This book examines the history of political continuity and conflict in East Timor between 1974 and 2006, and the origins of an unexpected crisis in 2006 which caused an international military intervention and several more years of UN missions. Providing a fresh and empirical political history to explain the crisis, the book offers new dimensions to the understanding of East Timor, its independence struggles, political transition and politics after independence in 2002. The author revisits historical materials and brings to light new resources, making extensive use of the 2005 Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation and contemporary diplomatic, UN and news media reports, to provide a precise context and chronology for the events in 2006. The book provides an analysis within which factors such as ethnic and inter-communal violence, security sector weaknesses and conflict between the army and police, the constitution and legal system, state-building and peace-building can be located in the larger context of the 2006 crisis. Demonstrating how and why, in the space of four weeks in April and May 2006, the newly independent country of Timor-Leste plunged from ‘UN success story’ into catastrophe, this book will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Politics, Southeast Asian history, Development Studies and Nation-, State- and Peace-Building and International Relations.

This book examines the history of political continuity and conflict in East Timor between 1974 and 2006, and the origins of an unexpected crisis in 2006 which caused an international military intervention and several more years of UN missions. Providing a fresh and empirical political history to explain the crisis, the book offers new dimensions to the understanding of East Timor, its independence struggles, political transition and politics after independence in 2002. The author revisits historical materials and brings to light new resources, making extensive use of the 2005 Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation and contemporary diplomatic, UN and news media reports, to provide a precise context and chronology for the events in 2006. The book provides an analysis within which factors such as ethnic and inter-communal violence, security sector weaknesses and conflict between the army and police, the constitution and legal system, state-building and peace-building can be located in the larger context of the 2006 crisis. Demonstrating how and why, in the space of four weeks in April and May 2006, the newly independent country of Timor-Leste plunged from 'UN success story' into catastrophe, this book will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Politics, Southeast Asian history, Development Studies and Nation-, State- and Peace-Building and International Relations.

A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen's vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq. Now, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror.

The Oxford Handbook on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations presents an innovative, authoritative, and accessible examination and critique of the United Nations peacekeeping operations. Since the late 1940s, but particularly since the end of the cold war, peacekeeping has been a central part of the core activities of the United Nations and a major process in global security governance and the management of international relations in general. The volume will present a chronological analysis, designed to provide a comprehensive perspective that highlights the evolution of UN peacekeeping and offers a detailed picture of how the decisions of UN bureaucrats and national governments on the set-up and design of particular UN missions were, and remain, influenced by the impact of preceding operations. The volume will bring together leading scholars and senior practitioners in order to provide overviews and analyses of all 65 peacekeeping operations that have been carried out by the United Nations since 1948. As with all Oxford Handbooks, the volume will be agenda-setting in importance, providing the authoritative point of reference for all those working throughout international relations and beyond.

Winner of the E.M. Forster Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this brutal and beautiful narration of the guerrilla war against the Indonesians in Timor, praised by Fretilin Foreign Minister and Nobel prize-winner Jose Ramos-Horta for its 'perfect authenticity', reappears now in this handsome edition at a topical moment in history as Timor fully joins the UN at last. ''Magnificent' - The Spectator 'A marvellous tour de force' - Evening Standard 'A brilliant novel, written with precision and tenderness' - Guardian

One of the most troubling but least studied features of mass political violence is why violence often recurs in the same place over long periods of time. Douglas Kammen explores this pattern in Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor, studying that region’s tragic past, focusing on the small district of Maubara. Once a small but powerful kingdom embedded in long-distance networks of trade, over the course of three centuries the people of Maubara experienced benevolent but precarious Dutch suzerainty, Portuguese colonialism punctuated by multiple uprisings and destructive campaigns of pacification, Japanese military rule, and years of brutal Indonesian occupation. In 1999 Maubara was the site of particularly severe violence before and after the UN-sponsored referendum that finally led to the restoration of East Timor’s independence. Beginning with the mystery of paired murders during East Timor’s failed decolonization in 1975 and the final flurry of state-sponsored violence in 1999, Kammen combines an archival trail and rich oral interviews to reconstruct the history of the leading families of Maubara from 1712 until 2012. Kammen illuminates how recurrent episodes of mass violence shaped alliances and enmities within Maubara as well as with supra-local actors, and how those legacies have influenced efforts to address human rights violations, post-conflict reconstruction, and the relationship between local experience and the identification with the East Timorese nation. The questions posed in Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor about recurring violence and local narratives apply to many other places besides East Timor—from the Caucasus to central Africa, and from the Balkans to China—where mass violence keeps recurring.