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This chapter examines the unique case of East Timor and its implications for the future of international intervention. Although Indonesia’s claim of sovereignty over East Timor was not recognized by the United Nations and most member states, the international community deemed Indonesia’s consent essential to intervention. The background to intervention in East Timor, Indonesia’s strong resistance to any international security presence in East Timor, the manner in which Indonesia’s consent was induced, and contrasts between the situations in East Timor and Kosovo are discussed.

This chapter analyses the process of democratic regime-building in East Timor, concentrating in particular on the period of administration by UNTAET between 1999 and 2002. Using documentary and elite interview data, it traces the influence of the UN administration in East Timor and highlights the particular form of interaction between domestic and international actors. Although distinct tensions emerged between international and domestic actors, the transition process in East Timor entailed little serious political deadlock between international and domestic actors, and thus entailed limited imposition on the part of the international administrators. The parties combined to bring about a largely consensual and pacted political transition.

The first part of this chapter briefly explores the history of international administrations since the early 20th century, including administrations under the League of Nations and in the context of decolonization during the cold war. It provides the historical context in which contemporary international administrations are embedded, identifying precedents, ideas, and traditions on which contemporary international administrations draw. The second part discusses the sources of authority of international administrations. Drawing on the discussion of authority in the preceding chapter, it identifies five sources of authority, and analyses to what extent they are reflected in the mandates of the international administrations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor. It concludes by discussing the issues of accountability and liability of international administrations.

Stephen Zunes compares and contrasts territorial disputes and forces that have attempted to influence outcome of Indonesian occupation of East Timor and Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. The author concludes that the institutionalization of expanded borders led to resistance to state downsizing, and that opportunities for withdrawal from the occupied territory emerged in Indonesia only with the fall of the Sukharto regime and subsequent democratization. The author also shows how great power politics of the Cold War enabled the occupations, and the post‐Cold War international community was an obstacle to the full integration of the territories into the two states.

During the 1990s, modesty in expectations remained the leitmotif of international humanitarian operations in places like Cambodia, Haiti, and East Timor. In Cambodia, human rights violations littered much of the recent past and remain a continuing problem. Following Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, a 1995 lessons‐learned report noted that there is no US government doctrine integrating the military component of a complex humanitarian operation with the civilian agencies responsible for recovery. As for East Timor, while quite limited as a policy precedent, it will probably be considered the paradigmatic test case for international state building.

Refugee policy needs to be more proactive, and a greater degree of international cooperation and a preventive orientation should animate humanitarian responses.

East Timor is the world's newest nation. The process of nation building has largely focused on the two official languages, Tetum and Portuguese. The preservation and promotion of the twenty minority languages have been given relatively little attention. This chapter discusses the small Austronesian language of Waima'a, looking at its recent history, the authors' efforts to document the language and to provide technical and other assistance to the Waima'a speaking community, and the impact these strategies might have had on language maintenance.

On 1 Nov 1994, the UN Trusteeship Council voted to suspend operations after Palau, the last remaining trust territory, attained independence. The sovereign state has emerged out of decolonization as the supreme form of political organization in post‐colonial international society—an international society in which dominions, colonies, principalities, free cities, and, of course, mandates and trust territories have all but vanished. However, the ostensible failure of this post‐colonial project—the fact that the promise of peace and prosperity held out by independent statehood is too often betrayed by appalling violence and absolute poverty—has reinvigorated interest in trusteeship as a way of responding to problems of international disorder and injustice. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: first, it examines the principal dilemma of decolonization that has resulted in a renewed interest in trusteeship; second, it considers this renewed interest in trusteeship in the context of international involvement in administering Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and, until recently, East Timor; third, it reflects upon the normative implications that a resurrected practice of trusteeship carries for a society of states that is premised on the juridical equality of all its members. The five sections of the chapter are: The False Promise of post‐Colonial Independence; Innovation and Convention—the case for trusteeship in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor; The New International Legitimacy—the resurrection of trusteeship; A Universal Society of States?; and Answering the Call of Humanity.

This chapter analyses the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, providing evidence to show how the Cold War regional environment created a convergence of interests between Indonesia, the ASEAN vanguard state, the United States and Australia with regards to the newly decolonized territory of East Timor. With external and regional power backing, Indonesia was able to invade East Timor without any repercussions from the international community, despite considerable attempts by the United Nations to intervene in Indonesia’s internal affairs to allow the East Timorese an act of self-determination. Indonesian interest convergence with these external powers meant that it was able to resist sovereignty violation at this time.

This chapter analyses the East Timor humanitarian crisis of 1999. It shows how interest divergence between Indonesia, the United States, and Australia following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, led to external powers applying pressure on Indonesia, to elicit regime change in East Timor. In a weakened state, Indonesia was coerced into accepting an international peacekeeping force in East Timor, despite asserting that such a force would constitute an unacceptable breach of its state sovereignty. Critically, ASEAN institutional cohesion alone was not sufficient to prevent Indonesian sovereignty violation at this time.

This chapter inquires into the use of the story in East Timor as a framework within which the nation's troubled and erased history is being reconstructed. The use of the Rāmāyana as a mediating artifact between politics and semiotics is examined. In East Timor, the historical experience of foreign domination and destruction is sought to be recovered, interpreted, and validated within an allegorical framework supplied by the theme of Sītā's abduction by Ravana, which is conveyed through a unique medium, that of embossed shell casings depicting the Rāmāyana episode. It is argued that this ekphrastic entry into sites of domination and contest from which conventional language has been erased has been made possible by the availability of the Rāmāyana as a narrative model.

This chapter explores Portuguese colonial relations with Timorese marriage institutions during the late colonial period. By drawing on the rich colonial history of the barlake (traditional marriage contracts) in East Timor, it proposes a novel approach to the trope of intermarriage in the Portuguese-speaking world. In addressing the variety of relationships with marriage in colonial practice, the chapter conceptualises three main types of colonial interactions with indigenous marriage: predatory, parasitic and mimetic. It uses case studies to show how these distinct forms of interaction could be associated with distinct colonial agents and their particular agendas. The chapter shows how, in late nineteenth-century East Timor, colonial relationships with barlake were marked by a tense coexistence between, on the one hand, the predatory model followed by the Catholic missionaries, and, on the other hand, the parasitic exploitation of indigenous marriage ties, customarily practised by colonial officers and governors.

This is the second of two chapters establishing the legal status of those territories where ITA projects have occurred, covering (mostly non-state) territories where the international legal right to self-determination was, in varying ways, determinative of this status. Before commencing the analysis on each territory, a review of the international law on self-determination and a consideration of the effect that the self-determination entitlement is regarded to have on territorial status is offered. This general legal framework is then applied to the question of the status of each territory: Mandated and Trust territories where the UN conducted consultations; West Irian in 1962-63; South West Africa/Namibia in 1967 and 1989-90; the Western Sahara from 1991; and East Timor between 1999 and 2002. The conclusion reached is that these territories were not ‘sovereign UN territories’ but rather non-state territories with distinct legal personality derived from their self-determination entitlement.

The multinational involvement in East Timor (now officially known in its Portuguese form as Timor Leste) began after the violence surrounding the independence referendum in 1999. At various points in the unfolding of the situation, the international presence in Timor seemed to represent the best efforts of humanitarian intervention. This external involvement took a number of familiar forms. There was, successively, intervention by a coalition of the willing legitimised by the United Nations, a UN force, and a UN transitional administration in the territory. The conflict that brought about this complex intervention was both inter-state and intra-state in character. The referendum that acted as the trigger for the conflict in East Timor was held to determine whether it should become an independent state, freed from annexation by Indonesia imposed in 1975. This chapter examines UN intervention in East Timor, Australia's participation in UN peacekeeping in East Timor via the International Force in East Timor (INTERFET), the transitional administration in East Timor, the post-independence period in East Timor, and the birth and infancy of Timor Leste.

This chapter examines the effort to build a liberal peace since 1999 in East Timor. It illustrates that to a large degree the liberal peace model has failed the East Timorese people in producing anything remotely representative of a social contract or the ‘good life’. There are two aspects to this: the first is the failure to construct a social contract between society and its institutions of governance. This is related to the broader issue of the social legitimacy of, and contract with, international actors derived from society and its complex groupings. The second is the failure, at least in the transitional period, to respond to the experiences of everyday life and welfare requirements of the new state's citizens.

East Timor was forcibly incorporated into Indonesia in 1975 and managed to become independent almost twenty-five years later. Now the territory, poised on the edge of statehood, is undergoing transition, but also flux and confusion. At the time of writing, the United Nations Transitional Authority for East Timor (UNTAET) is effectively the Government of East Timor, with elections for a constituent assembly to determine a constitution expected in August 2001. This chapter examines the immediate background to Indonesia's violent process of incorporation and the pattern of abuse that characterised it. To emphasise human rights promotion as grounded in exchange with the actual patterns of social practice involved casts a different light on the apparent self-evidence of that polarisation, as the story of East Timor suggests. Effective self-determination and effective international understanding of and response to East Timor's evolving circumstances may be anything but simple. Answers to questions around how to build a reasonably peaceful political order that East Timor's circumstances pose for its own population and leadership, and for others, may be fundamental to how we understand political community.