Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Volume 311. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019. xii, 252 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, coloured photos.) US$126.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-39418-6.
Much has been written on East Timor since the country’s restoration of independence in 2002, covering topics ranging from state building to peace building, to transitional justice, and to economic affairs. While James Scambary’s book, Conflict, Identity, and State Formation in East Timor 2000–2017 addresses some of these themes, he follows an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach in looking at the conflict dynamics in East Timor. Centred on interpretations of the 2006 crisis, Scambary employs a historical and ethnographic context to analyze the intersecting localized historical, political, social, and cultural factors influencing national and subnational conflict from 2000 to 2017. His analysis leads to a debate on how this subnational conflict dynamic facilitates a broader understanding of the contemporary power configurations and conflict dynamics in East Timor, with a main focus on the informal security groups (ISGs), referring to groups such as gangs, martial arts groups, and veterans’ groups.
In his book, Scambary offers critiques of the pre-existing master narratives, such as the simplified macro-level explanations of complex events by most experts on East Timor, which have largely overlooked the linkage between national conflict at a macro level with the local conflict. By combining anthropology, political science, and a political economy approach, Scambary draws on a multi-level framework for understanding conflict in East Timor, rather than ascribing conflict to a single root cause or set of root causes. The dynamic interaction between rural-urban migration, and how it functions to blur distinctions between local and national, in tandem with knowledge of East Timor’s complex colonial legacies, is key to understanding the context for contemporary conflict dynamics.
Chapters 2 and 3 detail the localized cultural, historical, social, and political factors that generate contemporary conflict in East Timor and that have led to the emergence of ISGs, and discuss how these factors have continued to influence events and shape conflict in the independence era. Chapters 4 and 5 are particularly interesting as Scambary describes the different types of ISGs in East Timor and their origins, with case studies of urban street corner groups, and veterans’ and martial arts groups. It describes the groups’ roots within East Timorese cultural beliefs and history, and their networks within contemporary political structures. It also focuses on urban ISGs by setting out a typology of the different types of groups and their origins.
Chapter 6 constructs a case study of an urban squatter settlement in Dili. Chapter 7 is particularly useful as the author traces the evolution of peace-building approaches in East Timor, and looks at how a range of misapprehensions and assumptions have hampered the effectiveness of both government and international-agency-driven initiatives, particularly those by the UN. Scambary then offers some thoughts on innovative, community-based approaches. In chapter 8, he shows how the cultural, social, and demographic dynamics that drive conflict have contributed to emergent clientelist configurations of power and patronage. The final chapter considers the implications of these conflict dynamics and emerging configurations of power for the future.
This book stands out by its depiction of individual encounters and experiences in ethnographic field research in East Timor, by which Scambary challenges the dominant representation of ISGs as a recent urban phenomenon, or their members’ labelling as delinquent youth reacting to social deprivation. In Scambary’s argument, they are far too complex social phenomena to be ascribed to any single cause or grievance. While it is true that these groups rose to prominence during the events of the 2006 crisis or as a response to the perceived mismanagement of the security forces’ recruitment process, in order to understand the proliferation and variety of contemporary ISGs, it is important to note that their origins can be traced back to the resistance against Indonesian occupation.
Beyond addressing the conflict dynamic, this book is insightful in its critical engagment with the debate of the UN’s role in East Timor’s state-building project. Such a conversation provides an alternative discussion that points to larger questions about the international community’s highly debated capacity to intervene in a post-conflict state, where this oversight is reflected in donor and government programs and policies. In a more contemporary discourse, this book suggests the need for the UN and the international community to adopt a more multi-level approach that looks beyond rural/urban, liberal/local, and modern/traditional dichotomies to see the linkages between local- and national-level politics and conflicts.
Scambary’s work certainly represents a significant contribution to the emerging but growing international school of scholarship concerned with subnational-level conflict that is highly critical of prescriptive, normative frameworks and of master narratives and what these tell us about broader debates in international conflict and state-building scholarship. While Scambary describes at length how Timorese politics is a complicated web of relations that requires us to look beyond the master narratives, the structure of the book could have been improved by more coherent chapters. Scambary needs to offer more concrete connections between the role and influence of ISGs in terms of how they build up the identity of East Timor, as the discussion of the foundations of a clientelist state elaborated in chapter 8 and the concluding chapter 9 that details the conflict and state formation do not adequately address the prospect of the ISGs within contemporary power relations in East Timor.
Nevertheless, Scambary’s ethnographic fieldwork experiences with the youth he is discussing is useful in highlighting their individual agency, pointing out how ISGs are linked into their communities, their contributions to independence, and their relationships to the state, to development, and to the peace-building process. In all, Scambary’s analysis provides a path for scholars and practitioners, especially those working in East Timor, to rethink how we interpret conflict patterns. This book demonstrates that we need to delve deeper to understand local-level actors and national and subnational conflicts in analyzing contemporary political power in East Timor.
On a final note, Dr. James Scambary passed away in Melbourne while this review of his book was being prepared for publication. I would like to record my gratitude to Dr. Scambary, who, though no longer with us, continues to inspire by his contributions to the literature on East Timor.
Ying Hooi Khoo
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur