National identity in fragile states: insights from tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste

The challenges of nation building in Melanesia and Timor-Leste have often been neglected in the regional focus on state-building challenges. High levels of ethno-linguistic diversity, combined with an array of regional, historical and cultural divisions, continue to present obstacles to the creation of a cohesive sense of national political community leading these nations to be labelled ‘fragile’. This paper presents the findings of a comparative study on the attitudes of tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste to national identity and nation building. A strong pan-Melanesian pattern of group identification was identified, common to Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The ongoing importance of traditional authority and custom in informing conceptions of political community and identity was evident in all four case study sites, but was in each case matched by indicators of respect for modern state authority. The survey also reveals some significant gender differences in key attitudes towards national identity, including the role of traditional authorities. Most importantly, the study reveals high degrees of national pride, and faith in democratic principles and citizenship; but conversely, low levels of pride in contemporary democratic performance and inter-group tolerance

Informal security groups and social movements

In the years since the intense conflict of 2006-07, there has been a widespread hope that the death of Alfredo Reinado, 1 the demobilization of the Petitioners, and a change in government would bring an end to an almost Wild West era of violence and vigilantism in Timor-Leste. That hope is now looking increasingly fragile. In May 2010, an unidentified armed group exchanged fire with a unit of the national police in the mountainous western district of Ermera. After a comparative lull in the eighteen months following the joint attacks on the president and the prime minister in February 2008, there was also a marked rise in informal security-group-related violence nationally, particularly among martial arts groups, peaking in the period just before Christmas 2011. While such levels of conflict could in no way be compared with the intensity of 2006 and 2007, this renewed violence serves to demonstrate the troubling persistence of informal-security-group conflict in TimorLeste today

Gangsters, guerrillas and the rise of a shadow state in East Timor

[No abstract available

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: changing clientelist patterns in East Timors 2017 parliamentary elections

This article examines the adverse impact of clientelist relations between political parties and campaign donors on parties relations with voters. Clientelism is generally conceptualized as a vertical, pyramid structure, whereby resources are distributed from politicians to voters at the base through brokers or programmatic politics. As Gherghina and Volintiru1contend, what is often overlooked is that in tandem with this vertical relationship with voters there is a complementary horizontal relationship with party donors. Parties with a weak organizational base focus on relations with party donors, such as private contractors, at the expense of their relationship with voters. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during East Timors 2017 parliamentary elections, I engage with Gherghina and Volintirus framework to argue that a bi-dimensional approach is integral to both understanding electoral outcomes and economic trajectories in developing country contexts. In East Timor, despite a decade of rampant patronage politics, the incumbent CNRT partys prioritization of their relationship with party donors cost them the election. In turn, this focus on party donors has distorted policy and public spending priorities, with severe implications for future development

Conflict and Resilience in an Urban Squatter Settlement in Dili, East Timor

Since the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999, East Timor's capital Dili has experienced a continuous rural-urban influx. This urban population growth has been concentrated in clusters of crowded and socially fragmented new squatter settlements, posing profound challenges for informal social control and community cohesion. Such neighbourhoods have continued to suffer from endemic communal tensions and gang violence. Using a case study of an urban squatter settlement in Dili, this paper makes two arguments. First, it is argued that, to engage with these communities and address conflict within them, it is imperative to understand the intricate and dynamic linkages between rural-urban migration, urban settlement patterns and communal violence. Secondly, it is argued here that the profuse variety of non-state groups inhabiting such settlements should be viewed from the context of the migrant experience, as unique forms of community resilience to this challenging environment. © 2012 Urban Studies Journal Limited

Policing the Melbourne street heroin trade: perspectives of Vietnamese Australian social justice professionals

Drawing on a 4-year research project, 'Exploring the experience of security in the Vietnamese-Australian community: practical implications for policing', this article examines the perspectives of Melbourne VietnameseAustralian community outreach and legal professionals on policing the drug trade. Engaging with current debates on the tensions between traditional or standard policing styles and community-oriented policing styles, the article argues that the current over-reliance on traditional policing styles, with an emphasis on zero tolerance strategies is diminishing already low trust of the police within the Vietnamese-Australian community and undermining longer term community engagement strategies

Hybrid Peacebuilding in Hybrid Communities: A Case Study of East Timor

East Timor achieved independence in 1999 after 24 years of brutal Indonesian military occupation and more than 400 years of Portuguese colonial rule. With the aid of an international peacekeeping force, a United Nations (UN) mission installed an interim administration that set about preparing East Timor for self-governance. However, while its new-found freedom was much celebrated, persistent tensions, rather than unity and peace, came to characterise East Timors society in the post-independence period. These tensions reached a peak in what is now popularly referred to as the Crisis. From April to June 2006, a rapid series of events resulted in the unravelling of the six-year UN statebuilding project. National level political tensions and divisions within the security services served as a catalyst for a wider communal conflict on a national scale, which was to last for nearly two years

Measuring attitudes towards national identity and nation building in Papua New Guinea

Nation-building and the tasks of encouraging a sense of national identity and political community pose an immense challenge in Papua New Guinea (PNG). With over 830 languages, it is one of the most linguistically and ethnically diverse countries in the world. Since independence in 1975, PNG has experienced high levels of political instability with frequent changes of government and allegations of corruption. Local and traditional obligations to extended family and language groups frequently supersede allegiances to the nation-state. This paper examines the attitudes of tertiary students from the University of PNG to national identity and key issues of nation-building. These students are highly likely to feature strongly among the next generation of leaders. Findings highlight the importance of family, religion and maintaining traditional customs. They also illustrate the importance of geographical region and gender in explaining differences in key attitudes towards national identit

Autour dun Pacifique postcolonial, pluriel et plurilingue. Enquête auprès des étudiants de lenseignement supérieur à Port--Vila sur la construction de lidentité nationale au Vanuatu [Around a postcolonial, plural and plurilingual Pacific: a survey o

Nation-building remains a key challenge across Melanesian societies, including Vanuatu. From the origins of the new nations of Melanesia following decolonization in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages ??and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. Despite an apparent greater success than neighboring Melanesian states, the legacies of dual Anglo-French colonialism presented additional challenges to the post-independence political elites of Vanuatu. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu, based on research conducted at the University of the South Pacific and other tertiary institutions in Port Vila in 2010. Among other things, the survey identifies many key areas of common attitudes toward nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni-Vanuatu. These include most indicators of national pride, and attitudes to the importance of respecting tradition andkastom , of citizenship, and respecting political institutions and laws. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings also suggest there remain some key areas of strong association between language of education, attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites toward regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu, and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity

Timor-leste votes: Parties and patronage

This article examines electoral politics in the tiny nation of Timor-Leste, one of Southeast Asia's most successful democracies. Focusing on the countrys July 2017 parliamentary elections, it asks why retail forms of electoral clientelism, such as mass-based vote buying, are rarer in Timor-Leste than in several neighboring states, despite its poverty and growing levels of corruption. It argues that Timor-Lestes electoral system undercuts the appeal of retail clientelism by prioritizing parties rather than candidates, and by encouraging parties to build up their networks and target patronage politics at community-level notables rather than ordinary voters. The result is an alternative model of clientelistic politics shaped by collective ties involving parties, local notables, and state contracts, Moreover, these clientelistic ties, although common, remained on the whole secondary to historical networks in binding voters to politicians