairs Office stated that establishing a quota system “would undermine the legitimacy of the electoral result”, would be a “violation of the principle of self-determination” and that “on the basis of international experience be unlikely to elect women of true political influence” (in Morrow & White 2002, 39). Advice given from the New York Department of Political Affairs to the Political Affairs Office in UNTAET stated that UNTAET has exclusive responsibility for holding free and fair elections in East Timor…while some countries do have quotas for women (and for other groups) other democratic countries vehemently oppose the practise. This would include some members of the Security Council… Electoral quotas for women (or any other group) do not constitute international best practice for elections. (in Pires 2004, 7) Instituting quota mechanisms as a means to effect gender equality is upheld in international platforms on women’s rights. Both CEDAW and the Beijing Platform for Action contain articles for affirmative action measures in increasing women’s representation in decision-making. CEDAW demands women’s equal right to hold public office and to participate in government. Article 4 of CEDAW pertains specifically to ‘special measures’ and states that “temporary special measures”, such as quotas, are acceptable to “accelerate de facto equality between women and men and shall not be considered discrimination.” The Beijing Platform for Action likewise calls for a 30 per cent quota to ensure women’s representation in UN decision-making. A 30 per cent target had initially been set by the Economic and Social Council to be achieved by 1995. The Beijing Platform for Action reiterated this target, as by 1995 it had not been achieved. The Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies (1985) and General Assembly Resolutions throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s also established targets of 30 and 35 per cent, within the secretariat and throughout all arms of the UN system. UNTAET, as a UN authorised body, had obligations to both CEDAW and the Beijing Platform

66  Participating women for Action. Although neither of these conventions was explicitly referenced in UNTAET’s establishing mandate (UNSC 1999), the first regulation of ­UNTAET stated that all persons undertaking public duties or holding public office in Timor-Leste should observe the standards held in CEDAW. Therefore, the advice given by the Department of Political Affairs to the Political Affairs Office in UNTAET is inconsistent with the principles enshrined within CEDAW. It also indicates how the presence of UNTAET in Timor-Leste shaped the meaning of women’s equality and participation – equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome (see Krook, Lovenduski & Squires 2009) – and how that equality was to be achieved. Article 4 of CEDAW states that the objective of affirmative action measures is for them to sit in place until equality of opportunity and treatment is achieved. Prior to that occurrence, inequality in opportunity – affirmative action ­measures – can facilitate, at the least, equality of outcome. The quota demand from the East Timorese First National Congress also reflected those made in other post-conflict contexts. For example, in Burundi women’s groups demanded 30 per cent parliamentary representation and successfully had this enshrined in the Arusha accords (Duncanson 2016, 83–84). Essentially, as UNTAET and the UN more generally lobbied against the quota provision to local elites, UNTAET was undermining existing international gender norms. This debate demonstrates how the liberal peace framework, propagated by UNTAET at the time, can disempower different collectives and individuals. The UN presence at the time, and one with such significant authority, led to the eventual failure of the quota provision and stymied the opportunity of women’s collectives to ensure political participation in a manner that reflected both their desires and international norms. At the same time though, activists within UNTAET’s Gender Affairs Unit and UN agencies were advocating in support of the quota provision in partnership with East Timorese women’s groups. By inhibiting the Women’s Congress quota demands – and with wellplaced individuals using their positions to do so – UNTAET was shaping definitions of equality generally and the path and nature of women’s participation specifically in Timor-Leste. UNTAET was defining a ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ way for women to legitimately participate in national political institutions. This observation reflects broader criticisms of the liberal peace project by those who argue that it seeks to create a particular mode of governance regardless of whether it is consistent with the desire of populations in post-conflict states or, indeed, in the stated interests of liberal norms of equality (Jabri 2013). The director of one national women’s NGO discussed her experience of UNTAET’s demands on how women should gain access to the national political sphere: I remember at the time…the women’s pressure group they [had] demands for women in political positions. And they strongly argued and

Participating women  67 [UNTAET] said no. Even in front of us they are arguing with us, they said “you have to compete [in the election without special measures]”. [We said] “Ok we can compete with you”…So, we have to compete, that’s the way…We had to demonstrate that we were capable…[We said] “if you want us to compete we can compete, why not? But you have to give us the opportunity”. This is the way that we fight to get these rights. (Interview 24)4 For the quota provision to be allowed, it would have to pass through the National Council, which was providing recommendations for the establishment of the Constituent Assembly. This is where it eventually failed, although with no small help from the Department of Political Affairs in New York and UNTAET’s Political Affairs Office in Dili. Despite the eventual failure of the quota demands, efforts were made by UNTAET’s gender unit and UNIFEM to support Rede Feto in their endeavour for representation in parliament: “the [East Timorese] women were outside demonstrating, and could they demonstrate! So [we asked] what can we give them, how do we placate this?” (Interview 29a). The result included training workshops with members of parliament from the Asia-Pacific region who shared their experiences and political strategies with the East Timorese participants (Brandt 2001, para 26) One outcome of the training workshops was the establishment of a Women’s Caucus, which provided support to women throughout the campaigning period and assistance to those who were elected to the Constituent Assembly (Brandt 2001, para 26). The Women’s Caucus continues to be a mechanism of cross-party support to women parliamentarians (Costa, Sawer & Sharp 2013) and continued to work with the gender units of subsequent missions. The gender unit in the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) worked with the parliamentary Women’s Caucus again in the lead-up to the 2007 elections and continued to work with both the Women’s Caucus and the Government of Timor-Leste to ensure women’s representation in parliament (Gender Advisory Team 2010). Despite the “proverbial firestorm” around quotas, women’s representation in parliament in Timor-Leste has remained consistently high. In the 2001 Constituent Assembly elections, women gained 27 per cent representation, one of the highest in the Asia-Pacific region (Ospina 2006a, 10). In the 2007 election, women’s representation rose to 27.7 per cent, and in 2012 it rose further to 30.1 per cent (EU EOM 2012, 22). Following the most recent elections in 2017, the Inter-Parliamentary Union reported 32.3 per cent representation; however, at the time of writing, the East Timorese parliament had been dissolved after election results failed to return any party to majority power (see Murdoch 2018). The high participation rate of women was bolstered by the adoption of a party list system in 2006, which stipulated that each party list must contain at least one woman per group of four candidates, amended in 2011 to one in every three, that is, a quota.5

68  Participating women Beyond signalling the depth of ideological gerrymandering in relation to ‘gender equality’ and women’s participation in post-conflict Timor-Leste, it is also worth examining the quota debate in the national space alongside the establishment of reserve seats for women at the village level. As noted above, the World Bank and UNTAET set out to restructure and democratise village-level politics, principally through the World Bank and Asia Development Bank jointly administered CEP, operational from 2000–2003. This was an attempt at decentralisation through the establishment of transparent, democratic and accountable local structures in rural areas and at promoting effective village and sub-district-level participation in development activities (UNTAET 2000a). During the transition period, both ­UNTAET and the returning East Timorese diaspora elite were concerned about the “kinds of leaders thrown up by war” and thus were reluctant to allow too much authority in village-level leaders (Hughes 2009, 225). For this reason, UNTAET thus initially stalled on implementation of the CEP (Chopra 2000; Strating 2015, 85–89). The CEP established village councils and sub-district councils to make decisions over development planning and funding – divorced from existing decision-making structures and excluding existing leaders – to work under UNTAET and UNTAET-appointed district administrators (Hohe 2004). UNTAET initially opposed the CEP, reportedly “fearing that UNTAET would not have control over the significant amount of funds, and that CEP would set up decision making bodies circumventing UNTAET’s governance structures” (La’o Hamutuk 2000; see also Chopra 2000). However, it eventually agreed to the establishment of the CEP. The councils established under the CEP were to have equal representation of men and women and were “envisaged by the World Bank as providing a useful model for democratic governance” in Timor-Leste, allowing for ownership over development processes and the transition to democratic statehood (Strating 2015, 89). CEP guidelines required women’s election to positions in village councils in order to meet the democratic laurels propagated by the UN and the World Bank (Cummins 2011). The paternalism evident in the CEP’s justifications and objectives, and UNTAET’s underlying concerns with maintaining its own authority, were by no means new to Timor-Leste, however. Indeed, the Indonesian occupation period had been framed under the rubric of ‘modernisation’, a framework that is also deeply rooted within development history (McEwan 2009). Before this, the intensity of Portuguese colonialism varied and very little control was exerted until consolidation in the early twentieth century (­Cummins 2014, 20). A loose indirect rule system operated until the nineteenth century, due, much like in other colonial sites, to a limited commitment of financial and military resources (Berry 1992, 328). As Portuguese reach into political and economic systems consolidated, different community groupings such as the suku were politically recognised for the first time as they better reflected Portuguese ideas of rulership; this “territorial definition and redefinition”

Participating women  69 have had lingering consequences on the composition and legitimacy of village politics (Cummins 2014, 23). In turn, under the consolidation of ­Indonesian occupation and control, political structures in Timor-­Leste were moulded to be consistent with other parts of Indonesia: “at the provincial and local levels, the Indonesians largely adopted the existing district and subdistrict boundaries, integrating them into Indonesian local government administrative divisions” (ibid, 29). These interventions into political structures did not necessarily radically transform those structures. Rather, ­Portuguese interventions are argued to have led to a solidifying of the “basic aspects of Timorese society” (McWilliam 2005, 27), and in turn, these same structures were the dominant frameworks and structures of resistance to Indonesian occupation, despite attempts at co-optation (ibid, 35–38). Despite the espoused principles of democracy (in part through equal representation), transparency, accountability and a ‘bottom-up’ approach to development, the CEP has been characterised as an ill-planned attempt to decentralise development at the village level and as a poor attempt at shaping Timor-Leste’s economy on the part of the World Bank (Moxham 2005). The CEP is also a reflection of the centralised way in which UN missions operated in Timor-Leste, and their active policing of decision-making authority within the national political realm, initially held by the transitional administration. The institution of the CEP did not recognise existing political formations in Timor-Leste’s different districts and villages and failed to connect village and district governance with national politics (Chopra 2000; Pushkina & Maier 2012). For instance, as discussed in the previous chapter, governance structures extant within the Organização da Mulher Timorense (OMT – Organisation of Timorese Women) were not included in the CEP, and existing traditional rulers were also sidelined. While UNTAET was deriding quotas at the national level, they were being instituted in village councils in partnership with the World Bank. In part, this reflects a misplaced assumption that ‘local’ politics are more accessible for women as opposed to ‘national’ level politics, an assumption not borne out in reality (Cummins 2011). Participant interviews also reported this assumption and confirmed its falsity; for example, one participant stated that the population was more “amenable” to women in leadership roles at the national level, a more abstract realm, rather than “closer to home” (Interview 13). Thus, early peacebuilding processes in the country centralised power in national political structures and in turn undermined women’s claim to equality in representation at this level. At the same time, women’s representation was instituted at the village level, a level that was disenfranchised from national political decision-making and local authority. International intervention in Timor-Leste shaped what was seen as acceptable representation of democratic participation of women in politics. As with the colonial and occupation periods that preceded it, political structures were established, manipulated or ignored consistent with the intervening powers’ goals, even though international peace operations are ostensibly

70  Participating women conducted under a rubric of supporting and benefiting the local populace. Influential individuals within UNTAET argued against affirmative action provisions as they saw them as inconsistent with the democratic principles that should be enshrined in the state they were building. It was also the national political domain, not the local or village level, which would be presented to the international community as the rebuilt state, and on which the UN’s peace and state-building efforts in Timor-Leste would be judged. It is arguable that for this reason the quota debate played out in the national political realm as opposed to the village level, where institutionalising women’s seats in village councils implemented by UNTAET and the World Bank in partnership was met with no resistance by UN personnel concerned about the desires of the Security Council (Cummins 2011). As UNTAET was one of the first missions to include a gender unit, it is frequently “hailed as an example of peacebuilding that took women seriously” (Charlesworth 2008, 354). In 2006, a review staff in UNTAET and the UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) found that within those missions “[a] widely acknowledged sustained achievement of U ­ NTAET/ UNMISET [was] the greatly increased role of women in politics” (Ospina 2006a, 49). This is perhaps an overstatement given the discussion above. In the quota debate, the UN’s goal to present a new liberal democratic nation to the world in 2002 took precedence over the Women’s Congress goal to implement a quota for women’s seats in parliament. Although such measures are consistent with democratic principles, as stated in ­CEDAW, the statements of the UN in New York and the Political Affairs Office in Dili highlight that members of the Security Council opposed to quota provisions should be placated over and above those at mission sites. This in itself is not revelatory, as the institution has noted that “peace operations are an expression of different interests…those of the Security Council, of regional neighbours and…troop and police-contributing countries” (HIPPO 2015, 14). What it does demonstrate though is how those dominant modes of thinking in relation to legitimate statehood and peacebuilding are intrinsically gendered. It is here that the analysis can move to a deeper consideration of a process of gendering a (reconstructed) state. Such an analysis moves beyond a simple rendering of ‘women and the state’, which focuses on women’s inclusion or exclusion from decision-making in state structures, to the notion of a ‘gendered state’, which pays closer attention to the how gender inequality and a gendered division of labour are embedded in the formation of the state, and how gendered norms shape what is visible and valorised within the state (Kantola 2007, 271). Feminist scholars have long argued that the notion of the state as deployed in international relations scholarship is gendered, with states constructed internally and externally as masculine, rational and unitary, justifying action abroad and a consolidation of power ‘at home’ (Peterson 1992; Weber 1998; Young 2003; True 2005, 223–224). This conceptualisation can be linked to the liberal notion

Participating women  71 of statehood that informs liberal peacebuilding. Gendered dualisms challenged by feminist scholars, such as public/private and international/­ national, underlie both the construction of the state and its production of gendered social hierarchies (Peterson 1992), and these can be seen to have deeply informed the reconstruction of the state through peacebuilding efforts in Timor-Leste. Discursive divisions are visible between the national (masculine) realm and the feminised other of village, ‘indigenous’ and local politics. As ­Peterson has described, feminisation is a process of devalorisation, and importantly, “the privileging of masculinity does not privilege all men or only men. The claim is rather that gender – with its lauded masculinity and denigrated femininity – pervades language and culture and devalorizes all feminized statuses” (2010, 18, emphasis original). Shepherd has also argued that ‘women’ in peacebuilding discourse are positioned in connection with the ‘local’, and in turn ‘civil society’, thus circumscribing their political agency in the ‘national’ or ‘formal’ sphere (2017, 126–127). Such a process genders states as masculine. This reference to the (reconstructed) state as a ‘gendered state’ points to “the subtle reproduction of a certain gender system and gender power orders” (Kantola 2007, 271; see also Peterson 1992), beyond the relegation of women and the feminine to the so-called private sphere. It is possible to read the operation of gender power, beyond the quota debate on women’s inclusion, in the process of state construction and political fostering in Timor-Leste, with UNTAET, chiefly its transitional administrator, acting unilaterally: “consultation was effectively limited to East Timorese political elite”, and although the National Council was ostensibly given a quasi-legislative role, it “nonetheless served at the pleasure of the SRSG who retained ultimately legislative and executive authority” (Leach 2017, 127). Post-conflict peacebuilding reproduces and institutionalises gendered hierarchies in state systems, ones that require, first, the construction of elite and non-elite realms, and in turn the devalorisation (feminisation) of the latter. This reading of debates in Timor-Leste, on where women should be visible and represented and how they should participate, points to the gendering nature of peacebuilding. Beyond the gendering of identities that are in turn attached to certain bodies (Smith 2018), it is possible to see in this a gendering of the reconstructed post-conflict state, back to, or into, a liberal democratic stable, rational, independent, sovereign, and thus masculinised, state. From this perspective, quotas for representation of marginalised groups in the national political space challenge the production of such a state. As one UN official at the time reportedly stated in relation to women’s quotas: “only Communist countries have those” (Interview 29a), thus linking quotas with an illegitimate ‘other’ of statehood. Conversely, the feminised ‘indigenous’ and ‘local’ political space of the village was an appropriate site in which to institute quotas for women and youth, due to its invisibility to the international community and based on a misplaced belief that this is a site that is more accessible to women. This in turn positions women as always

72  Participating women less than and not available to the masculine realm of international relations populated by masculinised states. Despite this close policing of the national political realm, the work and effects of women’s participation as part of peacebuilding was still overwhelmingly viewed as benefiting the national space throughout my research interviews, with village level voice and authority significantly undermined. As one NGO adviser explained: A lot of people complain that all of the focus on gender empowerment is in Dili, and for the elite, and for Lucia Lobato6 and of course they can be in the parliament, but it doesn’t mean that me, and my village, that I have any voice. (Interview 6) Although the quota measure fell over, other efforts to ensure women’s representation occurred during UNTAET and subsequent peace operations, which advised government bodies in relation to gender mainstreaming throughout government operations. There was a significant discourse that emerged from successive peace operations that one of their key aims was and remained the participation of women in (national) politics and their equal representation in decision-making. The urban centre is where women’s representation in politics is most visible, and a number of participants felt that “all changes have been in Dili” (Interview G2). As feminist scholars in peacebuilding have long argued, the increased participation of women in governance and politics as a result of Women, Peace and Security is often a story of “gains and opportunities along with continuing challenges and disappointments” (Duncanson 2016, 84).

Participation for whom? One of the fundamental conceptual limitations of how ‘gender’ is understood and practised within peace operations is its frequent conflation with ‘women’ (Shepherd 2011; Smith 2018). In practice, this means that gendered stereotypical assumptions about women and men, ones that inform social identities that can either impede or support individual security, are often reproduced, and that ‘adding women’ via participation is both the ends and means of incorporating a gender perspective or ensuring peace operations are gender sensitive. Clearly the latter is a significant departure from the depth of theorising that feminist scholars have conducted regarding gender and security and peace. It also sets a precedent for issues that fall under the category ‘gender issue’ to be ameliorated by the addition of women. Another result is that gender work roles within peace operations and in the UN system broadly – such as gender focal points or gender advisers – are typically given to women, which presumes that ‘gender work’ is women’s work (Tiessen 2005). In turn, gender advisers and gender focal points

Participating women  73 are often marginalised within units, and gender programs are marginalised within missions more broadly; that is, the gender component of peace operations are not taken as seriously as other ‘essential’ functions (Tiessen 2005). As one gender adviser explained in relation to the level of appointment and gender advisers: …that’s very typical of what used to happen around this issue [gender], you bring in somebody at a very junior level, you know they’ve just got no capacity. You’ve got to remember that the UN’s like the military, it’s like the public service, generals only talk to generals and if somebody is appointed at a low level people are not going to take you seriously and they’re not going to talk to you seriously. You need status, you need high rank in order to be able to go and make an appointment with the SRSG to be able to go and talk to people at that level. Otherwise they fob you off to their secretary or their chief of staff or somebody; you never get in the door. (Interview 29a) Therefore, there is a gendered hierarchy contained within peace operations, in that women are given gender work which is marginalised within missions, or as Hilary Charlesworth puts it, the creation of a “women’s ghetto” within peacebuilding with less power and resources (2005). Yet this is often framed institutionally as representative of increasing women’s participation. This issue was recognised in the Secretary-General’s report on the implementation of recommendations made by a 2015 review of peace operations. Following a pilot run in Haiti, the report recommends that a Senior Gender Adviser be placed in the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-­General in peace operations, rather than in other subordinate units or locations (UNGA & UNSC 2015, 15). Moreover, as gender work becomes women’s work, this positions women’s interests around gender, rather than broader political, social and economic issues. As Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt argue, it prioritises women’s “gender interests”, rather than those that may exist around class, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so on (2009b, 72). Such gendering has meant that particular roles and attributes have been attached to women through their assumed femininity, and this in turn justifies their participation (Reeves 2012). Demands to increase women’s participation in security governance have come to rely on gendered tropes, justifying women’s inclusion on the basis of assumed inherent skills and traits attached to femininity (Carreiras 2010, 480). In peace operations this has most frequently led to a characterisation of women as inherent and natural peacemakers, thus making their participation not only a necessity for the attainment of gender equality but also as following a simple gendered logic. For example, a report of the Secretary-General on Timor-Leste stated that “women’s skills as peacemakers and peacebuilders should be utilized and strengthened so that they may participate in and lead community

74  Participating women reconciliation and healing efforts” (UNSC 2006, 14). Therefore, even with the increased visibility of gender and women in international peace and security discourse that encourages women’s participation, the dominant narrative continues to rely heavily on gendered stereotypes and subordination (Sjoberg & Gentry 2007).7 The same simplifications are relied on in calls for increasing the number of female peacekeepers in police, military and civilian components. Increasing women’s participation in previously male-dominated domains, such as military and police contingents in peace operations, is argued to improve the missions’ effectiveness, especially in relation to the mission’s ability to respond to those issues seen as gendered or women’s issues (Reeves 2012, 352–354; Dharmapuri 2013, 7–8). Female peacekeepers are seen to increase trust in a mission, relate better to local populations, improve behaviour of male counterparts (that is, reduce the sexually exploitative behaviours of male peacekeepers) and are able to carry out tasks that men either cannot or should not do, such as body searches on women and dealing with domestic and sexual violence cases (UNDAW 1995; Hendricks & Hutton 2008; Dharmapuri 2013, 7). The recruitment and retention of women as peacekeepers and in national police forces has become an increasingly important approach to fulfilling the UN’s internal goals of women’s participation in security sector reform. It is also frequently linked to the improved protection of women and girls in post-conflict situations, again signalling the notion that peace operations can act as ‘standard setters’. In the Timor-Leste case, UNMIT (2006–2012) was considered a police mission and its areas of work focused almost entirely on security sector reform. Given the institutional focus of UNMIT and the salience given to security sector reform in combatting post-conflict sexual and gender-based violence, the gender work of UNMIT centred on two key areas: the first was to improve the representation of women in Timor-Leste’s police force, and the second was to improve the sensitivity and response of the police force to gender issues, namely to sexual and gender-based violence. According to one UNMIT staff member, UNMIT’s gender unit focused on state security institutions, adding women to these institutions, and conducting training for UN Police (UNPOL), national police (PNTL) and military (F-FDTL) staff to respond to gender-based violence (Interview 2). This in part constitutes what can be seen as a strong ‘victim narrative’ regarding women’s experiences of the 2006 crisis in Timor-Leste, and with the re-establishment of a heavily militarised peace operation in the country, it is possible to identify a particular donor focus on sexual and gender-based violence (Smith 2018). Most relevant for this discussion, though, is that women’s participation in the security sector was increasingly incorporated into successive peace operations and a central pillar of the Women, Peace and Security programming of the final mission, UNMIT. Despite these claims, the participation of women in the police and military contingents of peace operations, especially at decision-making levels,

Participating women  75 8

has remained poor. In January 2018, women made up 4.8 per cent of uniformed personnel in peace operations.9 In Timor-Leste, both UNTAET and UNMISET had limited female representation, particularly at higher levels or in decision-making roles (Ospina 2006a, 28–29). Representation of women in military and police contingents was low in each mission in ­Timor-Leste, and this was perceived by participants; for example, the director of one national women’s organisation stated: “ From our point of view [UNPOL] was mostly men…So, that’s why we, we tried asking them…but at least we have [some] women in UNPOL in Timor-Leste that we can see they are helping…Not many though, not many women” (Interview 24). One participant also felt that the low numbers of women in the police and military contingents meant that peace operations in Timor-Leste were failing to live up to their own set of standards: It makes sense that UNPOL supported women…They can take the position as the commander in the [police] unit. Like today in Liquica, the District Commander is a woman, so it means that what we expect about gender is already implemented, even though not in every district, but this is one [example]…[But] women in UNPOL…OK, I can say not many. So UN is asking about gender, gender should be equal, but sometimes they are not also taking consideration that the presence…like in the forces, UNPOL, ok there are some women, but in the military [peacekeeping forces] it is very few, military forces it is very few. (Interview 25) Moreover, while UNPOL encouraged women’s representation in the PNTL, it designated this engagement in a particularly gendered way; for example, women were especially represented in the Vulnerable Persons Unit (VPU) established to respond to sexual and gender-based violence. The unit was an important step in making security institutions more responsive to the security needs of both women and children in Timor-Leste, especially as issues of domestic violence and sexual violence had previously been inadequately dealt with. Yet, where women’s inclusion or incorporation into different sectors is limited to only gendered tasks, they continue to work on the periphery of mainstream peace and security processes. As one participant who had worked with UNPOL from UNTAET through to UNMIT explained: “UNPOL, they treat [men and women] the same, equal. But mostly they encourage women to learn like computers, the communication system…the gender focal point in PNTL, of course it is a woman; VPU, of course it’s a woman” (Interview 25). Another participant also noted that “usually for security [issues, it is] usually men, but in working closely with the community, [it is usually] women”

76  Participating women (Interview 24). This resonates with Lesley Pruitt’s finding regarding the roles expected of the first all-female Formed Police Units that deployed with UN peace operations from 2007. In her work, Pruitt found that the all-­female unit was expected to undertake a “second shift”, beyond the standard policing and security roles, such as voluntary community engagement work (2016, 72–75). These approaches to women’s participation perpetuate normative gender conceptions that have historically seen women as subordinated and excluded from priority issues of ‘high politics’ and ‘hard’ military security.10 The discussion in this chapter, which has taken account of ‘participation’ in both political and security arenas, demonstrates how gender programming can function to reinforce binaries that structure oppression (see Duncanson 2016). For example, during UNTAET, the small amount of East Timorese women employed with the mission were included as consultants in areas such as health care and education: “women for the most part have been excluded from discussions concerning politics, economics, national security and other such typically ‘male’ arenas” (Ajiza Magno in Schmaedick 2001). The areas considered ‘legitimate’ for women to participate in relied on a particular gendered logic of feminine subordination and masculine valorisation. Thus, the division of labour – and the hierarchy it is projected on – reflects and reinforces gendered imaginings of public/private and international/national. The participation aspect of Women, Peace and Security rests on the production of a stable, homogenised category of ‘women’ as the subject of gendered security; gender has been applied in a way that reproduces stable binaries, in turn contributing to their normativity (Kunz 2014). This is arguably the logical consequence of a liberal feminist approach that adds women to an imperfect institution, such as UN peace and security operations, without challenging the underlying infrastructure that reproduces gender hierarchies. Post-structural feminist literature argues that the concept of ‘gender’ has come to rest on the same stable binaries as those normative conceptions that have historically perpetuated discrimination. For instance, Judith Butler has questioned the use of an undifferentiated category of ‘women’ as the subject of feminism, claiming it excludes consideration of other axes of power, such as class, ethnicity and so on: “These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes” (2006, 6–8). In asking ‘participation for whom’ then, in the first instance this pertains to ‘which women’ participate. This is a debate that has been repeated within feminist discussions on participation in peace and security governance and on political representation and decision-making more broadly. Put simply, participation and representation tend to benefit a small group of already well-placed women who fit the constructed image of ‘woman’ in empowerment discourses

Participating women  77 and whose goals match those of other political elites (Krook & True 2012, 121). In thinking about who benefits, though, and based on the above examinations, I argue as well that participation work benefited the performance of peace operations and their mission to institute liberal statehood. From critical, and particularly post-colonial perspectives, resolution 1325 and Women, Peace and Security more broadly have served a legitimising function to extend and continue practices of intervention that need to be historicised in the context of colonialism (Pratt 2013). While channels were opened for women’s participation, these were in particular gendered and gendering ways – the places and spaces in which women were deemed able to participate were largely subordinate in the hierarchies of power, both militarily and politically. Women then are left to advocate for their rights, protection and equality within liberal state structures that inadequately support these tasks, while in turn feminist activism is depoliticised and undermined. Therefore, the select inclusion of women reproduced contexts of masculinised state- and peacebuilding that subordinate, yet require, (some) women as well as a subordinated feminine sphere; performances of participation reaffirm the identity of interveners and the political elite (Enloe 2014; Agius 2018, 71–72). It was not only women’s participation that was a focus of peace operations in Timor-Leste, though, and the next chapter considers the pillar of women’s protection that has come to characterise peace interventions.

Notes 1 Other targets within this goal include equal access to education, health care and decent work; see http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/ 2 For more on peacekeepers and the ‘performance’ of security, see Higate & Henry (2009). 3 ‘Softer’ options included the distribution of Tais Timor, a UNTAET publication designed to inform the national populace of its operations and increase public information access. 4 The framing of having to compete without special measures reflects the language of ‘self-liberation’ that was prevalent during the occupation period and as part of the liberation, especially in relation to women’s emancipation. This is explained by Aurora Ximenes, former OPMT member: “…if we look at East Timorese culture, women do not have the right to speak…Fretilin reflected on this situation and said: ‘This cannot be so [but] it is better for them to liberate themselves’. This was the language Fretilin used…women must liberate themselves from the culture, customs and traditions that tie them down” (cited in Leach 2017, 80). 5 In addition, candidates must be substituted with a candidate of the same sex in case of vacancy. See ‘Law on the Election of National Parliament’ Law No. 6/2006, http://www.jornal.gov.tl/lawsTL/RDTL-Law/RDTL-Laws/Law-2006-06.pdf 6 Former Justice Minister who was jailed for corruption. 7 In addition, Sjoberg and Gentry analyse the public treatment of female perpetrators of violence in war, cases which would seem to disrupt the dominant narrative of women as peaceful yet highlight that they actually buttress the narrative by being presented as aberrations (2007; see also Sjoberg 2016).

78  Participating women 8 The DPKO appointed its first female Peacekeeping Force Commander: Major General Kristin Lund of Norway in Cyprus in August 2014. 9 Figure sourced from: https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/gender.pdf 10 Jacqueline Siapno has reported that gender sensitivity within PNTL remains poor, particularly noting sexual harassment within PNTL and the existence of ‘glass ceilings’ for women within Timor-Leste’s security sector (2008).

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4 Protected women

This chapter critically examines the mandate of protection in the Women, Peace and Security agenda: that is, protecting women from and preventing sexual and gender-based violence, in conflict and in post-conflict reconstruction. Protection, like participation, must also be understood as imbued with racialised as well as gendered logics, which inform how the mandate is conceptualised and implemented. This chapter builds off the critiques developed in the previous chapter regarding women’s participation in peace operations, and in turn focuses these critiques on the other key pillar of Women, Peace and Security – protection and prevention of violence. Resolution 1325 and subsequent Women, Peace and Security resolutions have all spotlighted sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, especially as it pertains to women and children. The chapter argues that the implementation of protection makes some forms of violence visible while obscuring others, arguably delimiting and producing a ‘hierarchy of harm’ that ultimately undermines all efforts at prevention (Kelly 2010; Kirby 2015, 463). To this end, the chapter examines discourse and policy development on domestic violence and peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), respectively, in Timor-Leste. While each clearly constitutes sexual and gender-based violence, they have received differing responses, and thus understanding violence protection and prevention within the Women, Peace and Security agenda needs to pay attention to the construction of these distinctions and differences. Rather than seeking to recalibrate a hierarchy of harm, this chapter seeks to argue the “benefits of connecting work on sexual violence across contexts” (Kelly 2010, 115). In doing so, it argues that racialised and gendered logics and relations of power inform how violence is understood and made (in)visible in the context of peace operations. The chapter provides a critical examination on what protection means in practice, asking which women are to be protected and from which men’s violence (which reflects the heteronormative paradigm that protection remains conceptualised within). It is argued that this again necessarily hinges on relations of power beyond gender, including race, class and spatial location. As post-colonial feminist scholars have argued, ‘Third World’ women are frequently characterised as victims, particularly of barbaric and violent

84  Protected women Third World men, while the direct and structural violence perpetrated by imperialism and neocolonial practices goes unnoticed (Doty 1996; Agathangelou & Ling 2009). Moreover, victimisation is characterised as particular to the national space and not as a result of international processes. The argument presented here does not seek to diminish the need for legislative change to prevent sexual and gender-based violence generally, nor domestic violence specifically. Indeed, the adoption of a law on domestic violence in Timor-Leste is viewed as a significant win for activists and policymakers alike. Rather, it seeks to explore more productive conceptualisations of sexual and gender-based violence, ‘conflict-related’ or otherwise, and thus violence prevention in the context of peace operation deployment.

Protection and gender violence during and after conflict It is worth noting here a distinction between violence against women and gender violence. The former is directed at women because they are women, because of women’s subordinate social, economic and political status (True 2012, 9–10). The latter is understood as violence that occurs because of unequal gender relations and gender stereotyping and can be perpetrated against and by men and women, boys and girls. The term ‘gender violence’ draws attention to the systemic nature of violence that is both product and productive of gendered relations of power (Shepherd 2008, 42–43) and for this reason is often disputed in international documents, where conservative contributors prefer the use of ‘violence against women’ (see for instance E ­ nloe 2014, 44–49). ‘Gender-based violence’ is sometimes used synonymously with violence against women, which is problematic in that while violence against women is certainly gendered violence, gender-based violence refers to acts that may or may not be violence against women. This chapter uses sexual and gender-based violence as a broad category to reflect the language of programme developments in Timor-Leste; however, the deployment of this label and the content given to it as a result will be problematised. The latter half of the chapter examines peacekeeper SEA, and this label is again utilised to reflect institutional language, although the problematic treatment and understanding of SEA will also be dealt with. Feminist scholars have long sought to expose the gendered nature of violence in and after conflict and the extent to which some kinds of gendered violence are minimised and/or marginalised. For instance, the historical claim that rape and sexual violence committed against women was simply an unfortunate yet inevitable by-product of war has long been challenged and displaced (Brownmiller 1975; Meger 2016, 1–16). Sexual and gender-based violence has been theorised on a continuum, one that reaches from and through times of peace and conflict, encompassing both structural and direct violence (Cockburn 2004; Kelly 2010). The logics, narratives and practices of war, intrinsically connected to state security and militarism, manifest in gender-based forms of violence, and buttress systems of

Protected women  85 gendered violence and oppression broadly (Stiehm 1982; Cockburn 2004). Feminist scholars have carefully woven threads between war, militarism, women’s subjugation, and sexual and gender-based violence directed towards women during war as well as continuing impunity for perpetrators (Brownmiller 1975; Enloe 2000, 2014; Kelly 2010). In increasing recognition of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict, most attention has been paid to the rape and sexual exploitation of women in war, which grew in relation to activism from women’s transnational networks that framed violence against women fundamentally as a human rights issue (Bunch 1990; Keck & Sikkink 1998, 165–198). As Carol Harrington argues, the elevation of sexual and gender-based violence to an ‘international’ issue must also be considered in the context of post-Cold War security politics and US hegemony, which highlights its deployment as a tool in new war and interventionist discourses (2011). As sexual and gender-based violence, especially in relation to war, gained traction on the agendas of international institutions and states, its prevention was also codified in international law (Manjoo & McRaith 2011). Established in 1993 and 1994 respectively, the international criminal tribunals that took place following wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tried cases of mass rape and sexual torture as forms of genocide and crimes against humanity, and both tribunals are seen as instrumental in the way that sexual and gender-based violence is written into international law (Campbell 2007; ­Barrow 2010). In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (which came into force in 2002) brought sexual and gender-based violence to the level of war crime, genocide and crimes against humanity (Manjoo & McRaith 2011, 22–23). Gender violence here is understood as violence and persecution that occurs on the grounds of gender and “where institutions (military/militia, prisons… laws, security and justice) implicitly or explicitly support them” (Davies & True 2015, 162). Women, Peace and Security resolutions following 1325 have followed suit, and resolutions 1820 (UNSC 2008), 1888 (UNSC 2009), 1960 (UNSC 2010) and 2106 (UNSC 2013) focused on sexual and gender-based violence in the context of conflict and in post-conflict periods. Collectively they call for better protection of women specifically, and prevention of sexual and ­gender-based violence; ‘military discipline’ in order to prevent rape and sexual violence perpetrated in times of conflict; and improved reporting mechanisms and punitive actions for those who do commit sexual violence in conflict. These resolutions also stress the need for continuing enforcement and strengthening of zero-tolerance policies for peacekeepers who commit sexual and gender-based violence while on mission in peace operations. The focus has overwhelmingly been on sexual violence committed by male military perpetrators against women in times of conflict, and the preceding decades have witnessed significant interest in preventing and punishing ‘conflict-related sexual violence’, chiefly understood as strategic and as a ‘weapon’ (Eriksson Baaz & Stern 2013). This focus is demonstrated in the

86  Protected women increasing focus of Women, Peace and Security to this pillar, the appointment of a UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, celebrity campaigns to prevent conflict-related sexual violence (for instance, see UN Action’s Stop Rape Now campaign), and the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (Meger 2016; UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2014). Yet, while conflict-related sexual violence was for too long ignored, scholars have rightly pointed out that its eventual inclusion in institutional agendas has been done with the state remaining the referent object of security (True 2012, 119–120) and with an exceptionalism that divorces the issue from its broader structural nature (Meger 2016; Boesten 2017). Moreover, the narrowing focus of the context in which sexual and gender-based violence occurs, namely onto conflict zones, is a political move that shifts attention from structural gender inequalities and “systemic and widespread” gender violence more broadly, outside of conflict and conflict zones (Davies & True 2015, 162). Moving to the post-conflict space, the protection pillar seeks to prevent sexual and gender-based violence that continues into post-conflict moments and is hardly alleviated by the end of formal war (Pankhurst 2008). Preventing violence and instituting justice mechanisms in response are vital aspects of gender-inclusive peacebuilding, and peace operations often seek to institute formal justice mechanisms to respond to certain forms of sexual and gender-based violence in the post-conflict space. Examples include establishing sexual violence units, such as in the UN’s Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the UN Police (UNPOL) conducting awareness-raising training on sexual and gender-based violence, such as in the UN Mission in South Sudan; and gender-sensitive justice and security sector reform, providing support to national armed and security forces in the process (MONUSCO n.d.; see also Skjelsbæk 2001, 83–84; UN Action 2010; UNMISS 2016). The post-conflict space is one in which sexual and gender-based violence continues to threaten collective and individual security at levels commensurate to, or above, conflict and pre-conflict levels (Pankhurst 2008b). Violence of the conflict period precipitates into the post-conflict period, especially in relation to gender-based violence. The formal cessation of war has often done little to alleviate the insecurity of women in particular. By bringing sexual and gender-based violence to the fore, feminist scholars have problematised the distinction between ‘conflict’ and ‘post-conflict’ as one in which public violence between men ceases, while gendered violence continues unabated (Cockburn 2004; Harris-Rimmer 2009). Small arms and light weapons that have proliferated during conflict are used in the post-conflict space to perpetrate sexual and gender-based violence (Farr, Myrttinen & Schnabel 2009), leading some to argue that insecurity is then merely ‘privatised’ rather than ‘ceased’ (Harris-Rimmer 2009). Therefore, traditional definitions of security, and the kinds of security that peace operations seek to institute, have not readily paid attention to – and indeed,

Protected women  87 can even be argued to perpetuate – gendered violence. Although there is increasing rhetoric to the contrary, the ‘security’ championed in peace operations remains understood as the cessation of violence between armed actors and the consolidation of a state’s borders. In the case of Timor-Leste, Susan Harris-Rimmer has demonstrated the politics of transitional justice processes that were subordinated to desires for a ‘normalisation’ of relations between Timor-Leste and Indonesia, and how claims for gender justice fell through these cracks (2010). As discussed in the introduction, the liberal peace follows a model that seeks to institutionalise a stable and secure state recognisable by its Weberian monopoly on the use of force, democratic political institutions with functional elections, and (less explicitly acknowledged though) an adherence to neo-liberal policy prescriptions that regulate state intervention and provision of services, and open up the economy to trade (Duncanson 2016, 58–66). Thus, a stable post-conflict state is one embedded in globalising structures of neo-liberalism, ones that are intertwined with and institute significant forms of direct and structural gender violence (see True 2012). Efforts to implement protection from and prevention of sexual and ­gender-based violence within peace operations have followed similar trajectories to the ones discussed in the previous chapter in relation to participation, in that it is often a picture of “small wins and remaining obstacles” (Duncanson 2016, 79). In peace operations, the push to boost the numbers of female personnel has in part been framed in relation to sexual and ­gender-based violence, in that women’s presence should sensitise missions to the needs of victims, and that they would be able to staff those positions in protection units that helped support victims (Pruitt 2016). Women, Peace and Security resolutions have also consistently reaffirmed the UN’s zero-­ tolerance approach aimed at reducing SEA by peacekeepers, and a greater female presence in peace operations is argued to also assist in this matter (Higate & Henry 2009, 152–154). In rebuilding institutions in post-conflict states, peace operations have facilitated the development of health and psychosocial support services and have sought to institute national legal frameworks to punish perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence and to end impunity, in relation to sexual violence that occurred both during the conflict and after. Indeed, to leave unpunished conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence leaves a legacy of impunity that extends into the supposed post-conflict moment (Pankhurst 2008). Impunity for sexual and ­gender-based violence is connected across contexts, of conflict and post-conflict and non-conflict spaces (Harris-Rimmer 2010, 2; Kelly 2010). Within 1325 and in the narrative of protection, there are both explicit and implicit linkages between gender violence and women, as a homogenised group with similar/relatable experiences and as (always already) vulnerable to violence (Shepherd 2008, 87–92). This paradigm has productive effects in terms of how it constructs women as victims with limited agency (ibid) and as violable bodies. There is significant scholarship that challenges the

88  Protected women narrow conceptual framing of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict zones, such as that on female perpetrators of wartime rape and women as violent actors more generally (Sjoberg & Gentry 2007; Cohen 2013; Sjoberg 2016), and on men as victims of sexual and gender-based violence in war (Sivakumaran 2007, 2010). This work challenges the singular perspective of women as victims with limited agency in conflict and post-conflict moments (Meintjes, Pillay & Turshen 2001; Sjoberg & Gentry 2007; Schnabel & Tabyshalieva 2012). Such conceptual limitations have practical implications, in that while women’s victimhood is emphasised, their involvement in decision-making and peace negotiations is simultaneously marginalised. In essence, these concerns suggest that the protection mandate has come to be stressed far more strongly than empowerment, and that underlying this emphasis are gendered stereotypes that subordinate women to patriarchal protection (Shepherd 2010, 73–74; Hudson 2012). As one gender adviser explained to me, I actually think that in places where this is debated, in donor organisations and all those places, they’re much more comfortable about giving money to the woman as victim, rather than the empowerment of women. Because, you know, there is a comfort zone around women as victims, there is no comfort zone around women who are empowered. (Interview 29a) In Timor-Leste, women are understood as victims of the occupation and of post-conflict gender violence, while their participation in negotiations leading up to the 1999 referendum and following the 2006 crisis period has been marginal (Smith 2018), although not for lack of trying (see for instance OPMT 2006). Constructed gendered tropes of ‘veterans’ and ‘victims’ remain politically salient in the country, which in turn underpin the gendered differential distribution of material and economic resources post-­occupation (Kent & Kinsella 2015). Veterans – understood chiefly as those armed male actors of the resistance period – have received access to pension schemes and are a group seen as needing to be ‘bought off’ post-­occupation so as not to become ‘spoilers’ to peace efforts (Interview 7 and 13). It was suggested to me that veteran payment schemes were a way to “co-opt potential trouble makers” before elections (Interview 13). Transitional justice mechanisms did little by way of material redistribution in Timor-Leste (Harris-Rimmer 2010) and this has continued along gendered lines in relation to veteran payment and pension schemes. The understanding of women only as victims has then been buttressed by both international interventions and national political machinations. This representation of women only as victims has at times been rejected by members of East Timorese women’s organisations, such as during the political and security crisis in 2006. The crisis is generally attributed to a dispute within the new security forces, with a group known as the ‘petitioners’

Protected women  89 initiating protests over what they perceived as favouritism within the police force (UN Special Commission 2006). In 2006, the country was led by ­Fretilin Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri and President Xanana Gusmão, former leader of the resistance. There were deepening tensions between the President and the Prime Minister, initially triggered by a disagreement during the resistance period, and their respective supporters. Disputes in and between the security forces – both the police and military, mapped onto political allegiances – and the political elite were also responsible for perpetuating the crisis: directly, by distributing weapons to supporters, and indirectly, by using inflammatory language during the crisis period.1 As the crisis was underway, former first lady Kirsty Sword Gusmão wrote of the exclusion of East Timorese women from peace dialogues and their suffering at the hands of violence, stating, “Timor woman, once again a victim of the excesses and ambitions of men; Timor woman, once again widowed by a conflict not of her own making” (Sword Gusmão 2006). She continued: It is telling that not a single East Timorese woman has solicited an audience with [then President Xanana Gusmão] nor has had her views sought on solutions to the crisis…It has not been a deliberate act of exclusion, it just hasn’t occurred to anyone in this intensely patriarchal society that women may have something important and useful to contribute to the delicate…processes of disarmament, reconciliation and peacebuilding. (Sword Gusmão 2006) This framing was disputed by members of Organização Popular da Mulher Timorense (OPMT – Popular Organisation of East Timorese Women), the women’s wing of Fretilin. They stated that it was a “simplistic depiction” of what was a “very complex and involved process for all us women” (OPMT 2006). The response speaks clearly and explicitly from their platform as “women of Fretilin”, and thus supporters of Alkatiri, questioning “which men’s excesses and whose ambitions” were the cause of the crisis. They also list a number of occasions in which Fretilin women were part of delegations and discussions with the President and other ministries, seeking to challenge the idea that they were invisible in the political processes that followed the crisis (OPMT 2006). I use this example to demonstrate the reluctance of members of OPMT to be characterised only as victims with no reference to their social, political and economic differences and experiences. While inequality has deepened post-occupation and the peacebuilding era has sidelined non-elite East Timorese women, those who have found space in the upper echelons continue to struggle to have a politicised voice heard, and indeed, where this does happen it can be obscured by claims that women are simply victims. Characterising women as dependent victims encourages the idea that the work of women is not political (see Charlesworth & Wood 2001, 338) and positions women’s interests only in relation to gender, and

90  Protected women by extension gender violence. Violence, and the characterisation and responses to it, then, (re)produce and perform hierarchical gendered relations (­Shepherd 2008, 49–54). While activists have long sought acknowledgement of the violence that women suffer before, during and after conflict, it is problematic when the victimisation of women is the only way in which they achieve visibility (Schnabel & Tabyshalieva 2012). As Cynthia Enloe argues, in highlighting the propensity of commentators to emphasise women’s victimisation, the aim is not to “push women’s vulnerability back into the shadows” (2004, 104). Rather, it provides space to acknowledge women’s and men’s varied and heterogeneous experiences and provides possibilities of conceptualising gender violence without reproducing gendered hierarchies, acknowledging its connection to direct and structural violence of pre- and post- (and non-) conflict spaces, and without obscuring some victim and perpetrator subjects/experiences. Therefore, the limitations of protection as implemented in peace operations relate, in part, to gendered ideals that make visible only those subjects that align with male perpetrator–female victim experiences and how sexual and gender-based violence is understood as a concern for ‘international’ security (True 2012, 119–120). This rendering obscures some forms of violence and some victim and perpetrator identities. In her discourse analysis of resolution 1325 and reports from the Secretary-General on gender violence, Laura Shepherd makes clear the politics of protection visible in articulations of what ‘counts’ as gender violence or is labelled as such (2008, 94–95). The logics that shape such labelling are deeply informed by both race and gender, as will be discussed below. Thus, the sections that follow examine who or what in the Timor-Leste case was understood as being captured by the protection mandate and what victim/perpetrator subjects were focused on. While the argument does not contest the need for protective measures against sexual and gender-based and domestic violence in post-conflict spaces, it does challenge discourses of sexual and gender-based violence that make invisible some experiences of violence, thus obscuring their interconnectedness and in turn diminishing the material and conceptual potentials of protection to begin with.

Who is in need of protection? Before examining the politics of protection in post-occupation Timor-Leste, it is important to place contemporary situations of sexual and gender-based (and militarised) violence in historical context. The connection between militarism and sexual violence is evident in Timor-Leste, and sexual and gender-based violence can be understood against a backdrop of ongoing militarism, of which the Security Council-mandated peace operations are part. During World War II, East Timorese women were forced into the ­Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’ system, as approximately 20,000

Protected women  91 Japanese troops were committed to the territory (CAVR 2005a, section 3.2, para 24). Jill Jolliffe has reported that 25 women were held in barracks in Bobonaro, near the border with West Timor, and were “forced to have sex with queues of Japanese soldiers each night” (2001). Moreover, Jolliffe’s report points to the complicity of the colonialists and the racial hierarchies that informed the occurrence of conflict-related sexual violence, as she notes that the Portuguese governor at the time facilitated the process of providing East Timorese women for ‘comfort stations’: “His justification… was to save European women from rape by Japanese soldiers by providing them with indigenous women who were already prostitutes – although there is no evidence the women in question were” (2001). Indeed, in 2001 a group of activists requested that the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) not allow Japanese military forces to return to Timor-­Leste under the auspices of the peacekeeping operation because of this history (Joliffe 2001). Twelve East Timorese organisations signed a petition to the Japanese government and UNTAET, arguing against the deployment of Japanese peacekeepers, stating that the “Japanese government must publicly acknowledge that past policies have caused great suffering to the East Timorese people” (‘Petition regarding deployment of Japanese Defense Force’ 2001). As noted previously, a number of organisations and collectives were established in the occupation period to support women victimised by sexual and gender-based violence and had also documented cases of rape leading up to the 1999 referendum (see also Winters 1999). During the initial days of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, activists and key political figures and their families were targeted. Muki Bonaparte and Isobel Lobato, both founding members of OPMT, were killed in the first days of invasion (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 29). The violence exacted against political persons was often distinctly sexualised, as Peter Carey has argued: Some of the Indonesian acts of sexual violence have indeed taken on an almost ritualistic aspect and seemed to have been designed to eradicate the sexual potency of entire elite families. How else to explain the brutal way in which the family of the second Fretilin President Nicolau ­Lobato…were hounded to their deaths with Lobato’s wife, Isobel, having a stake driven through her vagina, after being executed…and his first cousin being publicly castrated and executed in Viqueque in 1980? (2001, 258–259) The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) report provides a document of sexual and gender-based violence that occurred throughout the occupation (see CAVR 2005a, chapter 7.7; CAVR 2005b). Sexual harassment, sexual torture in detention, sexual slavery and public sexual humiliation were frequent tools as part of the campaign that sought to pacify East Timorese into political integration with Indonesia

92  Protected women (CAVR 2005a, section 7.7.4). Accounts contained within the CAVR report highlight the connection between military activity and sexual and gender-based violence: The degree of rape and other forms of sexual violence reflected the patterns and degree of military activity at the time. Sexual violence increased during periods of major military operations, and decreased when such operations were less frequent. (CAVR 2005a, section 7.7.6 para 6) Domestic violence also occurred during the occupation, although this was often obscured or minimised, subordinated in the context of a violent military occupation. Such circumstances resonate with other accounts of domestic violence that see it increase during conflict yet at the same time become hidden within the national agenda (Kelly 2000, 59–60). In an interview with The Japan Times in 1999, Bella Galhos attributed this problem to the loss of East Timorese men’s power in public life, stating, “they will find a place where they can play that role again. That place becomes the home” (in Mercier 1999). Moreover, there were no legal protections or preventative measures in place during occupation; as one participant explained In the past Indonesian legislation is there, so if in the court there is mention that a husband beats his wife, it’s not a problem, it is semi-public, not a serious crime…Everyone in Timor-Leste, the man or woman, they don’t report it because for a long time they never, never, never get some space to respect their rights. (Interview 23) The violent occupation period offered no recourse for prevention, as Galhos stated: “There’s no way women are going to turn to the Indonesian military to come help with family problems at home” (in Mercier 1999). The environment of occupation exacerbated the occurrence of domestic violence in a context in which there were ongoing human rights violations, violence and intimidation. The military occupying Timor-Leste engaged in direct sexual and gender-based violence against the population they sought to pacify, and the structural conditions of occupation exacerbated yet obscured violence within the home (see also Hall & True 2009). Despite this history, UNTAET has been accused of focusing on traditional military concerns to the detriment of women’s security (Groves, ­Resurreccion & Doneys 2009). UNTAET presided over a period in which sexual and gender-­based violence continued largely unabated and unacknowledged. Moreover, the various UN-initiated transitional justice mechanisms established at the end of occupation failed to provide much in the way of positive outcomes or material redistribution in response to gender-based persecution that occurred during the occupation period, which has been connected

Protected women  93 to continuing violence in the post-occupation era (Groves, R ­ esurreccion & Doneys 2009; Harris-Rimmer 2010). UNTAET reports to the Secretary-­ General and the Security Council discussed frequently the ‘internal security situation’ in Timor-Leste. In early 2000, this was seen to have “normalised” under the influence of the International Force in East Timor, mostly because security chiefly concerned traditional law and order types of violence, such as militia activity, public acts of violence and securing Timor-Leste’s border with West Timor (Olsson 2009, 102). Louise Olsson argues that the primary concern of peacekeeping in Timor-Leste was to contain conflict-related violence such as this (2009, 147–153). When sexual and gender-based violence did finally reach the attention of international organisations, it was through the existing advocacy of East Timorese women’s organisations. Despite this preoccupation with public violence, in a presentation to the National Council in 2001, Special Representative to the Secretary-General (SRSG) Sergio de Mello stated, “nonetheless, we have no reason to be complacent. Too many women are the victims of crime, particularly violent crime. In Dili, approximately 50 per cent of all reported crime involves violence against women” (UNTAET 2001). This trend was prevalent throughout the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) reports to the Secretary-General as well, with successive reports noting that the most common form of violent crime was sexual and ­gender-based violence, even where the security situation was considered ‘stable’ (see for instance UNSC 2010). Domestic violence came late onto UNTAET’s agenda and only through the activism of East Timorese women’s NGOs in collaboration with the Gender Affairs Unit (Olsson 2009, 102). Domestic violence figured prominently in the First National Women’s Congress and the platform that emerged from it demanded, amongst other things, a law against domestic violence (Hall 2009, 316). This was another example of a number of differently positioned actors advocating to both the UN and East Timorese political decision-makers on a particular issue: “[a] group of over 15 NGOs formed a coalition specifically to lobby for domestic violence legislation… Oxfam Australia, UNFPA [UN Population Fund] and UNIFEM [UN Development Fund for Women – now UN Women] became leading partners as the campaign directly fitted with their organisational interests in supporting women’s rights and addressing domestic violence” (Hall 2009, 316–317). Just before its close, Sergio de Mello launched a nationwide campaign against domestic violence, stating that it was “a concerted effort, with the support of all political and civil society leaders of East Timor, alongside law enforcement officials” (in Rehn & Sirleaf 2002, 15). A Vulnerable Persons Unit (VPU) – discussed in the previous chapter – was established within UNPOL, eventually to be situated within the Polícia Nacional Timor-Leste (PNTL) – the national police force – and the unit became a primary response mechanism for cases of sexual and gender-based violence. Thus, domestic violence was the focal point of partnered campaigns against sexual and gender-based

94  Protected women violence that brought together both UN mission and agency representatives and East Timorese organisations. The prevalence of domestic violence in Timor-Leste is commonly attributed to both cultural norms and the legacies of a 24-year military occupation. Some participants claimed that it is normalised within East Timorese culture, using this to explain why domestic violence occurs in the first place and why it is taboo, under-reported and minimised by the broader community (Interview G1 and G2). However, these claims are countered by those who argue that East Timorese culture does not inherently condone domestic violence (Niner 2013, 243). In 2001, Milena Pires, a well-known women’s rights activist and now Timor-Leste’s permanent representative to the UN, attributed domestic violence committed against women to the upheavals of the Indonesian occupation period: Women were involved [in the resistance] at every level…they don’t want to return to their traditional roles…It is a very traditional Catholic society which has been frozen by years of war. The men are trying to reassert their authority. (in O’Kane 2001) A 2009–2010 health survey in Timor-Leste showed that domestic violence was the most common form of gender-based violence reported to the national police (NSD 2010, 225). The survey reported that 36 per cent of married women experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence by a husband or partner, and that only 24 per cent of women who had experienced violence from their partner reported it to anyone (NSD 2010; UNDP 2013). Exact statistics are elusive due to inconsistent methods of data collection, variable definitions and, some suggest, chronic under-reporting (UNDP 2013, 5). There remains a lack of in-depth reliable data that would enable more concrete patterns to be drawn since 1999 and the end of the occupation period. The 2003 health survey, for instance, did not ask direct questions on domestic violence at the request of the steering committee2 and instead extrapolated figures for domestic violence by the “rate at which ever-married women refuse[d] to have sex with their husbands” (Ministry of Health & National Statistics Office 2004, 43). While domestic violence may be understood to be prevalent, a 2003 report by the International R ­ escue Committee (IRC) suggested that domestic violence rates had remained relatively stable in the years immediately following 1999. The IRC study, which surveyed for intimate partner violence3 for the year prior to the crisis and the year prior to the interview (2002–2003), found that 46.8 per cent reported some form of violence in the year prior to the 1999 crisis, and 43.2 per cent in the year preceding the date of interview (Hynes et al. 2004, 308). Abdullah and Myrttinen found that although the number of firearm incidents decreased post-1999 in Timor-Leste, the “sizeable majority” of cases involving small

Protected women  95 arms and light weapons were intimate femicide and domestic and sexual violence (2009).4 During UNTAET and the operation that followed, the UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET), however, no specific legislation existed to deal with domestic violence. This meant that police could not ‘legally’ advance cases of domestic violence to the judicial system, and “the police of the VPU…remained…searching for justice between the local justice system, colonial laws, and UNTAET regulations…which reinforced gender inequalities” (Groves, Resurreccion & Doneys 2009, 198–199). From 2002, UNMISET continued support for the national campaign against domestic violence, although the resources of its gender unit were severely scaled back. With the establishment of UNMIT in 2006, and arguably reflecting developments in the narrative of Women, Peace and Security at the international level, sexual and gender-based violence and particularly domestic violence featured heavily on the agenda of the peace operation and began to dominate gender mainstreaming work in Timor-Leste (Interview 7, 12 and 13). It was, therefore, domestic violence in Timor-Leste that largely captured the protection component of the Women, Peace and Security agenda promoted by peace operations, especially after 2006 and the establishment of UNMIT. UNMIT reports to the Secretary-General regularly argued the need for domestic violence legislation, presenting as troublesome the fact that it was often resolved through traditional dispute resolution mechanisms “which were not always victim-centred and were not regulated by a legal framework” (UNSC 2008, 8–9). With the establishment of UNMIT and the identification of sexual and gender-based violence as a central issue area, and given the mandate and priorities of UNMIT broadly, the mission focused on a review of justice mechanisms and security sector reform in ­Timor-Leste to prevent and punish sexual and gender-based violence crimes. The culmination of advocacy on domestic violence was the adoption of the Law Against Domestic Violence (LADV) in 2010. From 2006, the establishment of UNMIT had supported existing local groundswell around domestic violence and the need for legislative action. The development of LADV was conducted in partnership between UNMIT, UN agencies (­UNFPA, UNDP and UN Women), and local and international NGOs (Hall 2009). Hall demonstrates how the end of occupation and arrival of a large number of international NGOs and UN missions with protection mandates opened space for the articulation of domestic violence as a denial of women’s rights by East Timorese, bringing this kind of violence to the fore, not simply that committed by the Indonesian military in the context of occupation (2009, 315–316). In addition to the adoption of LADV, in 2012, the Government of Timor-Leste adopted a National Action Plan on Gender Based Violence in partnership with SEPI and UNFPA, and which has been recently renewed (RDTL 2017); in 2016 it also finalised a National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (UN Women 2016).

96  Protected women The LADV adopted in 2010 made explicit interventions to what were seen as the cultural roots of domestic violence and sought to provide formal justice processes for victims, as opposed to seeking resolution via traditional processes. In regards to the former, the new law legislated domestic violence as a ‘public’ crime, as opposed to a ‘private’ crime. Previously, with domestic violence legislated as a private crime, police and prosecutors could not advance cases without express consent and engagement from the victim. In making domestic violence a public crime, the LADV meant that police and prosecutors must continue with cases through formal justice channels, regardless of the wishes of those involved and even where victims may request cases be dropped (UNMIT 2010). For some participants, this issue was viewed as problematic given that men remain the key income earners in East Timorese families, which meant that some women have been wary of engaging processes that, while removing a perpetrator of violence, may induce significant financial hardship (Interview 12). In a context of underdevelopment and lack of support infrastructure, and little socio-economic distribution for women, formal justice mechanisms present a difficult decision for victims between physical, economic and other forms of security. Thus, while LADV is celebrated as a normative and performative gain, it can be argued that it has provided few benefits by way of substantive security. In addition, the full implementation of LADV has faced difficulties, and its impact is often assessed as relatively limited. As one participant explained, many people still “fall through the cracks”, such as women with multiple vulnerabilities – for example, those with mental illness or intellectual disability, as well as children (Interview 7). LADV is argued to be poorly ‘socialised’, a task that often falls to under-resourced women’s organisations (Enloe 2004, 252), and its effects limited in the context of lack of basic infrastructure. A number of reports note that, in surveying the population, a majority of respondents prefer domestic violence cases to be dealt with in the informal justice system; that is, “[d]espite the significant majority of Timorese who have confidence in formal courts (77%), an even higher number (85%) are confident they will be treated fairly by the local justice system” (Justice System Programme 2011, 6). In practice, despite the existence of LADV, a “significant proportion” of domestic violence cases are still being resolved via local justice systems rather than formal courts (ibid). The limitations of ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ or informal justice systems specifically in relation to gender-based violence crimes have been well documented (Swaine 2003), which mostly focus on the ‘balanced’ apportioning of blame and consensus outcomes. However, in Timor-Leste, the formal justice system also offers insufficient support or justice for victims who are able to access it, not least because of a lack of resources and infrastructure. For instance, the more remote a district is from the urban centre, the more likely it is that cases will be resolved via community or traditional means, given the difficulty of accessing formal courts in the centre. During UNMIT, the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the

Protected women  97 mission reported that in some districts, it appears there has been relatively little or no change in the way domestic violence has been dealt with since the promulgation of LADV (UNMIT 2010, 22). In addition, police officers have found ways to subvert the aspect of the law, which makes domestic violence a public crime: “In one district, a PNTL officer explained that if a victim brings a signed peace agreement from a traditional proceeding to the police station within three days of filing the complaint, they would not forward the case for judicial action, but would file the agreement for their records” (ibid). Phyllis Ferguson as well has highlighted flawed and incomplete VPU records and poor communication between ministries, UN agencies, national NGOs and the VPU as limiting the implementation of LADV (2011, 55). This discussion, though, is not to contribute to the already well-rehearsed debates on ‘socialising’ the LADV in Timor-Leste. Rather, it seeks to highlight that despite evident limitations in both formal and informal mechanisms, and despite the fact that domestic and sexual and gender-based violence was largely marginalised within peace operation practices of security, where the issue is institutionally recognised it is generally attributed to shortcomings within the national or domestic space and to tradition and culture. Limitations exist for both formal and informal justice responses, and the presence of peace operations has also impacted domestic violence in the post-conflict space. Yet in institutional discourses the source of violence is largely attributed to domestic cultures, spaces and peoples. For instance, a 2006 report on the future of the UN in Timor-Leste noted, It is of critical concern that gender-based violence continues to be the most frequently reported crime in the country. Yet, less than a quarter of cases reported to the police are sent for prosecution… The limited access of women and children to justice, due to prevailing attitudes, is compounded by the weakness of the justice system. (UNSC 2006, 29–30, emphasis added) In addition, the subject of protection efforts, East Timorese women, are reified by victimhood with limited agency. This framing significantly narrows the potential for deeper understandings of gendered, raced and militarised violence (direct and structural) and its production in conflict, even where this predominantly targets female victims. This will be discussed in the following section in regard to peacekeeper SEA, but here it is worth noting further some limitations in the LADV. The female victim–male perpetrator binary ignores sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated against individuals that sit outside its heteronormative paradigm, such as male victims of sexual violence as well as violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in relation to conflict, and as refugees and the internally displaced (Chynoweth 2017, 27–29). Despite the increased attention to sexual and gender-based violence in the international realm,

98  Protected women there is a relative paucity of work on and services for LGBTQ victims of violence and limited linking of sexual orientation or gender identity with ‘sexual and gender-based violence’ (Hagen 2016). As Hagen explains, this exclusion functions as structural violence: Gender mainstreaming and the documentation of SGBV [sexual and gender-based violence] by the WPS [Women, Peace and Security] architecture can be a force of oppression and erasure of LGBTQ experience. Exclusion of LGBTQ individuals from monitoring and reporting on WPS resolutions pertaining to SGBV is both theoretical in the way that gender is framed and political in the resulting inclusion or exclusion of individuals as a result of this framing. (2016, 314) In Timor-Leste, high rates of familial and public violence have also been reported against lesbian and bisexual women and transgender men (Saeed & Galhos 2017). There is only limited reporting on the issue, but what is documented demonstrates the extent to which such violence is perpetrated by family members and within the home (ibid), arguably then well within the remit of domestic violence. The discourse of prevention on sexual and ­gender-based violence had an essentialised woman subject as their focus, persecuted by male family members. Children were also suggested to fall outside of this frame, even though they often suffered inter-familial violence, perpetrated by both women and men (Interview 7 and 10). This is a multilayered issue that is not attributable to one process or institution, and it is not to say that peace operations and development interventions should be, or have the capacity to be, a cure-all. Rather, with the degree of funding entering spaces that is earmarked for programs and organisations that respond to pre-identified needs and frameworks reflective of dominant modes of thinking, this functions as a silencing and marginalising of individuals and identities that are outside their purview, further compounding structural violence. That is, the invisibility of LGBTQ individuals and the narrow conceptualisation of ‘victims of gender violence’ in protection narratives re-embeds and reproduces structural inequalities that make individuals vulnerable to violence to begin with. As Paul Kirby has argued in relation to the securitization of conflict-related sexual violence as demonstrated in the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, “a political project to foreground sexual violence mainly when it is perpetrated by certain kinds of people must, if successful, have the corresponding political effect of directing material resources to those acts” (2015, 463). There is little space to negotiate at the boundaries and, thus, post-conflict peacebuilding in this sense functions to perpetuate and (re)inscribe structural violence. This issue is further demonstrated in discussions of funding. The attention given to sexual and gender-based violence in Timor-Leste narrowed both funding direction and the way gender violence was understood.

Protected women  99 Incorporating the abbreviation ‘SGBV’ in a programme log frame could appropriate larger portions of funding and was sometimes a response to the demands of donors rather than a reflection of the programme’s aims and operations (Interview 7 and 8). By ‘narrow focus’, I mean not that the issue is simplistic or not worthy of programme development, but rather that its structural relationship to other measures of insecurity, inequality and vulnerability, such as economic inequality, were often ignored, and the kinds of ‘SGBV’ that attracted funding and thus visibility aligned with the interests of peace operations and donors (such as discussed above in relation to Hall 2009, 316–317); in addition, the spectrum of sexual and gender-based violence and its structural relations to political, economic and militarised contexts are obscured. For example, even though women’s economic empowerment had featured heavily in peacebuilding programs, the narrow understanding of gender violence did not always capture the relationship between inequalities in social, economic and political spheres that are productive of gendered violence (Interview 8).5 Moreover, one consequence of funding being targeted towards narrowly conceptualised ‘issue areas’ was “box-ticking” in programme proposals, rather than more practical engagement with inequalities and their violent manifestation and reproduction in Timor-Leste (Interview 12). Protection from and prevention of gender violence is essential for any gender-just understanding of peace and stability. There are though evident limitations not just with programme implementation, but also in assumptions and conceptualisations of ‘gender’ and ‘violence’ that underpin approaches to prevention and protection from ‘sexual and gender-based violence’. Rather than a descriptive or objective label, sexual and gender-based violence becomes known and knowable through its attribution with certain characteristics and actors (see also Shepherd 2008).

Protection from whom?6 Also of note here is the exclusion of the violence of peacekeepers from these frameworks. Even though violence perpetrated by peacekeepers objectively fits within the protection mandate, it has been divorced from policy and programme development in relation to conflict-related sexual violence and Women, Peace and Security (Crawford 2017; Westendorf & Searle 2017, 384–385). Indeed, the first Security Council resolution to focus solely on the prevention of peacekeeper SEA, resolution 2272 (see Smith 2017), is not considered part of the suite of Women, Peace and Security resolutions. In focusing on this critique, this section draws on post-­c olonial and critical race perspectives to analyse the operation of prevention and protection in Timor-Leste. As post-colonial scholars have highlighted, the subject of the victim narrative is not simply ‘woman’ but, invariably, a ‘poor Third World woman’ who is in need of protection and ‘saving’ from the predations of (non-white) men and/or their ‘culture’ generally (Kapur 2002). Postcolonial scholars have argued that raced hierarchies of power

100  Protected women and processes of Othering have always permeated who is constructed as a victim and who they are a victim of. Gayatri Spivak’s now well-known line in reference to the colonial abolition of sati – widow burning – captures the racial hierarchy she argues informed colonial interventions into women’s lives: such interventions were part of the colonial discourse on the ‘other’, represented as “white men saving brown women from brown men” (1988, 297). Syed and Ali also highlight stories of victimhood as integral to the production of colonial discourse and ultimately colonial intervention and appropriation, arguing, The bodies and stories of women from ‘Other’ places were used by colonial masters and their agents in the production and projection of difference, between the white and the non-white, the barbaric and the civilised, the spiritual and the rational, the passive and the strong. (2011, 352) Characterising the colonised as uncivilised, illiberal and pre-modern served as pretext and justification for colonial and imperial endeavours that laid claim to land and the resources and peoples therein (Said 1979). This construction in part rested on a discourse of colonised women as victimised and thus to be rescued – as well as modernised and liberalised – by the colonial and imperial encounter. In focusing on violence against women, there has been a reinforced image of the woman as victim and the “Third World victim subject has come to represent the more victimized subject; that is, the real or authentic victim subject” (Kapur 2002, 2). Essentially, narratives of victimhood of Third World women are constitutive of not just gendered identities but also intersect with race and class hierarchies, reminiscent of the instrumentalist use of feminist rhetoric in colonial interventions (Hunt 2006). Yet in truth the continuing insecurity of women into post-war periods occurs across varied cultural contexts, meaning the subordination of women post-conflict is not specific to any particular socio-historical or political context (Pankhurst 2008a), and international institutions themselves play a role in constituting conflict landscapes (Orford 1997). From the 1990s, it became apparent that peacekeepers and humanitarian workers in post-conflict and emergency contexts were perpetuating a litany of sexual and gender-based abuses. Peacekeepers and aid workers commit sexually abusive and exploitative behaviours against women and men, girls and boys (Martin 2005; Csáky 2008; Awori, Lutz & Thapa 2013; Smith 2017, 408–411), as well as other acts of raced and gendered violence against host populations (Razack 2004). Feminist scholars have been quick to point out that these occurrences are consistent with earlier arguments on the militarised nature of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict, given that peacekeepers are drawn from states’ military contingents (Whitworth 2004). Military and civilian personnel in peace operations that commit sexual and gender-based violence do so in permissive environments with very limited

Protected women  101 or non-existent legal apparatus to either prevent or punish. As an institution, the UN has been slow to respond and now does so in a limited and ad hoc fashion, usually by seeking to better implement its zero-tolerance policy (Awori, Lutz & Thapa 2013; Grady 2016; Smith 2017). To be sure, part of the responsibility falls to member states, who retain legal jurisdiction over their nationals while undertaking peace operations, as per the Status of Forces Agreement signed between member states, host states and the UN, but they have proven reluctant to put their peacekeepers on trial (Smith 2017). The UN, though, still holds responsibility in elevating and responding to the issue and has contributed significantly to the obfuscation of knowledge on the behaviours of peacekeepers (Grady 2016). Moreover, the UN is responsible for initial investigations into allegations before they advance either within the institution or are passed on to member states, and it is at this stage that a number of cases fall down (Code Blue Campaign 2017). What this means then is that while the institution is a significant contributor to and actor in increased discourse and policy mechanisms to prevent and punish sexual and gender-based violence, those that do so under the UN flag are largely made invisible or considered only at the margins. One indication of the different conceptualisation and treatment of sexual and ­gender-based violence carried out by peacekeepers is the differing lexicon and nomenclature used – ‘CRSV’ for conflict-related sexual violence on the one hand, and ‘SEA’ for peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse on the other. Such framing implicitly locates SEA outside of the realm of ‘conflict-related’ violence, which obscures its structural, systemic and militarised nature (see also Westendorf & Searle 2017). In 2003, the Secretary-General’s Bulletin on ‘Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’ (hereafter the Bulletin) discouraged all relationships between ‘beneficiaries’ and peacekeepers, as this document and successive statements have reiterated the “inherently unequal power dynamics” in which such encounters occur, and outlines the institution’s enduring approach of ‘zero tolerance’ (UN 2003, 2).7 The broad categorisation and condemnation of all sexual encounters between peacekeepers and beneficiaries has been criticised for reflecting the priorities of ‘institutional survival’ rather than seeking to uphold the rights and needs of those involved (Otto 2007). This is because a number of SEA allegations involve transactional sex, or ‘survival sex’, and in its resounding condemnation of engaging in such a practice little room is left for acknowledging the agency of various actors (again relying on tropes of victimised Third World women). The Bulletin allows for no spectrum of agency or consent, which in turn has made extrapolating data on the variable forms and prevalence of SEA difficult (Grady 2016; Westendorf & Searle 2017). As noted above, SEA is not considered within either Women, Peace and Security frameworks or those connected to ostensibly conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Where it does gain mention, it is often as a shame to the organisation and/or to the states that peacekeepers abuse. For instance, a 2015 review of peace operations noted,

102  Protected women [S]exual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations are ­continuing – to the enduring shame of the Organization, its personnel and the countries which provide peacekeepers who abuse. The deplorable acts of a few must not be allowed to drag down the Organization, its staff and its troop- and police contributing countries. (HIPPO 2015, xii-xiii) Therefore the narrative of outrage on SEA is also a vehicle through which the position of the UN as protector and of ‘local’ populations as vulnerable can be reiterated. This critique reflects feminist theorising on protectionist discourses regarding states, whereby the construction of those in need of protection reaffirms ‘protector’ identity (and power). States, or institutions, reaffirm or remake their identity via the discourse of protection, while materially undermining women’s security, either in their own state or abroad (Young 2003; Agius 2018). In Timor-Leste, SEA was perpetrated by peacekeepers, with cases ranging from the sexual abuse of boys to sexual harassment, abuse and engaging sex workers (Smith 2017, 411–415). However, the responses to these forms of violence were less formalised compared to those relating to domestic and sexual and gender-based violence and occurred only after significant pressure from local advocates. All participants in this research, national and international, were aware of cases of SEA, but they often lacked knowledge on what happened to the perpetrators or avenues available for justice. What was communicated most frequently was a sense that international personnel were immune to the consequences of sexual harassment and exploitation, and that the UN as an institution was inaccessible. As the director of one national NGO stated, “Timorese people don’t know where to go to make complaints, to which institutions. What can be done anyway?” (Interview 1). Especially problematic are the parallels that can be drawn with occupation experiences, with violence continuing to occur in a climate of militarism and impunity, albeit in starkly different contexts. Accessible justice and protection mechanisms that people were knowledgeable about and kept the public well informed were missing in both situations. Advocacy, mostly from women’s NGOs, around SEA and peacekeeper violence was largely ignored by UNTAET (Joshi 2005). After activism from national women’s organisations and UNTAET’s Human Rights Unit, UNTAET leadership requested some investigations into the most publicly known cases (Olsson 2009, 110). At the beginning of the 2006 crisis, when it became apparent that an increased peacekeeper presence would be required, members of Rede Feto wrote to Ian Martin (at the time Special ­Envoy for the Secretary-General in Timor-Leste) to express what they saw as the key concerns that should be taken into consideration. One concern was the conduct of peacekeepers while on mission in Timor-Leste, and Rede Feto recommended that the UN enforce its policy to prevent SEA and investigate past allegations made against UN personnel (Rede Feto 2006).

Protected women  103 East Timorese organisations were then seemingly familiar with the unintended consequences of a militarised UN presence. Zero tolerance was continually reiterated in Timor-Leste following reports of peacekeeper misconduct in each mission. The Gender Affairs Unit of UNTAET established cultural sensitivity training for incoming peacekeepers, but it was UNMISET that established briefing sessions specifically on SEA, with international staff from UNPOL, peacekeeping contingents, and UN Volunteers attending (Ospina 2006, 11). The second UNMISET SRSG, Sukehiro Hasegawa, also established a commission to investigate claims of peacekeeper sexual misconduct (Koyama & Myrttinen 2007, 29). Continually stating a commitment to zero tolerance – itself problematic (Otto 2007) – has not proven effective in preventing SEA, changing cultures that perpetuate SEA, or protecting and supporting victims of SEA. Consistent with D ­ iane Otto’s claim that the policy represents ‘institutional survival’ (2007), in application, zero tolerance has simply removed from peace operations those who perpetrate SEA (and even then, only if the allegation is ‘substantiated’) and has not provided transparency on the process of investigations or justice mechanisms (Smith 2017). One participant brought up their feelings on the futility of zero tolerance in discussion of mission impact: For me if the mission changes, it’s not a big deal…The only problem with the system [is] in terms of the security and the military. So these people came here and they also [commit] violations against the Timorese woman, and also…they stay together with Timorese girls and then after this the girl has a baby, they just left them, without any responsibility… [The] NGOs, they made a big protest against this kind of attitude… [So] during UNMIT, [former SRSG Atul Khare] started to apply zero tolerance for all UN staff who were involved, or who are the suspects of the sexual violation. But at the end there is still no formal way, or formal justice for them, so it’s not clear at all. So zero tolerance and then after that what next? So it’s not clear. They just leave, they go, you never know what happened next. No justice. (Interview 20) During UNMIT, the mission “issued a banned list of places which could be considered no-go or disreputable in Dili [which meant] no one from the UN should [frequent] those places” (Interview 12). Yet, as Henri Myrttinen has reported, zero tolerance was loosely enforced: “[c]ircumvention of the UNMIT zero-tolerance policy by UNPOL was more or less an open secret, fostering an institutional culture of impunity with respect to sexual misconduct” (2014, 193). Accountability appears to fall through a web of complex legal obligations that fall to troop contributing countries, inaction on behalf of both UN headquarters and particular mission leadership, under-­reporting and a failure to pass on information to domestic populations. The VPU was also supposed to aid in investigations of SEA, but as one participant

104  Protected women explained, there were frequent frustrations with the way the VPU handled cases and the ability for those in Timor-Leste to follow the progress of cases: But what happened was that the [international] staff who are working here, they keep changing every six months or every one year. And mostly when they change they take all the documents. So you lost the chronology of what’s happening or what’s going on with these victims…So the administration or the filing system is really bad and we kept losing the documents and it really affected the victims to get access to justice. And justice would take longer and longer, and even years and years. (Interview 20) This statement reflects the findings of an internal UN report that found endemic failures and long delays in investigations of SEA, despite over a decade of commitments to prevent it and punish perpetrators (Awori, Lutz & Thapa 2013). Indeed, as noted above, poor VPU records were also attributed to the shortcomings of the LADV (Ferguson 2011, 55). My aim here, in positioning the occurrence and ad hoc response to SEA in Timor-Leste in relation to the analysis of protection and domestic violence conducted above, is to demonstrate how some, I argue raced and gendered, perpetrator subjects are reified in protection narratives, while others are minimised. What this means is that the narrative and implementation of protection in Timor-Leste isolated domestic violence – occurring within and involving only ‘local’ spaces and bodies – as constitutive of ‘gendered violence’ in the post-conflict space: other gendered violences, and the relationship between them, are lost in this frame. Victim and perpetrator identities that do not fit the paradigm are subject to less formalised response, or none. Gender (domestic) violence is attributed to and framed as endemic in the local space only and in Timor-Leste was especially attributed to ‘culture’. SEA, on the other hand, is perpetrated by an atomised few who are neither reflective nor (re)productive of gender violence or militarised institutional power. The globalisation of militarism via peace operations is ignored, and so too is the relationship between trafficking and gendered and raced violence (Agathangelou & Ling 2003). Policy responses to SEA – which occurred only with reluctance – simply sought to minimise the impact of SEA on institutional reputation, demonstrated in the lack of support for those who reported SEA and the lack of accountability and transparency in investigations and response. Consistent with theoretical perspectives on the neocolonial tone of victim narratives, Third World women are framed as victims, not of colonial or neocolonial practices, of international interventions or global power structures that have decimated local economies and instituted hollow political institutions. Women at peace operation sites are characterised as victims, particularly of barbaric and violent ‘other’ men, while the direct and structural violence perpetrated by imperialism and neocolonial practices goes

Protected women  105 unnoticed. Critical race perspectives remain relevant regardless of the race of individual peacekeepers, as peace operation interventions mandated by the UN intensify a “particular strain of neoliberal global governance that remains unquestioningly white, male, and bourgeois” (Agathangelou & Ling 2003, 133). The discussion is in no way intended to detract from the important work conducted on preventing domestic violence in the post-conflict space, especially given long-made feminist arguments on the continuation of domestic violence after conflict as the ‘privatisation’ of (gendered) violence and the invisibility of such violence within frameworks that privilege masculine security norms. Rather, the arguments here demonstrate how shuttered narratives on gendered violence obscure some perpetrator and victim subjectivities; they reify and homogenise (othered) women as victims with limited agency; and they obscure relationships between multiple forms of gendered, raced and classed violence, both direct and structural (Agathangelou & Ling 2003). Circulations of power at a number of levels are evident throughout, and those kinds of violence and victims that do not challenge global security narratives, on violence appropriately wielded by legitimate actors, are able to gain significant visibility. Such a raced and sexualised discourse has productive effects. Security, traditionally defined, is improved through the cessation of conflict, yet gendered violence can and does continue, which peacekeepers themselves contribute to. The argument here demonstrates how the primacy given to gender (read: women) in Women, Peace and Security pathologises (some) gender relations (Shepherd 2008; Pratt 2013) and positions gender violence as occurring between (some) men and women. From the epistemological position that violence is ‘out there’ (see Shepherd 2016), perpetrated by and against ‘the other’ and that peace operations will prevent, punish and rectify this violence, the gender violence that becomes visible and actionable is only that which is consistent with this position.

Notes 1 Given the remit of this book, this can only be a partial account. For more detailed accounts of the causes and politics of the 2006–2007 crisis in Timor-Leste, see Scambary (2009) and UN Special Commission (2006). 2 A steering committee was established under the leadership of the Ministry of Health and included representatives from the Ministry of Health, the National Statistics Office, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNFPA and representatives of bilateral donor organizations including the European Union and AusAID (Ministry of Health & National Statistics Office 2004, 15). 3 The IRC study questioned participants on types of conflict within their relationships. This is more limited than the definition of domestic violence used in the LADV, which captures an act or acts committed in a family context, not only between intimate partners (Law No. 7/2010). 4 Abdullah and Myrttinen (2009) also cite lack of reliable data and base their conclusions on their own research and interview material. 5 See also True (2012) for an in-depth examination of the political economy of violence against women globally.

106  Protected women 6 Parts of this chapter appeared in an article published in Australian Journal of International Affairs 2017 © Australian Institute of International Affairs, available online at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/‌10357718.2017.1287877 7 I acknowledge here that SEA, as defined within the Secretary-General’s Bulletin (UN 2003), prohibits interactions between peacekeepers and beneficiaries that may be considered consensual, such as engaging sex workers, and thus disallows agency on the part of those engaging in such work (see Otto 2007).

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108  Protected women Hagen, Jamie J. 2016. “Queering women, peace and security.” International Affairs 92(1): 313–332. Hall, Nina. 2009. “East Timorese women challenge domestic violence.” Australian Journal of Political Science 44(2): 309–325. Hall, Nina & Jacqui True. 2009. “Gender mainstreaming in a post-conflict state: toward democratic peace in Timor-Leste?” In Gender and global politics in the Asia-Pacific, edited by Bina D’Costa & Kate Lee-Koo, 159–174. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrington, Carol. 2011. “Resolution 1325 and post-Cold War feminist politics.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(4): 557–575. Harris-Rimmer, Susan. 2009. “After the guns fall silent: sexual and gender based violence in Timor-Leste.” TLAVA issue brief no. 5, November, www.smallarms survey.org/fileadmin/docs/K-Timor-leste-ava/SAS-Timor-Leste-AVA-IB5ENG.pdf Harris-Rimmer, Susan. 2010. Gender and transitional justice: the women of East ­Timor. Abingdon: Routledge. Higate, Paul & Marsha Henry. 2009. Insecure spaces: peacekeeping, power and performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia. London: Zed Books. High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO). 2015. Uniting our strengths for peace – politics, partnership and people. New York: United Nations. Hudson, Heidi. 2012. “A double-edged sword? Reflections on the tension between representation and protection in gendering liberal peacebuilding.” International Peacekeeping 19(4): 443–460. Hunt, Krista. 2006. ‘“Embedded feminism” and the war on terror.’ In (En)gendering the war on terror: war stories and camouflaged politics, edited by Krista Hunt & Kym Rygiel, 51–72. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hynes, Michelle, Jeanne Ward, Kathryn Robertson & Chadd Crouse. 2004. “A determination of the prevalence of gender based violence among conflict affected populations in East Timor.” Disasters 28(3): 294–321. Jolliffe, Jill. 2001. “Timor’s haunted women.” The Age, 3 November, http://members. pcug.org.au/~wildwood/01novwomen.htm. Joshi, Vijaya. 2005. “Creating and limiting opportunities: women’s organising and the UN in East Timor.” In Challenges and possibilities: international organisations and women in Timor-Leste, edited by Damian Grenfell & Anna Trembath, 29–36. Melbourne: Globalism Institute, RMIT University. Justice System Program. 2011. “Customary law and domestic violence in ­Timor-Leste.” UNDP Timor-Leste, www.tl.undp.org/content/dam/timorleste/ docs/JSP%20docs/TL_JSP_LitReview%20DV_CL_FINALJan2011.pdf Kapur, Ratna. 2002. “The tragedy of victimization rhetoric: resurrecting the “native” subject in international/post-colonial feminist legal politics.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 15: 1–37. Kapur, Amrita & Kelli Muddell. 2016. When no on calls it rape: addressing sexual violence against men and boys in transitional contexts. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. Keck, Margaret & Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kelly, Liz. 2000. “Wars against women: sexual violence, sexual politics and the militarised state.” In States of conflict: gender, violence and resistance, edited by Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson & Jennifer Marchbank, 45–65. New York: Zed Books.

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112  Protected women UN Security Council (UNSC). 2009. “Resolution 1888, 20 September.” www. securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4F F96FF9%7D/WPS%20SRES%201888.pdf UN Security Council (UNSC). 2010. “Report of the secretary-general on the United Nations integrated mission in Timor-Leste.” S/2010/85, 12 February. www.­security councilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF 9%7D/TL%20S2010%2085.pdf UN Security Council (UNSC). 2010. “Resolution 1960, 16 December.” www.security councilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9 %7D/WPS%20SRES%201960.pdf UN Security Council (UNSC). 2013. “Resolution 2106, 24 June.” www.securitycouncil report.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_ res_2106.pdf UN Special Commission. 2006. Report of the United Nations Independent Special Commission of Inquiry for Timor-Leste. Geneva: United Nations. www.ohchr.org/ Documents/Countries/COITimorLeste.pdf UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). 2001. “Presentation to the National Council by Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Transitional Administrator.” Dili, 28 June. http://reliefweb.int/report/timor-leste/east-timor-presentation-nationalcouncil-sergio-vieira-de-mello-special UN Women (UNIFEM). 2016. “Investing in women for peace and future generations: Timor-Leste adopts a national action plan on Security Council resolution 1325.” UN Women, 4 May. www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2016/5/ timor-leste-adopts-a-national-action-plan-on-security-council-resolution-1325 Von Braunmühl, Claudia. 2012. “A feminist analysis of UN Security Council resolutions on Women, Peace, and Security.” In Feminist strategies in international governance, edited by Gülay Caglar, Elisabeth Prügl, & Susanne Zwingel, 163– 180. Abingdon: Routledge. Westendorf, Jasmine-Kim & Louise Searle. 2017. “Sexual exploitation and abuse in peace operations: trends, policy responses and future directions.” International Affairs 93(2): 365–387. Whitworth, Sandra. 2004. Men, militarism and UN peacekeeping. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. ­ imor Winters, Rebecca. 1999. Buibere: voice of East Timorese women. Darwin: East T International Support Centre. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state.” Signs 29(1): 1–25.

5 Still resisting, still organising

The arguments in the preceding two chapters on women’s participation and protection should not be taken to mean that individuals are simply subject to gendered and gendering peace operations. The examinations in each chapter also demonstrated that individuals and groups at mission sites are not passive recipients of peace operation programming but instead actively work to influence peace operations to reflect their own priorities, seeking an ‘ally’ within the mission structure (Pouligny 2006, 184). Given peace operation policy to engage with ‘women’s organisations’ to fulfil both ­gender-inclusive obligations and to engage ‘local’ actors, this chapter examines the position of these actors in Timor-Leste and how their work was circumscribed by working with and through peace operations. The analysis and argument that follows problematises both homogenising and gendering assumptions on women’s organisations and the construction of singular unitary ‘local’ space. In doing so, it discusses the negotiation strategies adopted by some actors to work around resistance to ‘gender’ as a concept and process – a resistance that is in part fomented by the presence of centralised peace operations. The chapter begins with a critical feminist reading of how the role of civil society is positioned in peacebuilding, with ‘women’s organisations’ as a specific narrative within this rhetoric. It then moves to examine the resistance faced by national women’s organisations in Timor-Leste as they worked towards women’s rights and gender equality, and how such resistance was shaped by the presence of centralised peace operations. The argument here is that partnering with UN missions can have destabilising effects for women’s activism in post-conflict settings (Smith 2015). To overcome potential destabilisation, discussed in Chapter 2, women’s organisations identified and explained the synergies between women’s activism during the resistance era and UN gender programming in post-occupation peace operations. The focus here is on national women’s organisations because these were the organisations that acted as interlocutors in successive peace operations on gender policy. The chapter further argues that this effect of peace operations is overlooked by intervening institutions, with resistance to gender programming often framed as emanating solely from ‘patriarchal’

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traditional structures and cultures. This framing obscures that patriarchal norms are evident within peace operations themselves, which generate problems for gender-responsive peacebuilding and peacekeeping, as well as the time and energy expended by women’s organisations to negotiate ‘gender’ through connection with contextualised and relevant histories. In ­Timor-Leste, the view that ‘gender’ was imported and donor driven should also be historicised in relation to the Indonesian occupation era and attendant ‘modernisation’ programs: these too entailed particularly notions of femininity and gender roles that reflected the ideals of Indonesia’s New Order state at the time, often framed in terms of family welfare and improved health outcomes (Loney 2018).

Civil society and ‘women’s organisations’ in the liberal peace In 2000, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expounded the role of civil society in “articulating and defending” global norms and called for the UN to open itself further to civil society expertise (Annan 2000, 69). After establishing a Panel of Eminent Persons to report on UN–civil society relations, Annan wrote that he was “convinced that it would be of benefit to the Organization…to find ways to consult more regularly with civil society” (UNGA 2004, 2). The resultant report, We the peoples: civil society, the United Nations and global governance, the ‘Cardoso Report’, noted that global good governance “was no longer the sole domain of governments”, and that to be effective the UN would have to reach beyond governments to civil society counterparts (ibid, 3). Building and strengthening civil society is thus framed as a lynchpin in peacebuilding efforts and follows the logic of a ‘nexus’ between security and development in that each is mutually reinforcing and constitutive (Stern & Öjendal 2010, 17–18). In this framework, a strong civil society supports both democratisation – as it is seen to sit separate from the state and thus work as a check on centralised or oppressive political authority – and community empowerment – as it is through civil society organisations that individuals and groups can confront and negotiate state power (Kaldor 2003, 585). In turn, ‘civil society’ is used as shorthand to represent ‘local’ needs, voices and interests (Shepherd 2017). The term civil society has been used variously over time to conceptualise different sets of actors and spaces and to perform differing functions, especially in relation to the state. In a liberal vision of “rule governed society based on consent of individuals”, civil society operates as representative of consent and the avenue through which individuals enter public spaces and debate: “through voluntary associations, movements, parties, unions, the individual is able to act publicly” (Kaldor 2003, 585). In this way, civil society is framed as an essential element of democratic society, as constituting a ‘public space’ that is accessible to individuals, separate from yet connected to the political realm of state institutions, and through which citizens can exercise some form of resistance and/or negotiation. The Cardoso

Still resisting, still organising  115 Report defines civil society as “associations of citizens (outside their families, friends and businesses) entered into voluntarily” through which citizens can advance their interests. The report frames civil society as giving particular voice to ‘marginalised’ groups and in turn partnering with civil society as a means for peace and security operations to access these groups (UNGA 2004, 66). It states that “mass organizations (such as organizations of peasants, women or retired people)” amongst others are of “particular relevance” to the UN (UNGA 2004, 13). Civil society organisations have long held a place as implementers of development programs. With development and security seen as increasingly “inextricably linked”, these same organisations have unsurprisingly come to be conceptualised as significant actors in post-conflict peacebuilding and in the instituting of (democratic) security (see Duffield 2001, 22–42; Chandler 2007; Stern & Öjendal 2010). Oliver Richmond has argued that the notion of a ‘civil peace’ dominates the liberal peace consensus and, consequently, “where peacebuilding occurs, it is widely accepted that it must both create and promote a vibrant civil society” (2009, 150). In this view, civil society is necessarily absent from conflict sites, and its (re)institution is part of the linear transformation and modernisation process envisioned in liberal peace efforts. Fostering civil society in post-conflict contexts, then, is considered a legitimate mechanism of building peace, an accepted norm in the peacebuilding toolbox. Conversely, a well-functioning civil society acts as a “crucial validation of liberal peacebuilding strategies and objectives” (Richmond 2009, 150). Therefore, civil society has not only become important to the conceptualisation of liberal peace, it is also expected that civil society actors will support and legitimise intervener activities on the ground to host populations, in part due to their placement as ‘local’ actors, ones envisioned to sit at an interface between (modern, Western, civilised) ‘international’ actors, and (pre-modern, conflict-affected) ‘local’ actors and structures. Ostensibly, the UN posits its partnering with civil society organisations as a means to empower national actors and to localise the operations of peace missions. This aim is articulated in the Cardoso Report, where it argues that partnership will “strengthen the capacity of underrepresented groups to engage with the United Nations, especially women, indigenous groups, disabled people and the poor” (UNGA 2004, 66). This aim responds to a common complaint of peace operations: the top-down, Western modelled implementation processes. There are, however, a number of problematic assumptions contained within this conceptualisation of civil society and the deployment of the concept within peacebuilding narratives (Shepherd 2017; von Billerbeck 2017). To speak of a unitary homogenous local is both demonstrably false and potentially dangerous. The local is conceptualised as a homogenous and uncontested space that can be empowered and co-opted, via civil society, by ‘the international’ to further their own goals (Mac Ginty 2008; Richmond 2009). This demonstrates a lack of understanding of

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diversity within the so-labelled ‘local’ space generally – discussed in more detail in the following chapter – and within the civil society space specifically, which is likely to represent various and competing interests, ideologies and goals (Pouligny 2005). This critique challenges the notion that, first, civil society can be representative of the broader community, and second, that these actors can therefore legitimise peacebuilding policy, two issues addressed throughout this chapter. Moreover, questions have been raised regarding legitimacy, sovereignty and democracy in international interventions and their use of civil society partners. B.S. Chimni, for instance, examines the role of international institutions in forming a “global imperialist state” – domestic actors and NGOs within states decentralise international instruments of global governance, overcoming the issue of state sovereignty “from the inside” (Chimni 2004). National organisations that are used as implementing partners in international interventions implement the programmes of international institutions – actors that are unaccountable to the national population – while the national NGOs become accountable to their donors rather than communities (Belloni 2008). Thus, it is necessary to also question assumptions that, in working with peace operations, civil society organisations are automatically or inherently empowered. The fostering of and partnering with some civil society actors in peace operations, then, provides the perception of legitimacy and consent for a particular model of statehood, and by extension world order. This follows a Gramscian notion of hegemony, in that it is through consent, rather than domination exercised through the coercive machinery of the state, that hegemonic power is maintained. Applying this framework to peace operations, consent is garnered via civil society and “hegemony is attained through the myriad ways in which the institutions of civil society operate to shape…the cognitive and affective structures whereby [individuals] perceive and evaluate problematic social reality” (Femia 1987, 24). In this view, civil society is not so much a check on dominative power, but rather a mechanism of hegemonic power, extending and maintaining relations of power throughout the state. Further to this, as Agathangelou and Ling suggest, hegemony thus conceived is not simply about preserving elite interest but also systematically erases “all other ways of seeing, doing, being, and relating to the world” (2009, 2). This critique highlights the disciplinary and regulative aspects of peace operations and their deployment of civil society actors. From this view, rather than civil society partnering representing local legitimacy, it is a hollow mechanism that performs population consent and contribution. Autesserre (2014) and others (Hughes 2009b) have demonstrated how the knowledge of the ‘other’ in peace operations is construed, devalued, minimised and marginalised. Therefore, it is also important to consider the constructed nature of the categories of civil society, local and international, and their productive nature in terms of reinforcing, rather than challenging,

Still resisting, still organising  117 gendered hierarchical relations of power. Laura Shepherd highlights what she terms a “politics of space” attached to the conceptualisation and use of ‘civil society’ within peacebuilding discourse (2017). The discourse of civil society is productive of gendered hierarchies, and the framing of civil society as ‘local’ partners through which international actors can access marginalised groups constructs and places each in dominant–subordinate relation to the other. Norms and ideals originate in the abstract institutional space and are then ‘filtered’ to national and local partners via civil society. This positioning produces a hierarchy of actors in which the knowledge, experience and expertise of ‘civil society’ and, by extension, local actors, is subordinated to the objective and universally relevant knowledge of international institutions. This hierarchy is visible, Shepherd argues, in the ‘direction’ in which information is understood to move; that is, “the flow of expertise travels in one direction: ‘down’” (2017, 88). Indeed, this trajectory is evident in the nomenclature that represents ‘locally’ driven peacebuilding as ‘bottom-up’, as opposed to the internationally driven ‘top-down’, and local perspectives on peace operations are often described as coming ‘from below’ (see Pouligny 2005). Thus, knowledge and experience relevant to ‘peace’ is constructed in hierarchy, which in turn constitutes what counts or is seen as knowledge. Power constitutes differential value given to different knowledge ‘blocs’, and in ‘systemising’ knowledge (in this case of peace and peacebuilding), subjugated knowledge or blocs are made invisible (Foucault 1980, 81–82). Subjugated knowledge is that which has been “disqualified as inadequate to its task or insufficiently elaborate” (ibid, 82). In peace operations, the knowledge and experience of international actors, reflecting ‘international norms’, is considered superior and objective and can thus be imparted into any given context: the international realm is considered a “domain of peace that owns the necessary knowledge to ‘develop’ domestic [post-conflict] societies” (Shepherd 2008, 166). This is in contrast to local, subjective knowledge that is muddied by contextual factors, not least of which is the conflict context. Both the falsity of this performed binary and its production of power differentials is neatly captured in the following vignette from Séverine Autesserre: Michael Losembe, a Congolese businessman, was shocked by the way interveners treated him and other Congolese elites. To him, foreign peacebuilders communicated condescendingly, as though they were saying, “Here is how things work in the rest of the world; don’t you realize how far you deviate from that?!” He felt that the expatriates did not listen to the ideas of the Congolese, and they regularly made their Congolese counterparts feel underqualified. Frustrated by this attitude, Michael decided to conduct an experiment. He was from mixed background, American-born, with Belgian, Portuguese, and Congolese ancestors, and he could pass for someone of another nationality with relative ease. One day, instead of introducing himself as Congolese, he told the group

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Still resisting, still organising that he came from Puerto Rico. The result was clear: “The attitude in the meeting” was “completely different.” The interveners listened to his ideas with respect and interest. He found he had much more credibility and influence when he passed as an outsider. (Autesserre 2014, 59)

The obvious racial dimension that underlies sanitised debates on ‘local’ and ‘international’ is stark in this excerpt. In Timor-Leste, some participants noted that significant knowledge was gained through the experience of resistance to military occupation and clandestine organising, which was important to the process of building peace in the country; however, this had been excluded from the functions of peace operations (Interview 17). In discussion on the exclusion of large numbers of people from high-level peacebuilding processes, an issue addressed in Chapter 2 as well, one participant stated, “Everyone already has knowledge, and we have to develop that… Everyone has experience working in the clandestine time, in a different way” (Interview 3). The reference to “a different way” points to the disjuncture between this knowledge and experience on the one hand, and what counted as knowledge, relevant to peace operations, in the eyes of interveners on the other.1 The issue of devaluing some knowledge while valorising other is also evident in practices of training and evaluation. As part of their engagement with civil society actors, the UN provides training to facilitate ‘socialisation’, which is considered by some as indicative of the coercive aspects of peacebuilding and the performative aspects of gender (Belloni 2008; ­Marchand 2009). Training dictates how organisations and populations can be held accountable and can monitor themselves and how others evaluate their conduct, as well as legitimising the good governance of the UN (­Phillips 2005, 653). Gender is but one area in which communities are continually evaluated, along with other issue areas such as health and education (Hughes 2009a,  53). From a critical perspective, ‘training’ has broad connotations relating to the ‘training’ of disorderly populations into a particular style of liberal governance, consistent with world order (Pugh 2004; Darby 2009; Hughes 2009a; Jabri 2013). The UN employs ‘experts’ who then act as agents in globalising a particular mode of governance (Väyrynen 2004, 131). In peace operations, experts are sent to conflict or post-­conflict ­countries – experts in security, governance, economic reconstruction, gender or ­development, for example – who then define what is needed to reconstruct the conflict-­affected state and build it in a manner that will conform to a particular model of ‘good governance’, which should ensure the smooth transformative trajectory of peacebuilding; failure is attributed to national-­ level institutions, actors, norms and/or ‘weak governance’. As Caroline Hughes has argued, “United Nations Special Representatives [in peace operations] are fond of pronouncing…their intention to ‘build a new country’, using international expertise and resources and ‘lessons learned’ from experience in other trouble spots” (2009b, 2).

Still resisting, still organising  119 Therefore, the praxis of peace operations constitutes both ‘the local’ – the domain of intervention and site of behaviour change – and ‘the international’ – who is the “imperfect but necessary regulator of world order” (Heathershaw 2008, 329; see also Jabri 2013). Peace operations can therefore be framed in Foucauldian perspectives as activities in regulation, training and reformation of ‘abnormal’ states and their institutions (Zanotti 2006; Reeves 2012). From this perspective, the construction and utilisation of civil society as both democratic balance and ‘local’ actor is indicative of the disciplinary and paternalistic ideologies that sit at the root of much ideology on international interventions. Engaging with women’s organisations in host countries is a central pillar of the UN’s approach to incorporating both civil society and a gender perspective into its peace operations (Shepherd 2017). As noted above, the Cardoso Report explicitly states that ‘mass organisations of women’ are of particular importance to the UN, presumably because engagement with civil society is framed as a mechanism to “strengthen the capacity of underrepresented groups to engage with the United Nations, especially women…” (UNGA 2004, 66). Resolution 1325 calls for “measures that support local women’s peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution” and “expresses the willingness” of the Security Council to consult with local women’s organisations. Security Council resolution 1888 states that the promotion and empowerment of women and that support for women’s organizations and networks are essential in the consolidation of peace to promote the equal and full participation of women and encouraging Member States, donors, and civil society, including non-­ governmental organizations, to provide support in this respect. (UNSC 2009) In 2012, the Security Council reaffirmed its commitments to the Women, Peace and Security agenda by calling on the international community to give women’s civil society organisations a prominent role in peacemaking, in the planning and implementation of peace agreements, and in post-­conflict reconstruction (UN News Centre 2012). Engaging women’s organisations in peace operations is therefore framed as a mechanism to support gender-­ inclusive peacebuilding, as a means of improving women’s empowerment and protection in host countries and as a means of promoting a more substantive peace. There are a number of issues that can be raised on this point. One issue is the feminisation of civil society broadly (Shepherd 2017), which positions it as attached but in lower status to the ‘state’, the site in which political and economic authority is located. Feminisation is understood as the gendered coding and privileging of that which is masculinised over that which is feminised: “…the more an individual or a social category is feminized, the more likely…that its devaluation is assumed, or presumed to be ‘explained’”

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(Peterson 2010, 18–19). Moreover, “institutionalized hierarchies are naturalized by feminization and thus are effectively depoliticized” (Peterson 2010, 17, emphasis original). Laura Shepherd demonstrates the feminisation of civil society in part via the frequently used lexicon of ‘civil society organisations, such as/including women’s organisations’ (Shepherd 2017, 140–142), much like the use of ‘women and children’ decried by feminist scholars as the gendered representation of ‘vulnerable subjects’ to which the UN and other institutions so frequently refer. In short, there is an operation of gendered power that informs the “logics of space” that see women and ‘women’s organisations’ being located within depoliticised civil society, which is in turn attached to the ‘local’ space (Shepherd 2017, 24). This move significantly undermines politicised feminist activism and inherently frames programming on gender and women as non- or apolitical. Moreover, it is of course deeply interwoven with and extends processes of NGO-isation, which were examined in Chapter 2. In Timor-Leste, how the UN and its agencies positioned its engagement with ‘women’ and the pre-existing women’s movement is fundamentally a story of their seeking to engage ‘women’s organisations’ in the civil society space. Women’s organisations – non-politicised entities that focused their programs on areas that reflected the UN’s notions of ‘gender-based’ work – were utilised as vehicles to ‘socialise’ gender ideals broadly and to implement certain programs. One former director of an NGO that had been established prior to 1999 and worked with the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) expressed frustration at having to single out gender-based projects: We were all you know, members, activists for the resistance, nowadays they call veterans, so we knew a lot, it was not on one issue, we could speak about economy, could speak about health, could speak about women, could speak about youth, we could speak about violence, we could speak about reconciliation all this stuff… Well, they [the UN] came and talked to us numerous times, I don’t even count, about gender and I kept asking “what do you mean about gender?” I mean I knew what it was but why? “Oh, well because in the UN the gender issues now is one of the relevant issues”, and that’s fine but then they ask us how many gender-based projects we have, I said, look…gender-based is the maternal health, that’s the only specific gender-based programme we have. Our organisation, we made sure that there was balance [in terms of staffing], maybe in the short term we had many, many, many men because of the, you know, the unloading things, distributing things, you need men for that. But when we…the emergency period ended with the first government in 2001 or 2002…we had maybe a 100 and something staff so it was about 48–52, and it varied between 48–52, 49–51 and so very rarely went below that so we were quite happy with the gender balance, but it was the policies that I was concerned about. We did

Still resisting, still organising  121 literacy and numeracy programs, but it was not on their agenda… So we did literacy and numeracy for a few years in the rural areas, we did also maternal health and nutrition… Our projects were never funded by UN. The UN came and took a lot our time, wanted numerous information, but they never paid us one cent to do this project, which we found very valuable. (Interview 21) Relegating gender policy to civil society, attaching it to ‘women’ and isolating it from other issue areas homogenises women and positions their interests around ‘gender’, ones that can be ameliorated via engagement with depoliticised civil society organisations. It was civil society partners that challenged successive missions on certain issues, and those relating to women’s political participation and the Law Against Domestic Violence (LADV) were most successful. The director of a national women’s organisation explained how gender work was disseminated via women’s organisations in Timor-Leste: [They hear gender] from all social organisations. From the UN, from the government, from civil society…I think mostly from civil society organisations, because the UN used us, the civil society organisations, to deliver this information. There is a kind of human rights, I think they do directly, but in other agencies they use civil society organisations to spread this information through the community and let them know about this terminology that we use and since we cannot use this [gender] terminology but we use [the explanation] that men and women both have rights for this, for that. [It is] especially focused on primary basic needs: school, health, economic things to survive. (Interview 26) Related to the use of civil society as ‘local’ partners to ‘socialise’ ideal liberal gender norms is the assumption of patriarchy and resistance to gender programming as only attached to the ‘local’ space. Peace operations thus require civil society organisations to be the interface between the international and the site where behaviours are in need of change. In Timor-Leste, for instance, there was frequent reference to the need to ‘socialise’ various international norms and practices, something that could be achieved via civil society engagement. This obscures that patriarchal norms are evident within peace operations themselves, which generate problems for gender-­ responsive peacebuilding, as well as the time and energy needed to negotiate gender. Essentially, women’s organisations are seen as intermediaries to larger social groups through which international gender norms can be channelled and implemented (Alvarez in El-Kassem 2008). The following section problematises these assumptions further through examination of the resistance faced by East Timorese national women’s organisations and

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how their position was circumscribed by the need to partner with successive peace operations. This need was produced through two parallel developments discussed previously – the dependence of these organisations on donor funding, a dependency produced in the immediate post-­occupation period (see also Hughes 2009b on this point); and the need to work with peace operations as a way to access the political and economic elite ­decision-making structures.

Negotiating ‘gender’ post-occupation2 Gender mainstreaming and the ‘gender perspective’ outlined in Women, Peace and Security resolutions are representative of gender norms that are sought to be included in peace operations and seek to institute gender equality as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The discourses of these norms are framed by modernist assumptions that posit the liberal view of gender as an objective rationale that can be ‘brought’ to spaces, locations and ‘cultures’ to achieve gender equality. This is not to deny that diverse groups contributed to these resolutions and brought them into being, or that differently located actors seek to implement the principles of Women, Peace and Security (Basu 2016). However, in peace operations, these discourses are “confined” by modernity and obscure their own construction of the subjects they produce (Väyrynen 2004). Importantly, ‘gender’, understood in the liberal modernist view, is implicitly and explicitly set against ‘culture’ or spaces/peoples/groups that harbour gender-discriminatory norms, rather than gender-equal norms, and which can be located external to the liberal modern structures that propagate gender equality via gender mainstreaming and the policies that incorporate a (liberal, modern) gender perspective (Merry 2003a; Winter, Thompson & Jeffreys 2002). This is not to say that gender-discriminatory or problematic norms or assumptions do not exist, but rather that they are discursively constructed as outside of and separate from international gender norms that are incorporated into peace operations and thus often outside of peace operations themselves.3 For example, in her ethnographic research on the international human rights system and its approach to violence against women, Sally Merry found that in international discourse it is ‘traditional’ cultures that are generally characterised as barriers to progress, with traditionalism and culture understood as static, place-bound and unchanging (2003a, 2003b). As Merry writes, “[a]pparently cultures have no contact with the expansion of capitalism, the arming of various groups by transnational superpowers using them for proxy wars, or the cultural possibilities of human rights as an emancipatory discourse” (2003a, 55).4 As is evident in the history delineated in the introduction, East Timorese activists had a long history of engaging and deploying human rights rhetoric and tools. It was through these frameworks that they had for so long demanded their right to self-determination and independence. Documents such as resolution 1325 (and subsequent Women,

Still resisting, still organising  123 Peace and Security resolutions) focus their attention on post-conflict states “articulated in association with predicates such as ‘local’ and ‘indigenous’” (Shepherd 2008, 165). In this view, the local/post-conflict/conflict-affected site is associated with traditionalism, which is in turn construed as antithetical to the Western liberal norms of gender and human rights, which the ‘international community’ seeks to transport. Certainly post-conflict reconstruction can provide opportunities to empower women and improve gender equality, as do periods of conflict itself (True 2013; Meintjes, Pillay & Turshen 2001). Yet when the push to engender improved gender equality is perceived as emanating solely from international actors with little recognition of local context – when packaged with centralised peace operations – this can provoke resistance, due in no small part to histories of colonialism that employed similar notions of modernisation (Coomaraswamy 2002, 487). Moreover, any failure or challenges to implementation can be ascribed to local disorder, especially given the context of ‘post-conflict’ or ‘conflict-affected’ rather than to issues with intervention or the policy and practice of peace operations and the large influx of international donors (Hughes 2009b). In attempts to find the universal nature of women’s oppression and of patriarchy, gender oppression is “subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-western barbarism” (Butler 2006, 5). Understanding resistance to ‘gender’ as solely located in and emanating from patriarchal domestic structures is consistent with colonial civilising rhetoric, which sought to rectify the ‘barbarism’ of the colonial other. Radhika Coomaraswamy connects the denigration of the cultural ‘other’ to the historical legacy of colonialism, in which attention was focused on certain cultural practices that discriminated against women in order to “denigrate the third world ‘other’” (2002, 484–485). To counter essentialising rhetoric, it is important to understand culture(s) as performatively produced and that “the representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition” (Bhabha 1994, 2). Such a reading offers insight and understanding into how difference is socially articulated and fluid. Throughout research conducted in Timor-Leste, multiple statements positioned ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘culture’: as culture being the source of resistance to ‘gender’ and why gender policy was difficult to implement, and in relation to ‘gender’ being viewed as a Western imposition that sought to dislodge or override East Timorese culture.5 Gender, as a policy programme and concept, has certainly been politicised in post-conflict Timor-Leste, and the view that it is a ‘thing’ that is from ‘outside’ that has been ‘brought’ has been expressed by elite actors as well. Prime Minister Xanana ­Gusmão articulated his angst that peace operations and the influx of donors represented a contemporary form of imperialism. In 2001, he explicitly attached the international presence in Timor-Leste with the concept of ‘gender’ when he spoke out against what he saw as an “obsessive acculturation to standards that hundreds of international experts try to convey to the East Timorese,

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who are hungry for values [including] gender…What seems to be absurd is that we absorb standards just to pretend we look like a democratic society and please our masters of independence” (in Charlesworth & Wood 2002, 335). This quote is one example of how gender was part of a political ‘line in the sand’ over what was ‘local’ and East Timorese, and what was ‘international’ and imported. Such sentiments continue, and as Irena Cristalis and Catherine Scott explain, For East Timorese men opposed to cultural change in gender relations, blaming the UN for importing feminist or ‘Western’ ideas has been both logical and easy. Some men have threatened to campaign for a return to women’s subordination when the UN leaves. The backlash has led women activists to reconsider the rights-based approach that has framed their strategies over the past decade. (2005, 163) ‘Gender’, understood as isolating its concerns to women, has been framed then as an international construct largely imposed in Timor-Leste, rather than as a continuation of pre-existing advocacy around women’s rights, which began in 1975. This was explained by one UN agency staff member who stated that in Timor-Leste, “‘gender’ is seen as a process brought on by donors” (Interview 12), a perception that serves to eradicate both women’s contributions to the resistance struggle and activism for women’s rights before and during the period of Indonesian occupation. Moreover, this understanding fails to take into consideration the fact that East Timorese women’s groups themselves influenced the UN’s own commitments to gender mainstreaming, such as during UNTAET, where the Gender Affairs Unit took as its mandate the Platform for Action produced at the First National Women’s Congress, and the ongoing advocacy that led to the eventual development of the LADV. The resistance that gender programming faced was also framed by one participant as related to power: “gender inequality is not about culture, but about attitude. Those who have power want to maintain it, and a way of doing this is to keep women from increasing their share of power” (Interview 16). ‘Culture’ and ‘tradition’ were characterised as a barrier that confronted successive UN missions with complex hurdles in Timor-Leste. East Timorese culture was positioned in binary opposition to the modernist project of liberal gender equality as packaged in peace operations. East Timorese cultures, and patriarchal norms within them, were characterised by a number of participants as the biggest obstacle to institutionalising and internalising gender equality in Timor-Leste. The patriarchy of East Timorese culture was framed as all-encompassing and universal throughout Timor-Leste regardless of geography or social positions and despite the heterogeneous nature of East Timorese customs and belief systems (see Hicks 2007; ­McWilliam & Traube 2011; Niner 2013). In these formulations, all East Timorese women

Still resisting, still organising  125 were assumed to be subjected to patriarchy in the same way and to the same degree. As one participant explained, Our office was a source of information on many issues and they question me, “why are Timorese women so subservient?” How do you know they are subservient? I mean based on what? This is a general perception, culturally…I could ask the same questions to you anywhere in the world, why are your women so subservient? I said if characteristics of culture during a certain period of time [were discriminatory] then I would say sorry, Europe was really bad, and Australia is not doing very well either. So I said if you ask me this type of question, I don’t have the answers, because I don’t see every Timorese woman as subservient, starting from me. (Interview 21) The participant continued: They lost interest in me because…at the end I learnt with time, that if I really wanted to say go away in a very diplomatic way this is the way how to answer the questions. So I was not answering the questions, I was making their lives very complicated…they couldn’t answer me so they would find someone else who were subservient to their questions. (Interview 21) The security of foreign women was also called into question as the patriarchal culture evident in Timor-Leste could “manifest itself in aggression towards malae [foreign] women who come to Timor-Leste to live and work” (Interview 10).6 The cohesive nature of culture was also assumed, as explained by one participant, a staff member of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), who felt there was “an assumption of a patriarchal system [in Timor-Leste] and that this system was well established; this [is] used as an excuse rather than seen as a site in which behaviours can change” (Interview 13). Other examples related to the tension between ‘formal justice’ and ‘traditional justice’ include that the formal justice system was viewed as an “abstract system” that “mirrors international standards and is not affected by violence and power”, whereas the traditional justice system, and traditional culture more broadly, was “more permeable”; and that the violence of the occupation period had “contaminated” the traditional justice system (Interview 10). This demonstrates the assumed (gender) neutrality of formal/ international justice systems, a presumption contradicted by feminist legal scholars (Charlesworth, Chinkin & Wright 1991), as well as by the significant advocacy and energy that has gone into incorporating issues of gender equality and gender violence into international legal doctrines (Copelon 2000). In Timor-Leste, during the Second National Women’s Congress in 2004, ‘culture’ was emphasised as central to the resulting Platform for Action, and

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a gender analysis of cultural practices was stressed again at the 2008 Congress (Niner 2012, 139). The 2001 Women’s Charter of Rights in East Timor contained an article that concerned tradition and women’s rights (Cristalis & Scott 2005, 80–81). This article specifically argued for equal rights to inheritance, regulation of barlake and polygamy to prevent violence against women, and increased representation in traditional decision-making processes (Cristalis & Scott 2005, appendix 4, 180–181). Therefore, there are evident concerns among East Timorese women’s activists that some traditional practices and their interpretation undermine women’s rights in the country. Moreover, patriarchal attitudes are indeed evident in Timor-Leste, and these are perpetuated by both women and men (Trembath, Grenfell & Noronha 2010, 11). The director of one national women’s organisation noted how patriarchal attitudes in Timor-Leste could present obstacles, but that there was also a lot of work happening to combat such perceptions: Usually when we discuss with gender advisors, they say that “oh your system, the patriarchal system is very strong”. I said yeah we cannot just change in one minute or one year, it’s a long process. But it’s good, the ideas, we are starting with the ideas and then how to implement takes ages. (Interview 24) While there is an ‘inward-facing’ aspect to gender mainstreaming in peace operations, this is generally concerned with improving the UN’s own standing in terms of gender balance in staff and improving its response to gendered concerns in conflict and post-conflict settings. It is less concerned with how the presence of peace operations themselves shape, define and interact with normative conceptions of masculinity (on this see Myrttinen 2014) and femininity in the domestic setting and its own role in defining such conceptions, nor indeed with how the structure of peace operations may provoke resistance to their work. Conceptualising an ‘interface’ between international (gender-equal) norms and local (gender-discriminatory) norms is challenged by Agathangelou and Ling’s formulation of the neo-liberal imperium (2009). Here they draw on Nandy’s diagnosis of hypermasculinity as a reactionary form of ‘hegemonic masculinity’: “bouts of hypermasculinity occur when patriarchal elites goad each other on, escalating the inflations, exaggerations and distortions with each round” (2009, 3). Peace operations themselves bring patriarchal elites; at least this was certainly the case in ­Timor-Leste, where they interacted with and at times goaded, or were goaded by, the East Timorese political elite (see for instance ­Xanana Gusmão’s quote above). As discussed in Chapter 2 as well, women’s organisations and activists were tasked with lobbying both the UN and East Timorese elite to access decision-making. The politicisation of gender and its positioning as separate from and above ‘traditional culture’ thus presented significant work for those activists and organisations that were speaking and doing gender in post-conflict

Still resisting, still organising  127 Timor-Leste. This is despite a long (pre-peace operations) history of activism for women’s rights and equality in Timor-Leste. However, as one p ­ articipant explained, “they used a different theory and language”; therefore, “gender” as used within peace operations was seen as “new” (Interview  11). How this is negotiated by various actors has been highlighted by some as a demonstration of how the language of international documents is ‘localised’ (­Levitt & Merry 2009). Beyond this, though, it further demonstrates how peace operations themselves are productive of an environment that can provoke resistance and undermine the ability of various actors, especially those relating to women’s rights and gender, to be able to work in these areas. The structure and function of peace operations in Timor-Leste in part served to sever national women’s organisations from broader collective bases (see Smith 2015) and marginalised existing structures, as discussed in Chapter 2. Those organisations that successive peace operations did partner with worked from a position vested with less power and resources than elite political and economic structures, which were primarily framed by the demands of the IMF and World Bank. In the face of resistance, a number of individuals located in national women’s organisations talked of negotiating gender. Much of this related to explaining that ‘gender’ is not an imported or foreign concept and is in fact consistent with women’s prior activism in Timor-Leste, the principles of the resistance movement and East Timorese culture. For example, the head of one national women’s organisation with a long history of advocating for women’s rights in Timor-Leste said about the organisations work: “this is not gender from outside, we already struggled for that…we cannot use the gender terminology but we use another way” (Interview 26). Such negotiations are essentially about trying to find a synergy between the existing women’s movement and the language of ‘gender’ that was viewed as attached to the international presence. In part, this has meant some women’s organisations have needed to disassociate themselves from the international presence. In turn, then, some activists emphasised the pre-existing women’s movement in Timor-Leste and connected this activism with the struggle for independence. As explained by the director of one national women’s NGO, I think that since they start they use gender, just gender. When they established the Gender Affairs Units they start with this language, and also in the dissemination they use gender. But Timorese people, we are the ones who explain that gender means this and that, so we use our own languages to tell them what these things are. But some people think that gender is a thing from abroad, from outside, not ours, not from our culture, but when we explain it yeah even before [1999] we know gender. When, during the resistance, we struggle for our self-determination, we struggle for our rights; this is gender too. Women have to have access to these rights, this is gender; men have these, children have these, this is gender. We know the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] talks

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Still resisting, still organising about these rights, so if women cannot get them, or men or children cannot get them, then this is not right, this is inequality. This is kind of another way to explain to people. If you talk about the UN, they use this terminology and then when they are in the explanation we the local people have to explain about what gender means, what are gender roles and everything, and relate it to their daily life, work, or interconnections or interrelated things and analyse these things. (Interview 26)

The participant continued: But it’s not just one day, not just one day or two days, it’s a big job, from 1999 to now. And we have to bring that to the resistance time, how women and men worked together to fight to get our independence. And we have to analyse again during the occupation women do men’s roles or not, or just follow you…we have to analyse these things, we have to analyse everything. This is the way. (Interview 26) As the previous quotation demonstrates, connecting gender to the resistance struggle was a tactic of negotiation when seeking to work on gender issues. The narrative of heroic resistance remains politically salient in post-­occupation Timor-Leste, and political legitimacy is in part garnered through participation in armed resistance (Leach & Kingsbury 2013, 22–23). This has further marginalised women from post-conflict recovery processes, such as veteran payment schemes (Kent & Kinsella 2015), and has made it difficult for women to capitalise on their resistance efforts. Women have been framed as victims of the occupation rather than its agents, which has been an easy frame for political leaders to rely on given that, although integral, women were less often armed compared to men (Interview 13). Resistance to gender equality has been neither fixed nor uniform throughout each UN mission. According to two participants, the gains made in terms of gender equality in the early years of UN peace operations (1999– 2004) were hard won by both the East Timorese women’s movement and the support they received from international actors, like gender units and UN agencies (Interview 2 and 12). During UNMIT, though, these same participants felt that there was increasing awareness and familiarity with concepts relating to gender, noting that there were improvements in some areas like sharing of household tasks and women’s access to public sector roles (Interview 2 and 12). Discussion here of women’s organisations negotiating gender highlights the ways that different actors contextualise norms in particular settings. In connecting post-occupation gender work to the resistance movement, East Timorese women’s activists were overcoming the notion that ‘gender’ is an imported culture and instead related directly to their historical and

Still resisting, still organising  129 contemporary work. One prominent male gender equality advocate discussed that even where there may not be resistance to gender, exactly what behaviour was expected to follow gender trainings and focus groups was unclear. For example, following workshops some participants would approach this advocate to ask, “we are confused, how do we do it [gender]?” (Interview 23). This is consistent with Krook and True’s contention that the actual “content” of norms relating to gender can be vague, much less their relationship with a feminist transformation of social relations (2012; see also Zalewski 2010). Resistance to gender programmes in Timor-Leste was additionally characterised by rural-urban differences, and suspicion was directed towards those national-level actors connected to the urban space. ‘National level’ was used to describe the level at which the UN operated, as well as the national Dili-based organisations that were generally able to garner UN and international donor support. ‘Local level’ was used to describe the outer (non-urban) districts or village-level space, where resources were more limited. This is in direct opposition to the way in which ‘local’ is used in international peace rhetoric, where it is used to denote the ‘domestic’ space of the host state, whereas here it denotes heterogeneity and hierarchy within the domestic arena. Peace operations in Timor-Leste were centralised at the national (urban) level, with their activities, outputs, and associated benefits centralised in that space (Moxham & Caparic 2013). The economic benefits of peacebuilding in Timor-Leste have been concentrated in Dili, and even then distributed unequally (Moxham & Caparic 2013, 3124). This is consistent with broader criticisms of the liberal peace operations, where unequal peace dividends threaten the legitimacy of these interventions, especially those who are frustrated by feelings of exclusion from the benefits of peacebuilding (Scambary 2009). In general, this reflects the broader abstraction of the UN’s work and outputs from people’s day-to-day lives; as the director of one national NGO suggested, “many people feel that the UN is so far from us” (Interview 14). This issue contributes to the resistance faced by national women’s organisations, especially where they faced similar legitimacy issues in the eyes of ‘local’ populations as international interveners did. One participant explained the frustration of feeling that the gender and peace operation work was only conducted in the urban space: And then like the activity, talking about the activity that involves the women, like women’s day or rural women’s day: loron feto rural [rural women’s day]. Sometimes the community says, “we didn’t feel that women’s day”. This is to celebrate for all women in Timor-Leste, to involve all women, but they say that the activity is only in the centre, only in Dili. But for the district? No one is coming to do the activity. They say that they have a small grant, they get funding [for example, from the Secretary of State for the Promotion of Equality] but that this is

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Still resisting, still organising not much, only for the implementation. But they have a plan, they have a lot of plans, for every day, but they say that they didn’t have money, they can’t do that, because the only activity is in the centre…This is difficult for the rural involvement. This can be a challenge for women’s involvement. Oh they are talking a lot, speaking a lot, but they didn’t do anything from that [discussion]. They didn’t visit; sometimes they need to visit to see the situation. (Interview 5)

The centralisation of state- and peacebuilding instituted during the UN transitional administration immediately post-occupation has continued in Timor-Leste (Cummins 2014). This quote demonstrates ongoing tensions regarding gender programming. There has been a distinct lack of funding for rural groups, as peace and development interventions have focused on larger, centrally based organisations. Beyond this, though, the discussion demonstrates that the issue is not necessarily one of rural or smaller organisations lacking knowledge, skill or experience, but rather one of lack of funding and support, a situation that arises from the assumption that these rural organisations lack knowledge, skill and experience. The rural, nonelite space is envisaged as one that does not ‘know’ about ‘gender’, when limitations arguably lie as much with lack of funding and interest on the part of donors and, subsequently, national-level organisations. Like elsewhere, Timor-Leste is not a homogenised space of equally placed women and men. A distinct difference is that between the urban centre, Dili, and Timor-Leste’s rural areas, as well as socio-economic inequalities present in both urban and rural settings. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty stated that poverty in Timor-Leste was “pervasive and widespread” and that the majority of the population living in rural areas were trapped in intergenerational cycles of poverty (UN News Centre 2011). Fractious debates during elections in 2017 and 2018 focused on development spending and criticisms of the government penchant for large construction contracts awarded to multinational companies (Leach 2018). Much of the formal gender mainstreaming benefits have remained centralised in Dili, which is also true of other peace dividends such as access to jobs, education, health care, formal legal systems and so on. One member of the East Timorese women’s movement, active since the resistance, recounted that in working with the UN, the activities of national women’s organisations also became more centralised, as this was where resources and funding were located: All the UN bodies were concentrated at the national level. So the activities from women were also concentrated at the national level, all the information that we got, the leadership or training that we got. So in the rural areas they cannot reach this information, no radio, no communications, sometimes we go but not so frequently. So this is a gap. (Interview 26)

Still resisting, still organising  131 This suggests that resistance to ‘gender’ must also be understood in the context of a heavily centralised international presence after 1999, which was again intensified after 2006. Individuals within women’s organisations also expressed frustration at times with the top-heavy approach to peacebuilding. This was particularly acute at ‘emergency times’, such as the immediate post-1999 period and the 2006–2007 crisis period in Dili (Interview 14). Following the 2006 crisis and the establishment of UNMIT, one participant explained that some women’s organisations felt that they had to relinquish control of programs in the face of a heavily increased peacekeeping presence that again dominated the donor landscape (Interview 14).7 Mistrust and apathy directed towards ‘national-level’ bodies like the government and the UN missions were also directed towards those ­national-level women’s organisations that partnered with UN agencies. This was compounded by the perception, detailed above, that ‘gender’ was an imported cultural framework that sought to dislodge East Timorese culture. Resistance to gender programs was fuelled by the perception that national organisations were only working in partnership with the UN and implementing imported programmes rather than the organisations advocating for equality in their own right. The participant cited above continued: And they say “you are from the national [level], gender is from the outside”…And then because everything is concentrated at the [national level]…they thought that we are influenced by the malae [foreigners] to deliver this information…Not just suspicious of malae, but us too, me too. Because we’re from the urban areas. (Interview 26) Some authors have pointed out that the use of local or national organisations and civil society organisations in implementing gender norms in peacebuilding contexts can destabilise unity across geographic and socioeconomic lines in support of gender equality (Smith 2015). In Timor-Leste, the presence of the gender units was important for women’s organisations and activists to be able to gain traction within peace operations, and then in turn national political mechanisms. However, engagement with gender units and peace operations also meant that women’s activism has had to conform to a particular regime, thus empowering only those who do so. NGOs become the primary mechanism through which women’s activists can engage with international institutions like the UN, meaning activism is channelled into depoliticised civil society structures. For example, Nadeen El-Kassem’s research on international democracy promotion in Iraq found that an outcome of such work was that those voices that were critical or oppositional to the content of the democracy promotion agenda were sidelined and marginalised (2008). In terms of incorporating a gender perspective into peace operations, concerns have been raised about bureaucratic

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and elite tendencies that can easily exclude national women’s movements (­Sainsbury & Bergqvist 2009), and over the perceived unwillingness on the part of the Security Council specifically to engage with alternative feminist frameworks, ones that do not match their own interests (Al-Ali & Pratt 2009; Otto 2010; Gibbings 2011). Sainsbury and Bergqvist suggest that a bureaucratic approach limits any potential for a transformative effect on gender relations and instead gender work has “degenerated into a discussion of methods and techniques” (2009, 217). The discussion above identifies such a process in Timor-Leste. Examination of the resistance faced by national gender equality advocates in Timor-Leste challenges the assumption that national organisations will legitimise peacebuilding activities on the ground. Instead, national women’s organisations in Timor-Leste were caught up with the same legitimacy issues of the successive UN peace operations, and the broader ‘international community’, that were present in Timor-Leste, especially during ‘emergency periods’. Conceptually, national women’s organisations were attached to the UN presence and its attendant ‘culture’.8 This was in part due to the centralisation of the mission and in part due to their preference of working with apolitical organisations as compared to entities considered overtly political. Despite the rhetoric of supporting existing indigenous and local organisations and initiatives, there is clearly an ideological tilt to the choice of whom the UN supports. In turn, the instrumentalist use of women’s organisations is a mechanism that will shape the activities of such organisations. This is not to say that women’s activism in Timor-Leste only exists in the form of NGOs, but rather this was the principal, if not only, way in which activists were able to secure funding from donors and engage with UN peace operations and the ‘high level’ peacebuilding occurring in the country. As this chapter examines, in working with the UN, national East Timorese women’s organisations faced resistance to their work, challenging the assumption that domestic civil society partners will be able to legitimise international norms on the ground. Furthermore, the chapter has examined the diverse and hierarchical nature of the ‘local’ space, which can impair the ability of ‘national’ organisations working on various issues, such as gender. This is in direct contrast to the way in which civil society as a representative of a homogenous domestic space is utilised in international peacekeeping and peacebuilding rhetoric (and in some critical scholarly work too) – an issue that is taken up in the following chapter. The analysis presented here demonstrates that in Timor-Leste there was not one single conception of a domestic arena, but instead, it was imbricated with ‘national’ space and ‘local’ space, and that the relations of power therein were also deeply gendered. Importantly, this chapter has also argued that in examining the relative success or limitations of gender mainstreaming in peace

Still resisting, still organising  133 operations, one-dimensional understandings of local patriarchy are insufficient to explain shortfalls in implementation. Examining resistance to gender programming should be historically contextualised and take into account the presence of centralised international militarised peace operations.

Notes 1 Indeed, one of the few ways that resistance era experiences gain public visibility is via political elite spats, which are generally attributed to disputes emanating from the period of resistance (Leach 2016) and are the reason that Parliament is currently dissolved after a power-sharing agreement could not be reached following the 2017 elections. Besides this, there are only constructed gendered tropes of male armed ‘veterans’ and female ‘victims’ of the resistance, which in turn underpin the gendered differential distribution of material and economic resources post-occupation (Kent & Kinsella 2015). 2 An early version of this analysis appeared in the following article: Sarah Smith. 2015. ‘When gender started’: the United Nations in post-occupation T ­ imor-Leste.’ Global Change, Peace & Security 27(1): 55–67 © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2015.994489 3 Conversely, Parashar is critical of the development among feminists to be reluctant to criticise cultural practices that are violent towards women, or traditions that legitimise violence against women, for fear of being labelled inherently racist (2012). This is a valid point to make, and it is not my intention to argue for a purely culturally relativist approach. 4 Merry additionally notes that deploying culture was at times a deliberate strategy by some actors to explain away poor progress on implementing norms such as those contained in CEDAW (2003b, 959–966). 5 I use the word culture as it reflects the language that emerged from participant interviews. The word culture can be ambiguous with a multitude of definitions and meanings. Here it refers to the symbolic and learned aspects of human society, the “meaningful patterned activities” that emerge from interactive processes among individuals, communities and their environments (Rubinstein 2005, 528–529). 6 Although such a discussion is outside the scope of this book, I would like to note here the significant amount of sexual abuse and harassment evident within the security, humanitarian and aid sectors, which to date is under-­ reported and under-researched (see Mazurana & Donnelly 2017). This is a significant data gap and one that arguably justifies the continued delineation of insecurity and violence attached to local, rather than international, spaces and bodies. In short, while it is not possible to say with certainty, given the lack of data, it does appear that the biggest threat to women within peace operations and humanitarian deployments is potentially their colleagues, not ‘local’ cultures (ibid). 7 This may also be related to the fact that a number of national Dili-based women’s organisations were struggling prior to the 2006 crisis as funding and interest from donors – which a number of their programs were dependent on – ­continually dwindled from 2002 onwards (Olsson 2009). 8 Vivenne Jabri, however, queries the degree of agency these roles demonstrate given that the activity of the national partners is predicated on the international presence and the programs they are trying to impart (2013).

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6 From liberal to post-liberal peace What’s gender got to do with it?

This chapter critically examines the notion of a ‘post-liberal’ and hybrid peacebuilding paradigm, drawing on the arguments and theories developed in the preceding chapters.1 The concept of ‘post-liberal’ peace has been articulated in scholarly work that has critiqued the liberal peace approach, chiefly its reliance on ‘international’ understandings of how to build peace, ones that neither reflect nor resonate with ‘local’ practices or structures (Richmond 2011a). Both in this scholarly work and in institutional reviews of peacekeeping and peacebuilding (AGE 2015; HIPPO 2015), and based on the perception that interveners should modify their practice to better suit variable contexts, there has been a significant discourse on bringing the ‘local’ into peacekeeping and peacebuilding praxis: that is, a ‘local turn’ (Hughes, öjendal & Schierenbeck 2015; Leonardsson & Rudd 2015; Schierenbeck 2015). The ‘local turn’ constitutes in large part a normative framework that derives from a central critique of liberal peace approaches over the preceding two decades: an inability to engage those individuals and collectives that are claimed to be the actual beneficiaries of peace operations. The preceding chapters have demonstrated how peace operations in Timor-Leste alienated and marginalised certain groups, individuals and issues, and that these were informed by gendered and raced logics of what constitutes (in)security and stability. Given these findings, on the surface, a call to make peacekeeping and peacebuilding more ‘locally’ relevant appears to offer promise and potential. However, this chapter argues that the utilisation of the ‘local’, as both normative framework and analytic concept, constructs a problematic binary of international–local. To date, the ‘local turn’ in scholarly and institutional work has paid insufficient attention to gender (and race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality) as a category of analysis, as both a socially mediated and produced identity that structures engagement in peacekeeping processes, and as an organising logic in how peacebuilding is understood. The reification of the international–local binary within post-liberal and hybrid peace theorising is communicable only through reliance on gendered and raced ontologies of who or what constitutes different sets of actors, their relation to each other, and what principles, experiences and

From liberal to post-liberal peace  139 expectations are attached to each dimension. Although relations of power are considered within these frameworks in terms of the spatial relations of different sets of actors, gender and race as axes that structure such relations and the production of the categories to begin with are not considered. Much post-liberal and hybrid peace theorising reproduces world views that are troubling from the perspective of critical feminist and post-colonial work, not least because of its reliance on dichotomies such as international–local and, thus implicitly, self–other. In examining how the concept of the ‘local’ is deployed institutionally, these same shortcomings appear. The chapter proceeds in two parts. The following section examines how the figure of the local has been constructed and utilised in both academic work and policy reviews. Regarding the former, attendant concepts that are deployed in this theorising are also examined, in particular the notion of hybridity. Hybridity has a long tradition in post-colonial literature, where scholars have sought to theorise the constitutive and productive consequences of colonialism on both coloniser and colonised identities (Said 1979; Fanon 1986, 2004; Bhabha 1994), although this history is largely overlooked in contemporary peace and conflict studies. The analysis then moves to the treatment of the local in two reviews of peacekeeping and peacebuilding conducted in 2015 – the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the Advisory Group of Experts (AGE), which reviewed the whole of the UN peacebuilding architecture. Together, the reviews demonstrate “crippling gaps” in institutional methods and approaches to building peace, and thus I examine how those ‘gaps’ are shaped and informed by gendered and raced logics, identities and categories. I pay particular attention to how making peace operations more field-focused and improving engagement with local actors is framed as a potential rescue for peace operation efficacy and legitimacy, but also note that militarised security-seeking practices remain prioritised and valued, over and above those seen as more consensual or passive (feminine). In the final section, critical race and feminist theories are brought to bear on post-liberal peace broadly and their constitutive reifications of ‘local’ actors, arguing that the issues raised throughout the book are further evidence of the deeply gendered and gendering nature of peace operations, and that attempts to move away from ‘liberal’ conceptions of peace have, to date, done nothing to ameliorate this issue. Despite rhetorical commitments to a more ethical and gender-just peace, post-liberal peace theorising is rooted in epistemological and ontological positions that necessitate and thus reproduce homogenous and binary categories of masculine–feminine, international–local and self–other. To be clear, I do not necessarily disagree with the diagnosis of problems with current peace intervention practice, as is evident in the preceding chapters. Rather, the argument here is that the body of work that has constructed and sought to engage the subject of the local as a means to rectify these issues ultimately reproduces the same problems: they fail to historicise their claims in colonial histories or post-colonial

140  From liberal to post-liberal peace literature; they do not take gender seriously as an analytic category nor as constituting the different (constructed) subject positions they utilise; and the position of peace operations in the substantively raced/gendered/classed “neoliberal imperium” remains intact (Agathangelou & Ling 2009, 2–3).

Post-liberal peace and the figure of the ‘local’ Hybridity and the local in critical peace and conflict studies Current practices of peace interventions are profoundly more interventionist than those that preceded them, and this is but one reason liberal peace operations have attracted strong criticism. The actual outcomes of liberal peacebuilding, which has extended well into the twenty-first century with the evolution of multidimensional peace operations, have left much to be desired. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, peacekeepers have had to be redeployed to states where they were previously withdrawn, such as Timor-Leste and Liberia, and others find themselves in their second or third iteration over protracted periods, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. If not a relapse into conflict, many host states are still deeply insecure, experiencing chronic poverty, inequality, the continuance of violence, and weak state institutions (Mac Ginty 2010; Call 2012; Westendorf 2015). The ‘neither peace nor war’ situations that the liberal peace has instituted in numerous locations serves as powerful evidence in supporting such claims. The alienation of those populations that the liberal peace is ostensibly enacted to protect has been a recurrent theme in critical perspectives. Local histories, local contexts and local modes of governance are eschewed in deference to establishing liberal institutions that may or may not produce a just and sustainable peace. The kinds of peace instituted via multidimensional peace operations thus alienate and marginalise those in post-conflict contexts and are often seen as abstracted from the reality of day-to-day life (Brown & Gusmao 2012, 107; Autesserre 2014). The relationship between those who intervene and beneficiaries has been perennially problematised – and rightly so – with a number of empirical cases demonstrating the pitfalls of establishing liberal institutional structures with little reference to the contexts in which they exist (Hughes 2009a, 2009b; Autesserre 2014). From such criticisms, an agenda to move to a post-liberal peace has emerged, one that conceptualises how international peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts may move out of the quagmire of the preceding decades. This is argued to be especially pertinent given the increasingly complex and protracted contexts into which peace operations are being deployed, and the globalised nature of new, and mostly civil, war (Kaldor 2012). Such theorisations of peace are fundamentally about recalibrating the relationship between different sets of actors, predominantly conceptualised as international on the one hand, and local on the other, although how to define

From liberal to post-liberal peace  141 each is necessarily disputed. In academic work, the local is variously deployed, but for the most part denotes subnational institutions and actors (Leonardsson & Rudd 2015; Schierenbeck 2015), and it is often discursively linked to clearly demarcated ‘non-international’ ways of being: traditional and consensual forms of governance and patronage networks. The local becomes shorthand for illiberal, pre-modern, undeveloped and non-Western, where it is described as threatened and ‘sidelined’ by processes of modernity, globalisation and urbanisation (Mac Ginty 2015, 842–845). Of course, it is difficult to demarcate a simplified notion of the local. The concept has become a shorthand term, although authors recognise complexity and murkiness in both defining the category (Richmond 2011a, 14–15; McLeod 2015, 51) and its construction in the liberal peace project (Kappler 2012; Mac Ginty 2015). The term is deployed to demonstrate the limits of liberal peace projects, highlighting those populations that are marginalised within it despite being framed as its beneficiaries: “To this extent, ‘the local’ has a symbolic function…a reminder of the intrinsic limits of international peacebuilding as a normative project” (Hughes, öjendal & Schierenbeck 2015, 818). Like hybridity, the concept of the local is deployed as an analytical tool through which agency and subjectivity in peacebuilding processes can be explored (Richmond 2011a, 14; Hughes, öjendal & Schierenbeck 2015, 818–819). The ‘local turn’, then, refers to challenges to the centralisation of peace operations that have historically shut out non-elite individuals and groups by making a case for peacebuilding efforts to engage those actors understood as local. From the perspective of the Timor-Leste case, this is a worthy endeavour. Peace operations in the country were often criticised by the population for being exclusionary, and few beyond elite circles gained from the political and economic benefits that could be garnered from peace operations. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 2, the unwillingness to engage with ‘politicised’ entities meant that some resistance era structures were excluded from successive peace operations, although this did not mitigate the embedding of resistance-era disputes within the national government (Murdoch 2018). For women’s organisations especially, peace operations that were cognisant of women’s role and activism in the resistance period may have provided better support for their inclusion in post-conflict processes, such as those related to veteran payment schemes and transitional justice. Engaging local actors or seeking to understand or respond to local contexts is framed as both an effective means of building peace (because, it is implied, it will be more genuine rather than alien and imported), and as a means to emancipation of the local figure via emphasis on otherwise marginalised voices (Hughes, öjendal & Schierenbeck 2015; Leonardsson & Rudd 2015; Schierenbeck 2015). One particular theme throughout post-liberal peace literature is the notion of hybridity (see inter alia Wallis et al. 2018; Lemay-Hébert & Kühn 2015; Richmond & Mitchell 2012; Peterson 2012). Hybridity in this body of

142  From liberal to post-liberal peace work has been used variously. In relation to its emancipatory potential, it is conceptualised both as a process (Mac Ginty 2011; Mac Ginty & ­Richmond 2016, 221) and as a desirable endpoint or formulation of peace, thus often implying a normative agenda (Richmond 2011a). More recently, its strength has been expounded as an analytical tool through which processes of contestation, negotiation and resistance at peace intervention sites can be explained and understood (Mac Ginty & Richmond 2016). Hybridity has been frequently deployed to overcome charges of essentialism given the use of such broad and collapsed categories as ‘local’ and ‘international’, yet the hybridity that is conceptualised is still that between an extant and discrete local and international (Hirblinger & Simons 2015, 424). It is also argued that hybridity has already occurred, as liberal peace interventions have not functioned in a uniform manner and, with reference to Foucault’s formulations of productive power and resistance, the agency and resistance of a range of diverse actors means that it has necessarily been adapted or subverted across multiple temporal and spatial levels. In this frame, international actors have not understood how local actors interact with the liberal peace paradigm, developing their own politics of peace – hybridity – in the process (Richmond 2011a, 66; Millar 2014). In post-liberal peace formulations, hybridity is understood as occurring at an imagined interface between the ‘local’ and the ‘liberal’, the point at which they meet and where the local enacts agency and resistance to either assert its own practices or adapt liberal ones, thus leading to a ‘hybridised’ peace rather than a purely liberal peace: At the site of each international peace intervention, an interface forms at which the everyday activities, needs, interests and experiences of local groups and the norms and practices of international policy-makers overlap [and] a unique range of practices [and] responses…emerges and ‘hybridizes’ the ‘blueprints’ for peace. (Richmond & Mitchell 2012, 1) Used here, the concept of the ‘everyday’ characterises both the spatial location in which resistance (and consequently hybridity) occurs and the forms such resistance can take.2 The spatial location of the ‘everyday’ is used to highlight the ordinariness of such (inter)actions, including “verbal interactions, group organization, negotiation or networking, counter-­ organization…the (mis)appropriation of donor funds or even continued or new forms of conflict” (Richmond & Mitchell 2012, 3). ‘Everyday’ agency and resistance are brought to the fore in post-liberal peace literature, often explicitly to counteract the focus on institutional processes in the liberal peace and its disconnection from the lives of those who are supposedly its beneficiaries (Mitchell 2010). Thus, intervention and the international actors that constitute intervention have had difficulty in reaching and interacting with the ‘everyday local’.

From liberal to post-liberal peace  143 While peace interventions have sought engagement with perceived local actors, it has often been with a slim sect of political and civil society elite that reflect Western liberal priorities and are thus viewed as not truly representative of the actual local (Richmond 2011a, 153–154; Kappler 2012). This was certainly the case in Timor-Leste. The preceding chapters have argued that not only did this have particular implications for women’s organising, which was channelled into an under-resourced and marginalised NGO format, but the ideological structures that lead to this process are informed by gendered logics and power. By deploying a hybrid binary framework to problematise this process, post-liberal peace theorising has challenged peace operations to go further, to access and engage the subnational level, often described as “customary processes and institutions…indigenous forms of knowledge, traditional authorities, elders, chiefs, communities, tribes, and religious groups” (Richmond 2011b, 154). In liberal peacebuilding processes, it is argued, the ‘local’ has been constructed as a legitimising vehicle through which liberal polity and statehood can be instituted. In hybridity frameworks, this formulation is reversed, wherein subnational groups, organisations and collectives can be utilised and engaged to institute a more substantive, stable and just peace. The more authentic local is legitimised because of its disconnect with liberal norms and values. There is an implicit understanding that something that is (externally) identified as local (read as non-liberal, non-Western, non-international) will produce the kind of peace that is more acceptable and amenable to the relevant context, so long as ‘spoiler’ elements can be excised, thus ensuring greater sustainability than that which has been constructed and imposed on ‘subjects’ by the liberal peace project. Hybridity as emancipatory argues for a process that “enables subjects to produce peace” rather than the liberal peace’s production of subjects (Richmond 2011a, 189). In doing so, however, such theorising itself produces a local subject, as the concept is uncritically used as an objective category, while the power that goes into such knowledge claims is obscured. The local remains positioned as “something ‘out there’ to be discovered, understood and empowered”, and about which authoritative truth claims can be made (Hirblinger & Simons 2015, 423). In short, hybridity is characterised as both a way out of the failings of the liberal peace and is also indicative of those failings, to begin with (Belloni 2012, 21). Hybridity exists because differently placed actors vie for ‘their’ way to take precedence, moulding and impacting the rigidity of template-driven liberal peace in the process (Jarstad & Belloni 2012, 1). Hybridity occurs across multiple levels, within and outside institutions, in public spaces and at the ‘everyday’ level of informal resistance (Visoka 2012; Millar 2014). Hybridity in this reading conceptualises a process that is already happening, describing what is seen as the reality of liberal peace outcomes, as well as potentially presenting an ideal that could frame future actions through a particular deployment of the local, however imagined.

144  From liberal to post-liberal peace The local rescuing twenty-first century peace operations The idea of legitimising peace interventions by way of ‘localising’ efforts has appeared in institutional and policy documents as well, for example, as discussed in the previous chapter in regard to the deployment of civil society as a vehicle to implement gender policy. In institutional narratives, the localisation of peace operations is generally framed as a means for improving the efficacy and dividends of peace operations (see DPKO 2008; von Billerbeck 2017, 1–2), just as in much of the scholarly work. In 2015, both the HIPPO and AGE released reports that surveyed the UN’s approaches to peacekeeping and peacebuilding respectively. The HIPPO report identified “chronic challenges” including under-resourced conflict prevention and mediation efforts, template-driven approaches, and an over-reliance on technical and military measures rather than political efforts (2015, vii–viii; on this last point, see also Westendorf 2015). The AGE report also identified chronic underperformance and underinvestment and also suggested more “inclusive national ownership” as a response (2015, 8), in tandem with much more commitment from the UN and its member states in funding and resourcing the peacebuilding architecture: the Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Fund and the Peacebuilding Support Office. Taken together, the two reports indicate the UN’s awareness of the need for reform and the challenge it faces in implementing such reform programmes (Smith 2016, 180). As with the academic literature discussed above, in the HIPPO and AGE reports, the ‘local’ is envisaged as a particular spatial dimension populated by certain types of (good and bad) actors that, if engaged properly, will improve peace operation legitimacy and dividends. Yet, despite the rhetoric of improving local engagement, the concept is framed and positioned as subordinate to militarised peace and security-seeking behaviour, thus producing a feminised other/local space structured as dependent on the rational masculinised space of military security. The importance of ‘the field’ is centralised throughout the HIPPO report and it argues for a refocusing on this location as one of four ‘essential shifts’ needed to make peace operations effective and responsive to contemporary conflict situations (HIPPO 2015, 9). The other essential shifts are the need for utilising political, rather than military, conflict resolution tools; improving flexibility in response to conflict situations to endeavour the use of the ‘full spectrum’ of peacebuilding mechanisms; and becoming more ‘people-­ centred’ (ibid). The report demands these changes as “peace operations are the most visible and high risk aspect of the work of the Secretariat” (ibid, 14). Despite the high costs when peace operations fail – in terms of lives, reputation and legitimacy – “the UN Secretariat is not yet a field-focused or field-enabling entity” (ibid, 15). As a result, UN Headquarters should work to make field operations more effective and efficient. The report makes recommendations on how to improve local engagement but also notes the challenges faced in this task. It notes problems of

From liberal to post-liberal peace  145 “identifying representatives who genuinely speak on behalf of local people” (ibid, 66). On this point, as discussed above and in the preceding chapters, the report decries a “tendency [on behalf of the UN] to engage with a small network of people, who speak English or French and use jargon familiar to the international community, but who may lack a local base” (ibid). This statement neatly captures two aspects of the local engagement discourse: the limitations of UN practice on the one hand, and the deficiencies of (some) local actors on the other. This reflects academic works on a post-­ liberal peace that also postulate the undesirable nature of some local actors, such as in Richmond’s distinction between the local – a limited sect of elite engaged by international interveners; and the “local-local” – the more real or actual representative local (Richmond 2011a). In regard to the limitations of UN practice, the HIPPO report also encourages a shift in the mindset of individuals who serve in peace operations, critiquing what it characterises as a “white SUV complex”: [personnel] must be committed to helping to improve the lives of people living in conflict-affected countries whom they have been mandated to serve. This demands that UN personnel in the field engage with and relate to the people and communities they are asked to support. (HIPPO 2015, 15) Moreover, “[s]everal local community actors and civil society representatives expressed the view…that they found it difficult to interact with UN personnel, who appeared remote and aloof” (ibid, 66; see also Higate & Henry 2009). The HIPPO report notes that local perspectives should be streamlined in missions and go beyond performances of consulting. Indeed, it touches on an enduring tension in peace operations, that despite a rhetoric of local engagement, there is actually little space for effective partnerships: “[s]ome [­local/national participants] expressed concern that peace operations did not spend enough time understanding existing capacities for peace and protection or conflict mitigation mechanisms, and simply replaced local structures with exogenous ones” (HIPPO 2015, 66; see also UNGA & UNSC 2015, 6). Concomitant to the ‘remote and aloof’ practice of international actors that keeps them abstract from the realities ‘on the ground’ is the way that local actor deficiencies are conceptualised, such as their lacking of ‘a local base’. This aspect is also evident in post-liberal and hybridity literature, as discussed above. Implicit and explicit throughout discourses of local ownership is the idea that if the international properly engaged with or incorporated properly representative local actors (for example, ones with a ‘local base’) then peace operation effectiveness would ensue and undesirable local characteristics, not least the conflict context itself, would be mitigated. For example, in its recommendations for engaging communities, the report states,

146  From liberal to post-liberal peace Many post-conflict settings are characterized by transitional political arrangements, weak political parties and elite-dominated peace processes. By working in partnership with the local people…UN peace operations can help facilitate more inclusive political processes that address social cohesion, inequalities and marginalization, and contribute to a more sustainable peace. (HIPPO 2015, 65) Similarly, the AGE report found significant limitations in the operation of the peacebuilding architecture, and it is notably critical of the UN system and how it functions: “for many UN Member States and UN Organization entities alike, peacebuilding is left as an afterthought: under-prioritized, ­under-resourced and undertaken only after the guns fall silent” (AGE 2015,  7). This statement reflects the conceptual separation between militarised ­peacekeeping missions mandated under the Department of Peacekeeping Operations on the one hand, and those missions supported by the peacebuilding architecture on the other; indeed, the Peacebuilding Commission has struggled to build strength and legitimacy since its inception in 2005. The militarised frames that are used to understand and interpret conflict and peace are highlighted in the report: “Evidence strongly suggests that undue haste and a narrow focus on cessation of hostilities rather than addressing root causes are significant factors in relapse” (ibid, 8). The AGE report encourages inclusive national ownership, whereby the national responsibility to drive and direct efforts is broadly shared by the national government across all key social strata and divides, across a spectrum of political opinions and domestic actors, including minorities. This implies participation by community groups, women’s platforms and representatives, youth, labour organizations, political parties, the private sector and domestic civil society, including under-represented groups. (AGE 2015, 21) Thus, again, there is the presentation of a local space populated by a particular set of actors or collectives, positioned hierarchically and relative to each other, that prove useful to peacekeeping and peacebuilding endeavours, such as women’s and youth groups, progressive civil society organisations and those committed to liberal principles of human rights and democratic rule of law. Both the AGE and HIPPO reports make mention of the Women, Peace and Security framework and its (lack of) implementation in peace operations and peacebuilding efforts. They draw attention to limitations that have long been highlighted in academic and policy literature, as well as reproduce the gendered logics that continually perpetuate gendered insecurities. For example, the HIPPO report argues that Women, Peace and Security is narrowly

From liberal to post-liberal peace  147 understood as a ‘women’s issue’, that the rights and needs of women and girls are not included in early conflict analyses, that gender policy remains bounded within gender units rather than integrated across whole missions, that there is insufficient capacity at the Headquarters level, and that there is a distinct lack of funding and uneven commitment (HIPPO 2015, 67–68). However, the report makes rather lacklustre recommendations regarding Women, Peace and Security, seeking a (re)commitment to gender mainstreaming strategies and an increase in gender parity among staff. Beyond this, the report suggests that Women, Peace and Security has lived and died on whether the national leadership of member states has made the agenda a national priority (ibid, 67–68). Thus, its third recommendation is to ‘encourage’ national leaders to take ownership of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Beyond this, the report adopts essentialising and homogenising rhetoric of ‘women’ – and ‘womenandgirls’ (Enloe 2014, 25) – and what they can contribute to or need from peace processes. While it could be suggested that in-depth analysis of the implementation of Women, Peace and Security was left to the Global Study also conducted in 2015 (­Coomaraswamy 2015), neither the AGE or HIPPO reports acknowledge the significant institutional and internal changes that could be made to improve implementation, which are highlighted in the Global Study report. The AGE report also highlights the particular experiences of women in conflict: “overlapping forms of discrimination and exclusion particularly affect women during violent conflicts, placing serious obstacles in the way of ensuring full participation” (AGE 2015, 23). In relation to violent extremism, it notes that “Many current violent extremist movements brutalise women and girls and make frontal attacks on women’s rights. Yet paradoxically, violent extremist organizations also increasingly target women in their recruitment strategies” (ibid). However, an explanation of this paradox is lacking, and one could wonder similarly about men, who also constitute victims, targets and actors of terrorist and ‘counter-terrorist’ violence. The ‘paradox’ is only intelligible from an ontology of ‘women’ as constituting a singular hive mind with similar experiences and desires. While acknowledging the role of women in peace processes, the AGE report suggests that sustainable peace must “offer an opportunity to expand women’s political participation and leadership beyond the peace table” (AGE 2015, 32). Mechanisms here are very much focused on national-level politics at mission sites, such as encouraging the use of temporary special measures or quotas to increase women’s participation in elected bodies, “to respond to women’s aspirations and to engage them as active participants” (ibid). It notes the ‘siloed’ efforts at political representation, preventing ­gender-based violence and gender-sensitive measures to economic recovery, meaning they are often dealt with by separate entities who in turn do not always “[bring] a peacebuilding lens fully to bear” (ibid, 33). In 2010, the UN launched a ‘gender marker’ with the aim of ensuring 15 per cent of all peacebuilding expenditures went to women-centred projects:

148  From liberal to post-liberal peace despite this, in not one single country of engagement has the UN attained its own, modest 15 per cent marker…Amongst the factors has been the slowness of UN entities on the ground in coming forward with genuinely peacebuilding oriented gender-related programming proposals, rather than thinly repackaged existing initiatives (a phenomenon that affects more than just the issue of gender). (ibid) This last point is a welcome acknowledgement, especially given some of the issues discussed in the preceding chapters. Despite the combined efforts of the 2015 reviews of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, there is a continued predominance of militarised and siloed security-seeking practices conducted by the UN – ones that rely on gendered logics in which militarised security-seeking practices are prioritised and valued over and above those seen as more consensual or passive (feminine). Indeed, the sanctioned use of military force in some contemporary peace practices signals a ‘robust turn’ in peacekeeping to “deter threats to an existing peace process in the face of resistance from spoilers” (Bellamy & Hunt 2015, 1280). The mandated use of force is justified as a response to complex conflicts and the reality that peace operations are not necessarily deployed to situations in which there is a ‘peace to keep’ but to places that are continually mired in armed conflict, and in which the UN is expected to stabilise the security situation as a result (Bellamy & Hunt 2015, 1283). This is one way to read gendered logics in the current practice of peace interventions. The following section focuses specifically on the raced and gendered logics of the ‘local turn’ in peace operations, arguing that the lack of attention to gender has obscured gendered power and the fact that gendered and raced logics deeply inform the ontology of actors understood within international–local binaries and produce and circumscribe their ability to act as such.

Gender in the post-liberal peace There are a number of ways that an understanding of gendered power can trouble the constructed categories of international and local. Even if we take the conceptualisation of each as discrete, knowable objects, with an ‘interface’ between them, as unproblematic, that the post-liberal peace literature has paid so little attention to gendered power and identities means it has overlooked how gendered social relations shape and inform who can speak and act as both ‘local’ and ‘international’, and/or be recognised as such. This is demonstrated in reference to Timor-Leste and the issues raised in the preceding chapters. For instance, proponents of hybridity have ignored how gender policy and the Women, Peace and Security agenda is contested within and between so-labelled ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors, and how and why it is subordinated in relation to ‘high politics’ – the military,

From liberal to post-liberal peace  149 economic and political planning that constitutes the core of the peacebuilding rationale. In targeting elites for ‘local ownership’ in these realms, women and women’s organisations are routinely overlooked and relegated to the ‘low politics’ engagement of civil society (Shepherd 2017), yet often these actors are also written out of hybrid peace theorising for reflecting Western norms too readily. In her study of ‘local ownership’ in UN peace operations, Sarah B.K. von Billerbeck articulates an explicit gendered hierarchy that is deployed in the UN’s implementation of local ownership, although she does not label it as such. She highlights the dual processes of seeking ‘liberal ownership’ – local actors selected for their support for democratic principles; and ‘elite ownership’ – actors selected for their ‘capacity’, such as key political and military leaders (2017, 91–112). The former category focuses on the subnational level, including subnational political and military actors, as well as civil society groups, youth groups, and women’s groups (ibid, 93–94). In regard to elite ownership, focused at the national level and the selection of ‘leaders’, von ­Billerbeck argues that it generally maintains a focus on the central level, with subnational or provincial actors outside the capital city only playing a role when they are considered integral to peace and stability [because] [f]ostering the capacity of newer or less experienced political, military, and economic actors to the level requisite to carry forward complex processes of peacekeeping, governance, and security sector management is…considered to be more difficult and time-consuming than relying on those existing bureaucrats and military officers…For example, some noted that the UN could not expect small women’s groups or local youth groups to ‘sit at the table as full participants in peacebuilding decisions because they don’t have the capacity, even if they are representative’. (2017, 99–104) ‘Women’s groups’ – and by extension women, gender and ‘gender issues’ – and their subordinated location in civil society are explicitly rendered as lacking the military, political and economic skills necessary to undertake the demands of ‘real’ security and ‘high’ politics. Feminist scholars have long argued the gendered power that operates in rendering binaries such as public/private, high/low politics and international/national (Young 2003; Enloe 2014) – here again these gendered dualisms play out in terms of the realms that are feminised, and those that are masculinised, thus valorised, in peace operations (Peterson 2010; Shepherd 2017). Moreover, in undertaking such a practice the UN has, at the moment of intervention, already relegated ‘gender programming’ to civil society and outside of high-level political, military and economic structures and, in doing so, is productive of a gendered hierarchy that marginalises those designated feminised areas.

150  From liberal to post-liberal peace What this points to is how gendered power, relations and ideologies fundamentally shape who, individually or collectively, is able to actively produce hybridity. Roger Mac Ginty’s formulation of hybridisation outlines four factors that feed into hybridity whereby the factors attached to the local space are contingent on ‘ability’: the ability of the local to resist, ignore or subvert the liberal peace, and the ability of local actors and networks to maintain alternative forms of peacemaking (2011, 8–9). Reflecting on the case of Timor-Leste, it is apparent that ability is linked to power and will not be evenly distributed within a given space, structure or time. Much research has shown how those issues considered ‘gendered’ or those forms of violence that primarily impact women in post-conflict contexts are not only marginalised in peacekeeping and peacebuilding processes but are also, at times, compounded by those practices (Meintjes, Pillay & Turshen 2001; Rehn & Sirleaf 2002; Pankhurst 2008). Indeed, gender advocates, whether labelled local or international, have targeted various domains in seeking to expose gendered forms of insecurity not just in conflict but during times of militarised post-conflict peacebuilding. Therefore, while activists have frequently sought to ‘resist’ norms that have framed security and peace in masculine and patriarchal terms – ignoring the insecurity of the private realm for ­instance – their ‘ability’ to do so and the impact this has had on post-conflict policies has been circumscribed by those same norms. ‘Ability’, then, is tied to, amongst other things, gendered hierarchical power, which exists within and across the binary of international–local, and I would argue is constitutive of such a binary, to begin with. On the international side, Mac Ginty emphasises the compliance and incentivising powers exercised by liberal peace agents (2011, 8–9). Again, given the militarised and patriarchal logics that underpin peace interventions, international actors have favoured incentivising programmes that reflect these norms, such as disarming combatants and monopolising the use of force in the hands of the state. In terms of gender programming, the preceding decades have seen significant developments, not least represented by the adoption of resolution 1325 in 2000 and subsequent resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. Yet the material and financial resources invested to ‘incentivise’ these areas have fallen short in both relative and absolute terms (Coomaraswamy 2015, 5), meaning despite rhetorical commitments, women and gender continue to receive short shrift in peacebuilding from ‘international’ actors. Feminist analyses have demonstrated how gender programming is deployed as part of broadening other (militarised) interests (Shepherd 2016; Agius 2018), demonstrating problems with assuming the ‘international’ as a coherent unitary actor with an undisputed, and clearly stated, agenda (see also Higate & Henry 2009; Autesserre 2014). Thus, even working within the confines of the categories established in hybridity, both the ‘local’ and ‘international’ are shaped by gendered power that defines the parameters of what is included and excluded in hybridisation processes.

From liberal to post-liberal peace  151 Power differentials within the local space are sometimes acknowledged, yet this is generally attached to claims to not overly romanticise the local (see Mac Ginty 2011), rather than examination of how this might make such categories analytically and substantively troublesome to begin with. Drawing on the preceding discussion regarding the Timor-Leste case, it is evident that broad generalisations of what constitutes ‘local’ do not hold weight under scrutiny – ostensibly ‘local’ actors are partners in the liberal peace and reflect liberal norms (often thus considered ‘elites’), while others resist so-­ labelled ‘local’ ideas. In terms of gender policy, as demonstrated throughout this book, actors that would be considered ‘local’ within these frameworks found partners and allies in ‘international’ or non-local actors, while both found significant obstacles in both international and local forms. Gender advocacy (and tensions) occurred across and within an international–local binary, and to collapse these negotiations of power and interest into such a binary significantly weakens the potential of cross-cutting allyship. Critical peace literature on hybridisation generally positions ‘local’ interests as attached to and sought within the local realm, which belies the fact that, in regard to gender programming, local actors may seek international partnerships to support their goals. In Timor-Leste, ‘local’ actors worked within ‘international’ institutions, which were geographically located within the ‘local’ space of the peace operation site. Binary frameworks cannot capture such processes of power and negotiation; to conceptualise an ‘interface’ where points of resistance and negotiation occur only between local and international is evidently too simplistic (see Hameiri & Jones 2018). Thus, much of the problem stems from the binary epistemology relied on in post-liberal peace theorising, specifically that of the international–local and the way each dimension of this binary is understood. Despite emancipatory claims, and numerous caveats otherwise, proponents of hybridity as an extant process and as an analytical device in building peace reproduce a binary between constructed categories of local and non-local (Hameiri & Jones 2018). The binary reproduces and relies on Orientalist narratives that deploy a particular conception of the local; that is, the local as an intelligible category is deployed and positioned as distinct to the liberal/international: “They [local actors] may modify the liberal state, they may resist it, or they may be co-opted by it” (Richmond 2011b, 118). Theorising a hybridised peace, and seeking means to institute one, produces and relies on a local that is homogenised and inherently non-liberal/international, thus constituting a process of othering. This is evident in the descriptions of what constitutes the local and how hybridity is seen to come about in peace interventions: [because] liberal peacemaking was forced to deal with its own positionality and biases, as well as recalcitrant nationalists, religious conservatives, kleptomaniac governing elites, stubborn local and peoples whose worldviews was not organized along a left-right secular political continuum…The result has been hybrid political orders (and disorders) in which

152  From liberal to post-liberal peace Western ideas of how a society, polity and economy ‘should’ be run reach a sometimes uneasy accommodation with local mores and practices. (Mac Ginty & Richmond 2016, 222) The latter part of this quote explicitly delineates hybridity in binary terms, which occurs when a non-West/non-liberal other finds balance or accommodation with ‘Western ideas of how a society should be run’. “This ‘local’ space, while contrasted to the space of power, is also represented as banalised  – ‘everyday’ – rather than politicised…Difference, where it exists, is primarily represented as cultural or ‘customary’ in character” (­Sabaratnam 2011, 797). In their sustained critique of the ontology of hybridity and its demonstrable insufficiencies, Hameiri and Jones make a case for a Gramscian ‘politics of scale’ to better examine the negotiations and contestations that take place in peacebuilding between differently placed and relational groups: “Institutions distribute power, resources and political opportunities. Consequently, they are endlessly contested by sociopolitical forces…groups struggle over power, resources and ideational goals, seeking to mould institutions to favour themselves and their allies” (2018, 110). The analytic tools offered by critical gender and race theorists can do much in this regard, and I would argue they are essential because it is not possible to pay attention to the circularity of power and contestations therein without querying how gender, as a logic and socially produced identity, shapes those relations of power and subjectivities. Through critical feminist and race theory, it is possible to view the ­international–local binary as discursively constructed and productive, the dimensions of which are not merely explanatory categories constituting objective knowable subjects/objects. As discussed in the previous section, the ‘local’ is framed as an agent whose incorporation in the pursuit of hybridity can fix peace operations and overcome the crisis of legitimacy that interventions face. In this view, hybridity is akin to ‘problem-solving’ theory in that it seeks to manage and overcome crises in liberal peace operations by incorporating and ameliorating social and political orders that manifestly challenge it (­Laffey & Nadarajah 2012; Nadarajah & Rampton 2015; Randazzo 2016). In Robert Cox’s formulation, where critical theory “stands apart from the prevailing order and asks how it came about”, problem-solving theory serves as a ‘fix’ to make “existing relationships and institutions work more smoothly” (Cox cited in Bilgin 2018, 63). Therefore, there is a “politics of invoking hybridity” in a way that serves to fix peace interventions (­Nadarajah & Rampton 2015, 55), especially in the context of globalising, disciplinary neoliberalism. In this critique, there is a parallel with critical literature on gender, peace and security – although a gender lens has yet to be applied fully by either hybridity theorising or its critics. As Sandra Whitworth has written, citing Enloe, ‘gender’ has become a “safe idea” on its journey to international political channels, precisely because the manner of its utilisation has “transformed it from a critical to a problem-solving tool” (2004, 111).

From liberal to post-liberal peace  153 From this perspective, attempting to increase the devotion of material resources and political capital to gender mainstreaming or another gender programming – or to facilitating ‘local’ engagement – forecloses more critical interventions in which the practices of the UN are recognised as already gendered/gendering (Whitworth 2004, 139). Peace operations sit within and perpetuate a “neoliberal imperium” – that is, “an overarching hegemonic project [that] sustains a set of social relations of power expressed through daily interactions and the institutions that support them [such as] global capitalism, the neoliberal state and its market…” (Agathangelou & Ling 2009, 2–3, emphasis original). Although invocations of the local and hybridity are positioned as alternatives to disciplinary liberal peace frameworks, “their modes of analysing world order end up reproducing, perhaps unintentionally, many of the exclusions they critique…This is because the primary subject of analysis remains the (neo-)liberal and hegemonic West, which acts imperiously upon this objectified non-liberal non-West” (Sabaratnam 2011, 797). ‘Local’ engagement – which is implicitly understood as the regulation and training of non-liberal subjects into liberal ones – continues this process. For those sceptical of ‘robust’ humanitarianism and the commitments of powerful states to act in the interest of others, peace interventions are another iteration of moulding weak, fragile and failing states into an image that would best serve the needs of status quo (Jabri 2013; Pugh 2004). Although processes of negotiation and contestation are certainly evident, as discussed in the previous chapter, the dichotomous paradigm of hybridity invokes and (re)produces a politics of difference that can simultaneously be a process of othering and a mechanism for acculturation. Following Said’s formulation of Orientalism, it designates, names and fixes what is being spoken of “with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality…” (1979, 72). To define local as non-liberal produces and makes knowable this objectified subject and positions it antithetically and subordinated to that which is international. The local/other becomes objectified in this discourse as requiring external control (Sabaratnam 2011, 786). In this way, discourses on local engagement and the hybridity paradigm as deployed in academic and policy literature represents a neo-colonial discourse. Homi Bhabha argues of colonial discourse that It seeks authorization for its strategies by the production of knowledges of colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated. The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction…colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. (Bhabha 1994, 70–71)

154  From liberal to post-liberal peace Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of epistemic violence is additionally useful here. In Can the subaltern speak?, Spivak delineates the British codification of Hindu law, which then in turn becomes the authoritative representation of this other (1988, 76–78). Spivak argues that the other as a subject is inaccessible: “I am thinking of the general nonspecialist, non-academic population across the class spectrum, for whom the episteme operates its silent programming function” (ibid, 78). She “considers the margins…marked out by this epistemic violence” (ibid). The subject that is produced and made knowable in intellectual theorising – which absolves itself of this production through constructing itself as transparent – “belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labour” (ibid, 75). Thus, the production of a knowable, reliable ‘local’ is a colonising move that reflects, and constitutes, not objective reality but rather the authors’ subjectivity, positionality, identity and desire. In turn, according to Spivak, gendered logics and ideologies construct the female subaltern subject as voiceless in a ‘double exploitation’ wherein the “track of sexual difference is doubly effaced”: both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in the shadow. (ibid, 82–83) From this view, the local is not intelligible as a reality but is rather a discursive construct used to structure intervention. Importantly, the local in this discourse is given and embodies those traits that are not associated with the international (self–West), and thus the local is a construct against which interveners, academics and policymakers can build an identity of self. The construction of such (false) binaries obscures the co-constitution and dependency of each dimension, especially the international–West, given it is conceptualised as whole, complete and developed (see Nadarajah & Rampton 2015; Barkawi & Laffey 2006, 346, 349). In their challenge to the Eurocentrism of security studies, for example, Barkawi and Laffey highlight the continual failure to acknowledge the co-constituted nature of ‘Europe’: “the view that Europe is separate and self-producing renders invisible this mutual constitution of core and periphery characteristic of great powers” (2006, 346). Consequently, they argue a need for relational thinking because “it begins with the assumption that the social world is composed of relations, rather than separate objects, like…‘the West’” (ibid, 349). Furthermore, Bhabha has challenged the notion of hybridity as something that occurs between two discrete cultures, and provides a more nuanced interpretation of hybridity as both representative of and oppositional to colonial power:

From liberal to post-liberal peace  155 Hybridity…reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowals, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority What is irremediably estranging in the presence of the hybrid…is that the differences of cultures can no longer be identified or evaluated as objects of epistemological…contemplation: cultural differences are not simply there to be seen or appropriated. (Bhabha 1994, 114, emphasis original) What the theorising of Bhabha highlights is the construction of an ontology of difference, the production of discrete and knowable entities, in thinking on hybridisation. He speaks to the agency and actions of the colonised as always hybridising objects and knowledge of the coloniser, destabilising its authority. Hybridity, in Bhabha’s formulation, challenges an ontology of difference and discreteness, as ‘the differences of cultures can no longer be identified or evaluated’. Bhabha’s view of hybridity is not as an amelioration of two (discrete, knowable) cultures but is rather “a return of the content and form of colonial authority” (Childs & Williams 1997, 134). Hybridity ‘returns’ colonial authority and discourses, challenging the stability of the colonial subject self (ibid, 134–136). Such theorising challenges the way that hybridity is currently conceptualised in peace and conflict literature, where instead it frequently stands in for difference between two produced and productive categories, international on the one hand and local on the other. Local entities lose legitimacy in this literature where they mimic – to borrow from Bhabha again – international norms or standards too closely and thus challenge colonial authority, as seen, for instance, in Richmond’s formulation above on the local and the ‘local–local’. Post-colonial scholars have challenged the binary thinking that imbues neo-colonial praxis, one that homogenises an ‘other’ and produces a contestation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Spivak cited in McEwan 2001, 95; Said 1979). This critique is also evident in literature on humanitarian practices, which has demonstrated how policy discourses on issues such as refugees and humanitarian aid construct the self/narrator as modern liberal subjects, ones that depend on the abject, undeveloped, illiberal other (Chandler 2007; McEwan 2009; Olivius 2016). Therefore, the discourses of ‘local ownership’ speak more to the construction of self-identity than a rethinking of how peace operations (or should peace operations) operate; that is, the West/self comes to know itself through the process of othering and clearly demarcating between self and other (Said 1979). Likewise, critical feminist scholars have exposed the racial politics of colonial feminist ideologies that, while seeking emancipation for white women, “made that emancipation dependent on the existence of a colonized…womanhood” (Burton 1990, 295; see also Syed & Ali 2011; Ha 2014, 48–82). Tellingly, von Billerbeck has argued that, given how unsuccessful the UN has been at convincing national actors of its efforts towards ‘local ownership’ (although of course this concept is disputed), the discourse of ensuring

156  From liberal to post-liberal peace local participation serves instead ‘endogenous legitimation’; that is, “local ownership discourse appears to be primarily meaningful for the UN itself” (2017, 114). von Billerbeck explicitly links this with the self-image of individuals in the humanitarian sector, stating that the UN staff she interviewed “displayed a strong desire to convince themselves that they were not behaving in a neo-imperialist or imposing way in peace operations” (ibid, 121). Therefore, the narrative of local ownership serves in the production of the image of a modern, enlightened, liberal ‘international’ while justifying the logic of intervention to begin with. In this way, ‘local ownership’ relies on gendered power that structures the norms of militarised intervention and normalises militarised security-seeking practices that can ultimately produce gendered insecurity. The discussion in this chapter is not to necessarily challenge normative and theoretical claims that peace operations need to be reoriented for those who “live and work in the places and spaces it creates” (Higate & Henry 2009, 155). Indeed, the preceding chapters have demonstrated how peace operations worked to delimit and produce spaces for advocacy and change in the Timor-Leste case, and they did so in ways that relied on gendered logics of space, statehood and security. However, the way that concepts within these moves – the local, the international, hybridity, the everyday – are utilised do not overcome the gendered and gendering process identified throughout this book, nor offer much space to acknowledge and redress gendered insecurities and violence. This is because despite discourses to the contrary, the beneficiary of peacekeeping and peace operations remains a diffuse, contested, global neoliberal imperium. Not only are current engagement strategies in peace operations manifestly limited and narrow, they operate in a context that perpetuates the stratification of power and capital, ‘locally’ and ‘globally’. Given that, spatially, we are all at once both local and global, the ‘local’ in peace operations is probably best understood as those who have benefited least from processes of globalisation and the capital accumulation of neoliberalism, and histories of imperialism and colonialism before this. Presently, peace operations buttress such a world order rather than challenge it. I would additionally emphasise, as the analysis in this book has demonstrated, there is not one ‘local’ experience or perspective, and the tensions therein are structured by gendered (among other) relations of power. Circulations of power and the fluid subject positions of multiple actors defy easy categorisation of local–international and the gendering processes therein. For instance, in assessment of the implementation of Women, Peace and Security, it is right to point out the under-resourcing of these mechanisms within peace operations, and this was certainly the case in Timor-Leste. Gender units in successive missions in Timor-Leste fought to have gender even marginally considered in the work of peace operations, alongside and against East Timorese organisations and individuals as well as alongside and against UN organisations and individuals. At the same time, the presence of peace operations and

From liberal to post-liberal peace  157 the gender units therein heavily circumscribed the kinds of issues that were considered as part of gender policy in peacekeeping, and the ways that ‘gender issues’ were made intelligible, which in turn fed into broader narratives of the role of intervention and the location of differently placed actors. The challenges identified in this book, and my own assessment of the limitations of peace operations, stem largely from conceptual limitations that inevitably produce a gendered and gendering peacebuilding process. Recent policy recommendations suggest this is unlikely to change, and the ontological linking of ‘women’ and ‘women organisations’ with civil society and in the realm of ‘low’ politics reproduces approaches in which gender is repeatedly marginalised and dealt with in problematic ways. Claims to reformulate and re-vision liberal peace approaches, as captured in post-liberal theorising, are also problematic – they have further cemented reliance on hierarchical gendered logics in formulating peace while working to obscure the operation of gendered and raced power. Despite significant evidence of the gendered and gendering nature of peace operations – such as the occurrence of and impunity for sexual exploitation and abuse, exogenous institutions defining formal equality and producing/obscuring certain gendered subjectivities, the undermining or championing of activism consistent with peace operation priorities and political norms – this has not been acknowledged institutionally, and currently Women, Peace and Security frameworks seem to operate more as a salve rather than an opportunity to challenge ­problem-solving epistemologies. It is my hope that these discussions will challenge the periodic reformulation of constructed categories without reference to either a broader politics of power or to how this informs epistemologies and processes of interpretation to begin with.

Notes 1 The actual phrase ‘post-liberal peace’ is attributable to Oliver Richmond (2011a); however, I use it here to refer broadly to the ‘local turn’ in academic and policy literature. 2 For instance, on feminist formulations of the ‘everyday’, see Smith (1987), Dyck (2005), and Hansen (2014, 18–20).

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160  From liberal to post-liberal peace Meintjes, Sheila, Anu Pillay & Meredith Turshen. 2001. “There is no aftermath for women.” In The aftermath: women in post-conflict transformation, edited by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay & Meredith Turshen, 3–18. London: Zed Books. Millar, Gearoid. 2014. “Disaggregating hybridity: why hybrid institutions do not produce predictable experiences of peace.” Journal of Peace Research 51(4): 501–514. Mitchell, Audra. 2010. “Peace beyond process?” Millennium 38(3): 641–664. Murdoch, Lindsay. 2018. “East Timor dissolves Parliament in effort to solve political standoff.” The Age, 26 January. www.theage.com.au/world/asia/east-timordissolves-parliament-in-effort-to-solve-political-standoff-20180126-p4yyx3.html Nadarajah, Suthaharan & David Rampton. 2015. “The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace.” Review of International Studies 41(1): 49–72. Olivius, Elisabeth. 2016. “Constructing humanitarian selves and refugee others.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18(2): 270–290. Pankhurst, Donna. 2008. “Introduction: gendered war and peace.” In Gendered peace: women’s struggles for post-war justice and reconciliation, edited by Donna Pankhurst, 1–30. Abingdon: Routledge. Peterson, V. Spike. 2010. “Gendered identities, ideologies and practices in the context of war and militarism.” In Gendered war and militarism: feminist perspectives, edited by Laura Sjoberg & Sandra Via, 17–29. Santa Barbara: Praeger International. Peterson, Jenny H. 2012. “A conceptual unpacking of hybridity: accounting for notions of power, politics and progress in analyses of aid-driven interfaces.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 7(2): 9–22. Pugh, Michael. 2004. “Peacekeeping and critical theory.” International Peacekeeping 11(1): 39–58. Randazzo, Elisa. 2016. “The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the local turn in peace building.” Third World Quarterly 37(8): 1351–1370. Rehn, Elisabeth & Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. 2002. Women, war, peace: the independent experts’ assessment on the impact of armed conflict on women and women’s role in peace-building. New York: UNIFEM. Richmond, Oliver. 2011a. A post-liberal peace. Abingdon: Routledge. Richmond, Oliver. 2011b. “De-romanticising the local, de-mystifying the international: hybridity in Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands.” The Pacific Review 24(1): 115–136. Richmond, Oliver & Audra Mitchell. 2012. “Introduction – towards a post-liberal peace: exploring hybridity via everyday forms of resistance, agency and autonomy.” In Hybrid forms of peace: from everyday agency to post-liberalism, edited by Oliver Richmond & Audra Mitchell, 1–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sabaratnam, Meera. 2011. “IR in dialogue…but can we change the subjects? A typology of decolonising strategies for the study of world politics.” Millennium 39(3): 781–803. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schierenbeck, Isabell. 2015. “Beyond the local turn divide: lessons learnt, relearnt and unlearnt.” Third World Quarterly 26(5): 1023–1032. Shepherd, Laura J. 2016. “Making war safe for women? National Action Plans and the militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda.” International Political Science Review 37(3): 324–335.

From liberal to post-liberal peace  161 Shepherd, Laura J. 2017. Gender, UN peacebuilding and the politics of space: locating legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. ­Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Smith, Michael G. 2016. “Review of the UN High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, uniting our strengths for peace: politics, partnership and people.” Global Governance 22(2): 179–187. Spivak, Gayatri 1988. “Can the subaltern speak?” In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, edited by Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Syed, Jawad & Faiza Ali. 2011. “The white woman’s burden: from colonial civilisation to Third World development.” Third World Quarterly 32(2): 349–365. UN General Assembly & UN Security Council (UNGA & UNSC). 2015. The future of United Nations peace operations: the implementation of the recommendations of the High-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, A/70/357-S/2015/682, 2 September. http://undocs.org/S/2015/682 Visoka, Gëzim, 2012. “Three levels of hybridisation practices in post-conflict Kosovo.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 7(2): 23–36. von Billerbeck, Sarah B. K. 2017. Whose peace? Local ownership and United Nations peacekeeping. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallis, Joanne, et al. (eds.) 2018. Hybridity on the ground in peacebuilding and development. Canberra: ANU Press. Westendorf, Jasmine-Kim. 2015. Why peace processes fail: negotiating insecurity after civil war. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Whitworth, Sandra. 2004. Men, militarism and UN peacekeeping. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The logic of masculinist protection: reflections on the current security state.” Signs 29(1): 1–25.

Conclusion

Let me be very clear. The UN presence, no matter what, how complex and sometimes so cumbersome was necessary. There is no doubt, whatsoever about that. (Interview 21)

This project left me, I suspect like many others, with as many questions as answers. My hope is that this book and the arguments therein have demonstrated the complexity associated with assessing the gendered/gendering operation of international peace missions in Timor-Leste, and their interplay in tandem with a patriarchal national political realm. Both of these forces have heavily circumscribed the prospects for rethinking gender norms in the country and at times have worked together to institute deeply masculinised political and security frameworks. Moreover, peace operations played a significant role in the form and function of governmental structures and the expectations on them in regard to ‘gender policy’. The quote that begins this short conclusion is emblematic of how a number of participants ended their reflections on the period of UN intervention in the country. Discussions ranged across the complex relations and negotiations between variously placed actors, the times that international institutions had acted as allies, and the times in which they had frustrated demands for inclusion, empowerment and emancipation – and, indeed, independence in the period before 1999. Often to my surprise, there was little animosity towards these same institutions and states for their complicity in the 24-year occupation that had wreaked so much havoc on the country, lives and bodies of those with whom I spoke, their friends, comrades and families. Yet, despite these acknowledgements, many discussions ended with some iteration of the above quote: ‘but it was necessary’, or ‘we are still learning, still going’. My judgement is obviously limited by my position as an outsider, but I put this down to a desire to ‘own’ the peace- and state-building processes, to not locate problems solely within the actions of interveners, and to acknowledge that ‘local’ actors had also followed these same models.

Conclusion  163 The politics of the resistance era continue to shape developments in the country. As I write this concluding reflection, the country has just gone through a second round of elections, after those conducted last year failed to deliver any party majority power. Political (largely resistance era, male) leaders neglected to reach any power-sharing agreement, and Parliament was subsequently dissolved and fresh elections called. In the campaigning leading up to the second set of elections, resistance era loyalties and gripes were stoked, with those who had been part of the armed resistance denigrating the contributions of diaspora activists, often labelling them as ‘outsiders’ (Leach 2018), again privileging and reinforcing militarised patriarchal authority that has characterised much of the post-occupation period, including via peace operations. So what final ‘lessons’ can be taken from this analysis of a gendering peace in Timor-Leste? The analysis focused on what are often framed as the ‘successes’ of peace operations in relation to gender and Women, Peace and Security – the policy wins around women’s protection and women’s participation. The examination of these pillars has been broadened to also pay attention to what is not captured – ideologically, materially – within each and, without diminishing the gains made, has challenged the singularity of how these are understood. The chapters that buttressed those on participation and protection sought to refocus on the actions and activities of East Timorese organisations, bringing to the fore the relational and fluid power dynamics that at once influenced gender policy in the country and reproduced particular gendering ideologies with their attendant hierarchisation. In turn, then, both protection and participation can be, and I would argue should be, contextualised and positioned within both local and global processes of militarism and the subordination of the feminine. For instance, we can highlight how peace operations are situated within and perpetuate globalising neo-liberalism and militarism, which have been so devastating to gendered security (True 2012). In both needing and circumscribing women’s participation in peace operations, international interveners sought to constitute their missions in a way that ascribed to these values and norms, regardless of the desires of women’s organisations and activists. This process intertwined with the masculine politics of resistance and memory in Timor-Leste (on this, see Kent & Kinsella 2015). In legitimising men’s political authority, internally justified through their contributions to armed resistance, and marginalising women through stymying the quota debate, for instance, women’s contributions to the resistance era were further obscured and their activism was marginalised through processes of NGO-isation. The institution of a liberal state valorised masculine politics and subordinated feminised civil society, which was further destabilised through its dependence on donor resources that ebbed and flowed around certain interests and issues. With regard to protection from violence, women again gained visibility in very particular ways and in a manner that obscured the interconnections

164  Conclusion of gendered violence. However, it should also be noted that activism on domestic violence gained significant support, and the institution of the Law Against Domestic Violence (LADV) represents an important milestone for women’s protection from violence (although, as discussed in Chapter 4, the law is yet to see much of a reduction in cases). The institution of LADV diverges from the unfortunate trend of peacekeeping and peacebuilding processes overlooking women’s experiences of intra-familial and interpersonal violence during and after conflict, which has long been noted by feminist scholars (Pankhurst 2008). Yet how should feminists view this win against the backdrop of continuing militarised violence (not just in Timor-Leste) and the ways in which this is obscured through a blinkered focus on the violence of the ‘other’? Critical feminist scholars, for instance, have demonstrated how rape law reform in settler colonial societies must be viewed against the deployment of these laws to target and police people of colour, belying their interest in protecting women broadly (Bumiller 2008). The argument here, then, suggests that LADV in the Timor-Leste case, and for peacekeeping generally, should be viewed as a first and tentative step towards a gender-just peace, rather than a last. In closing then, I return to Rita Manchanda’s framing of women’s “ambivalent gains” during and after conflict as a framework for understanding the implementation of gender policy in Timor-Leste (2001). Writing on women’s experiences of conflict in South Asia, Manchanda argues that a narrative of ‘ambivalent gains’ should be incorporated into discourses of victimisation and loss, as conflict can produce new social, economic and political realities that define gender, and so too do post-conflict peace interventions. The 2015 reviews of peacekeeping, peacebuilding and Women, Peace and Security also seem to demonstrate this argument. The review of Women, Peace and Security found significant gaps in the agenda’s implementation and made far-reaching recommendations, yet these have largely been sidelined for approaches that incorporate little substantive change, as discussed in Chapter 6. Women continue to fight for inclusion and remain economically, socially and politically marginalised, and subject to both material and physical insecurities. Yet, even in gaining traction in positions and locations of power, structures remain gendered, thus perpetuating these inequalities and insecurities. These reflections on the current state of affairs in peacebuilding and peacekeeping paradigms are offered not as finite interpretations but as a way to ‘continue the conversation’ on developing a gender-just peace, which a feminist lens on international relations and security demands.1

Note 1 I borrow the term ‘continuing the conversation’ from J. Ann Tickner (1998) and Laura J. Shepherd (2013).

Conclusion  165

Bibliography Bumiller, Kristen. 2008. In an abusive state: how neoliberalism appropriated the feminist movement against sexual violence. Durham: Duke University Press. Kent, Lia & Naomi Kinsella. 2015. “A luta kontinua (the struggle continues).” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(3): 473–494. Leach, Michael. 2018. “Heated campaign draws to a close.” Inside Story, 11 May. http://insidestory.org.au/heated-campaign-draws-to-a-close-in-timor-leste/ Manchanda, Rita. 2001. “Ambivalent gains in South Asian conflicts.” In The aftermath: women in post-conflict transformation, edited by Sheila Meintjes, Anu Pillay & Meredith Turshen, 99–121. London: Zed Books. Pankhurst, Donna. 2008. “Introduction: gendered war and peace.” In Gendered peace: women’s struggles for post-war justice and reconciliation, edited by Donna Pankhurst, 1–30. Abingdon: Routledge. Shepherd, Laura J. 2013. “The state of feminist security studies: continuing the conversation.” International Studies Perspective 14(4): 436–439. Tickner, J. Ann. 1998. “Continuing the conversation.” International Studies Quarterly 42(1): 205–210. True, Jacqui. 2012. The political economy of violence against women. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

List of interviews

Individual interviews Interview 1. Director, national NGO, Dili, 12 July 2012. Interview 2. Gender adviser, UNMIT, Dili, 25 July 2012. Interview 3. Director, national women’s NGO, Dili, 27 July 2012. Interview 4. Gender adviser, UNMIT, Dili, 30 July 2012. Interview 5. Program manager, national conflict prevention NGO, Dili, 31 July 2012. Interview 6. International adviser to national NGO, Dili, 31 July 2012. Interview 7. International adviser to national NGO, Dili, 7 August 2012. Interview 8. ILO, international staff member, Dili, 8 August 2012. Interview 9. g7+ representative, Dili, 9 August 2012. Interview 10. Gender adviser, UNMIT, Dili, 13 August 2012. Interview 11. National staff, international NGO, Dili, 16 August 2012. Interview 12. UN agency, international GBV prevention adviser, Dili, 4 ­September 2012. Interview 13. UNMISET and UNMIT political affairs, Dili, 6 September 2012. Interview 14. Director Rede Feto, Dili, 7 September 2012. Interview 15. National staff, UN Women, Dili, September 2012. Interview 16. Director, national anti-violence NGO, Dili, 25 July 2013. Interview 17. Former director, national human rights NGO, Dili, 29 July 2013. Interview 18. Director, national women’s NGO, Dili, 31 July 2013. Interview 19. International adviser, government ministry, Baucau, 6 August 2013. Interview 20. Former director, national women’s NGO, Dili, 8 August 2013. Interview 21. Founder and former director, national human rights NGO, Dili, 13 August 2013. Interview 22. Director, national NGO, Dili, 22 August 2013. Interview 23. Former director, national anti-violence NGO, Dili, 2 September 2013. Interview 24. Director, national women’s NGO, Dili, 3 September 2013.

168  List of interviews Interview 25. Former national UNPOL adviser, UNTAET, UNMISET and UNMIT, Dili, 3 September 2013. Interview 26. Director, national NGO, Dili, 10 September 2013. Interview 27. Former UNTAET staff, Melbourne, 23 October 2013. Interview 28. Staff, International NGO, Melbourne, 27 March 2013. Interview 29a. UN gender adviser, Melbourne, 27 February 2014. Interview 29b. UN gender adviser, Melbourne, 16 July 2014. Interview 30. Former Renetil (youth) activist and UNDP staff, Melbourne, 4 July 2014.

Group interviews Interview G1. Women’s unit with national monitoring NGO, Dili, 2 August 2012. Interview G2. SEPI representatives, Dili, 23 August 2012.

Index

5th May Agreement 16–17, 38 Advisory Group of Experts: review of peacebuilding architecture 139, 144, 146; on Women, Peace and Security 147–148 Agathangelou, Anna M. 116, 126 agency 59, 88, 142 Alkatiri Mari 40, 89 Australia 15 Autesserre, Séverine 116, 117–118 barlake 32, 52n1, 126 Beijing Conference: East Timorese women at 37 Beijing Platform for Action 38, 45, 58, 60, 61, 65 Bhabha, Homi K. 123, 153, 155; hybridity 139, 154–155; mimicry 60, 61 Bonaparte, Rosa Muki 30, 33, 91 Butler, Judith 8, 76; performativity 8–9 Cardoso Report 114, 115, 119 capitalism 59, 122, 153, 156 civil society 44, 114–115, 121; feminisation of 44, 58, 62, 117, 119, 120, 157, 163; in liberal peace 113, 114, 115–116, 119, 149; as representing local needs 114, 115, 121, 146; and UN 114 colonial discourse 100, 153–154 colonialism 7, 69, 77, 84, 139, 155, 156; and feminism 100, 155; and women 99–100, 123; see also colonial discourse; post-colonialism; race comfort women 90–91 Commissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação (CAVR) 15, 91–92

Community Empowerment Project (CEP) 58, 62, 63, 68, 69; reserve seats for women in 68 conflict related sexual violence 99, 101; impunity for 87; intersections with race 91; as ‘weapon of war’ 85–86; women as perpetrators of 88; women as victims of 87–88; see also sexual and gender based violence Conselho Nacional da Resistência Timorense (CNRT) 35, 63; establishment of 45 Constituent Assembly 63, 64, 67; women’s quota in 64, 67 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 1, 35, 48, 61, 64, 65, 66, 70, 133n4 Coomaraswamy, Radhika 123 critical race theory 99, 104, 139, 152 cultural relativism 133n3 de Mello, Sergio Vieira 18, 40, 63, 65, 93 democratic peace theory see liberal peace democracy: and civil society 114–115, 116; democracy promotion 5–6, 11, 131; in liberal peace 40, 60, 61, 64, 71, 87, 114, 149; in Timor-Leste 14, 32, 36, 64, 68, 69; and quotas 65, 70 Department of Political Affairs 18, 48, 64, 65, 67 Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) 18, 47, 48, 60, 146; genderbalance in 60, 78n8 Dharma Wanita 36–37, 52n4 difference: construction of 123, 140, 152, 153, 154, 155 domestic violence 75, 83; Law Against Domestic Violence 2, 84, 95–96, 97,

170 Index 121, 164; post-conflict 105; in TimorLeste 2, 92–95, 98; and traditional justice responses 95, 96; see also sexual and gender-based violence East Timorese women: constructed as victims not veterans 88, 89, 128, 133n1, 141; see also resistance era; women’s activism; women’s organisations empowerment see Community Empowerment Program; gender; women Enloe, Cynthia 8, 90 epistemic violence 154 equality 59, 66; formal vs. substantive 61, 62, 96; feminist critiques of liberal notion 61; see also inequality Eurocentrism 154 everyday: in feminist theory 157n2; in hybrid peace studies 142, 143, 152 failed states 6 Falinitl 16, 34, 35 Falintil-Forças Armadas de Defesa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL) 74 female peacekeepers 74, 75–76; as standard-setting 60; slow progress gaining numbers 61, 74; see also peace operations feminisation 8, 71, 76, 77, 117, 119–120, 144, 149, 163; and depoliticsation 44, 62, 120 feminist international relations 7–9, 149 Forum Komunikasi Untuk Perempuan Lorosae (FOKUPERS) 35, 37, 39, 43 Frelimo 33 Fretilin 14, 33, 77n4, 89; changes to resistance structures 35, 41; Constitution 32; ideology 32; women in 33, 89 gender: advisers 72, 73; allyship 151; analytic tool 152; binary logics 8, 31, 71, 76, 139, 149; constructed against ‘tradition’ 122, 123–124, 131; empowerment 72; in/security 7, 11, 13, 59, 86, 99, 133n6, 146, 150, 156, 164; intersections with class and race 2, 3, 11, 12, 22, 73, 83, 89–90, 100, 123, 138, 139, 148; logics 7, 9, 21, 30, 58, 83, 90, 138, 139, 143, 146, 148, 154, 156, 157; negotiations over 127, 128, 131; in peacebuilding 72, 76, 149;

policy 72, 113, 123; politicisation of 124, 126; relations of power 117, 120, 156; stereotypes 88; as synonymous with women 72, 124; training 118; violence 8, 9, 10, 58, 61, 84, 125, 150, 156, 164; as western imposition 123, 124, 131; see also feminisation; power; race; sexual and gender-based violence gender mainstreaming 61, 95, 122, 126, 130 Global Study 3, 10, 147, 164 good governance 114, 118; see also liberal peace; peacebuilding Grupo Feto Foinsa’e Timor Lorosa’e (GFFTL) 35 Gusmão, Xanana 40, 89, 123, 126 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO): report 70, 139, 144, 145–146; on Women, Peace and Security 147 hegemony 116 human development 6; Sustainable Development Goals 59, 77n1 human rights 61, 92, 121, 122, 123, 127, 146 human security 4, 6 hybrid peace theory 138, 139, 140, 141– 142, 143, 145, 151–152; critique of binary in 151–152, 153, 155; feminist critique 150; Orientalist critique 151, 153, 154; see also hybridity; postliberal peace hybridity: in peace studies 138, 139, 140, 141–142, 143, 148, 150, 151; in postcolonial theory 139, 152, 154–155 imperialism 7, 84, 116, 123, 156; neo- 156 Indonesia 16; Asian Financial Crisis 35; New Order 36; reformasi 35; Suharto 14, 35, 36, 38; in Timor-Leste 39, 68, 69, 91–92 inequality 128; between men and women 58; as gendered and raced 59 International Force for East Timor (InterFET) 17, 22n2, 93 international organisations 100, 116, 151 justice: formal vs. traditional justice 125; transitional 87, 88, 92–93 knowledge: hierarchies of 116, 117, 118, 153, 155; see also power

Index  171 Law Against Domestic Violence see domestic violence LGBTQ 97 liberalism: critiques of 59; women in 59 liberal feminism 76 liberal peace 1, 5, 6–7, 19, 39, 58, 60, 66, 71, 87, 115; critiques of 6–7, 10–13, 138, 140, 142; and gender 10–12, 64, 71; and post-colonialism 11–12; women’s organisations in 21, 114–115, 146; see also peacebuilding; peace operations; post-liberal peace Ling, L.H.M 116, 126 local (the) 139, 141, 151, 152, 154, 156; gendered 71; as illiberal 141, 143, 151, 153; improving peace operation effectiveness 145; as non-western 141, 143, 152, 153; vs. national level 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72; 129, 130, 131, 132; as spatial dimension 139, 142, 144, 146, 156; in UN policy 144, 145; vs. international 60, 61, 151, 152; see also local-international binary; local turn; post-liberal peace local-international binary 11–12; 123, 124, 138, 140–141, 142, 143, 150, 156; critiques of 150–151, 153; as discursively constructed 138, 151, 152; gender advocacy in 151; as gendered and raced 138, 152; productive power 152; see also hybrid peace theory; local (the); local turn local turn: critiques of 117–118, 139– 140, 153, 155–156; and gender 149, 154; in peace studies 3, 21–22, 113, 115–116, 138, 140, 141; in UN policy 144–145, 149, 152, 153, 155–156; see also everyday; hybridity; local (the); local-international binary; post-liberal peace Manchanda, Rita 164 militarism 7, 8, 51, 74, 84, 85, 90, 97, 99, 101, 104, 144, 148, 162, 163; and gendered insecurity 29, 32, 36, 37; logics 7, 58, 146, 150; and masculinity 144, 162; and violence 29, 85, 90, 97, 100, 101, 163 Mozambique 14, 16, 33, 37 Namibia Plan of Action 38, 59 National Consultative Council 62, 63 National Council 63, 65, 71; women’s quota in 63, 64

National Women’s Congress 45, 63, 70, 93, 124, 125–126; request for women’s quota 63, 64, 66 neoliberalism 126, 140, 153, 156; globalisation of 51, 105, 152, 163 new wars 4, 85 NGO-isation 43, 44, 47, 51, 120, 127, 131; see also civil society; women’s activism; women’s organisations Office for Promotion of Equality (OPE) 47, 48 Organização da Mulher Timorense (OMT) 35–36, 41–42, 43, 44, 69; establishment 35; management structure 42; see also OPMT Organização Popular da Mulher Timorense (OPMT) 29, 32, 33, 41, 42, 44, 45, 89, 91; establishment of 30–31; founding principles of 31, 33; marginalisation from UNTAET 42–43; in resistance period 34–35; see also OMT Orientalism 151, 153; construction of ‘other’ 116, 123, 139, 153–154, 155, 164 patriarchy 8, 11, 12, 13, 21, 30, 51, 88, 121, 123, 126, 150; in Timor-Leste 31, 32, 36, 52n1, 52n3, 89, 124, 125, 126, 133, 163 peace see liberal peace; peacebuilding; peace operations; security peace operations: centralised 123, 130, 141; as disciplinary 98, 118–119, 153; gender advisors in 72, 73; as gendered 3, 41, 73, 87, 104, 126, 162; as militarised 7, 58, 62, 74, 103, 104, 133, 139, 144, 146, 148; as neocolonial 7, 11, 69, 140, 156; as patriarchal 7, 113–114, 121; 144, 150; UN reform of 4–6, 144; use of force in 148 peacebuilding 6–7, 148–149; bottom-up vs. top-down 69, 117; and civil society 114–115, 116; distribution of economic benefits 41, 129; gender component of 2, 10, 12, 19–20, 70, 73, 86; as gendered 11, 62, 64, 71, 114, 121, 139, 149–150, 157, 162; militarised 150, 162; ownership over 69, 146, 149, 162; and states 69, 71, 130; in Timor-Leste 18–19, 39, 132; as transformative 6, 7, 115, 118; women in 10, 131; see also liberal

172 Index peace; local (the); peace operations; post-liberal peace; security; women’s organisations; Women, Peace and Security Peacebuilding Commission 144, 146 peacekeeping economies 41 peacemaking 119; women’s exclusion from 16; in Timor-Leste 38 Polícia Nacional Timor-Leste (PNTL) 18, 74, 78n10, 93; women’s representation in 75 polygamy 32, 126 Portugal 14, 16; Carnation Revolution 14, 30  post-colonialism 58, 77, 99, 104, 139–140, 152, 155; and feminism 83–84, 139, 154; and gender oppression 123; see also hybridity; Orientalism; ‘Third World woman’; Women, Peace and Security post-liberal peace 138, 139, 140–141, 142, 145, 157n1; critiques of 148–157; see also local turn power: gendered 149, 150, 156; productive 122, 126, 139, 142; relational 152, 156 Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative 87, 98 race: and inequalities 59; marginalisation in Women, Peace and Security 73; power and logic 2, 11, 12, 21, 83, 90, 91, 99–100, 104, 105, 118, 138, 139, 148, 153, 155, 157; and violence 11, 83–84, 97, 100, 105; see also critical race theory; hybridity; local turn; Orientalism; Women, Peace and Security Ramos-Horta, José 40 rape 35, 39, 84, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 164; see also sexual and gender-based violence Rede Feto 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 67, 102–103 relational thinking 152, 154 resistance: to gender policies 113, 121, 123, 124, 126–127, 129, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132; in post-liberal peace 142, 143, 148, 151; see also gender, negotiations; resistance era (Timor-Leste) resistance era (Timor-Leste) 15–16; in contemporary politics 52, 88, 89, 128,

133n1; structures 41, 44, 45, 69, 141; women’s activism in 31–31, 32–39, 50–51, 52n3, 94, 120, 124; see also Timor-Leste Rome Statute 85 Sabaratnam, Meera 20, 22n4, 152, 153 Said, Edward 153 Secretary of State for the Promotion of Equality (SEPI) 44, 47, 95 Secretary of State for the Support and Socio-Economic Promotion of Women (SEM): see Secretary of State for the Promotion of Equality security: feminist perspectives on 7, 149; gendered 105, 138, 149, 156, 163; militarised 7, 10, 11, 19, 148, 150, 156, 162, 163, 76; see also militarism Security Council see UN Security Council Security Council resolution 1325 2, 10, 38, 45, 48, 57, 59, 61, 77, 90, 119, 122, 150; National Action Plans 12, 95; women’s participation in 60 security-development nexus 6, 114, 115 security sector: women’s participation in 57–58 sexual and gender based violence 49, 74, 75, 83, 84, 90, 95, 98–99, 163–164; in conflict 84–85, 86; as continuum 86, 87; in international law 85, 125; intersections with race 90, 91, 97, 100, 104; militarised 21, 85, 90, 100; policy responses 86, 101; post-conflict 86; and sexuality 97–98; in Timor-Leste 39, 90–92, 93, 98; see also conflict related sexual violence; domestic violence; sexual exploitation and abuse sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers 51, 61, 74, 83, 84, 99, 100–101; in humanitarian sector 133n6; impunity for 103, 157; prevention 99; and shame 101–102; in Timor-Leste 102–104; zero-tolerance 85, 87, 101, 103 Shepherd, Laura J. 117, 120, 164n1 Spivak, Gayatri 100, 154 state (the) 71, 116, 119; in security studies 4; as gendered 12–13, 70–71, 156; as masculine 62, 70, 71, 72, 163; as protectionist 102; state security 84

Index  173 state-building 70, 163; and gender 70–71; see also liberal peace; peacebuilding structural violence 58, 84, 87, 97, 99; intersections with physical violence 86, 87, 98, 100 subjectivities, production/obstruction 2, 3, 8, 9, 105, 152 Sword Gusmão, Kirsty 89 ‘Third World woman’ 11, 59, 83–84, 99, 100, 101 Timor-Leste 19, 22n3, 148, 151, 156; civil society 63; 2006 crisis period 19, 74, 88–89, 131, 150, 151; diaspora 37, 68, 163; elections 22n1, 67, 130, 133n1, 163; gender norms 31–32, 123, 162; independence referendum 16, 17, 38; Indonesian occupation 15, 33, 68; inequalities in 130, 163; political parties 14; Portuguese colonisation 13–14, 68; resistance movement 15–16, 69, 118, 163; rural-urban divisions 129, 130; and UN 162; Santa Cruz massacre 16; women’s representation in parliament 61–62, 67; see also resistance era; women’s organisations Timor-Leste-Indonesian relations: normalisation of 87 transitional justice see justice transnational feminist networks 29, 37, 38; UN Decade for Women 38; World Conferences on Women 16, 37 UN: as gendered institution 9, 156; see also international organisations; peacebuilding; peace operations UN Action 86 UN Assistance Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) 17 UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) see UN Women UN Development Program (UNDP) 4 UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) 49, 74, 93, 95, 103, 125, 128, 131; gender unit 49, 74; security sector reform 74, 75 UN Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) 18, 19, 48, 49, 70, 95, 103; gender unit 48; women’s representation in 75 UN Office in Timor-Leste (UNOTIL) 18, 48, 49

UN Police (UNPOL) 74, 86, 93, 103; women’s representation in TimorLeste 75 UN Security Council 16, 17, 45, 65, 70, 119, 132 UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) 1, 17–18, 19, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65–66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 91, 120; blank state approach 40–41, 62; centralised 41, 69, 129, 130; decentralisation 68; domestic violence 92–93, 95; economic benefits 41; Gender Affairs Unit 43, 45–47, 64, 66, 67, 93, 124, 127; and peacekeeper violence 102; Political Affairs Office 64–66, 67, 70; Timorisation 41, 62–63, 77n3; women’s representation 75 UN Women 44, 64, 93 victim-veteran debate see East Timorese women violence against women 84; see also rape; sexual and gender based violence von Billerbeck, Sarah B. K. 149, 155–156 Vulnerable Persons Unit 75, 93, 97, 103 war 84, 85; gendered impacts of 7; gendered narrative of 8; women’s experiences of 8, 86; see also security War on Terror 6, 11 women: in decision-making 61, 65, 76; economic participation 59, 99; empowerment of 57, 58–62, 72, 119, 123; as homogenised subject 76; in peace operations 59, 60, 61, 73, 74, 87, see also female peacekeepers; political participation 59, 63–65, 66, 69, 76–77; as victims 84, 87–88, 89, 90, 100; see also East Timorese women; gender women’s activism: allyship 151, 156; depoliticisation of 44, 58, 62, 77, 120, 131; post-conflict 113; in TimorLeste 31–31, 32–39, 51, 120, 124, 126, 127, 163, see also resistance era (Timor-Leste) womenandgirls 147 women’s organisations 113, 115, 119, 132; depoliticisation of 62, 120, 121, 131, 149; donor relationships with 43; lack of funding 133n7; in liberal

174 Index peacebuilding 119, 122, 131, 146, 157; negotiating gender 128–129, 131; in Timor-Leste 63, 64, 66, 102, 113, 120, 121, 127, 129, 132, 141, 163 Women, Peace & Security 1, 7, 9, 10–11, 20, 59, 99, 101, 119, 122, 146–147, 148, 163, 164; and conflict-related sexual violence 85; lack of investment

150; limitations 11, 73, 105, 147–148, 150; and race/racism 2, 77, 99; as ‘soft’ issue 10, 73; and women’s political participation 3, 21, 57, 72, 76; and women’s protection 3, 21, 73, 74, 83, 86, 87, 95, 98 World Bank 18, 58, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 70, 127