[TimorLesteStudies] New Book: Andrew McWilliam, 'Post-Conflict Social and Economic Recovery in Timor-Leste: Redemptive Legacies' (Routledge, 2020)

[Michael Leach]

Andrew McWilliam. 2020. Post-Conflict Social and Economic Recovery in Timor-Leste: Redemptive Legacies  Oxford, New York: Routledge, 284pp.

https://www.routledge.com/Post-Conflict-Social-and-Economic-Recovery-in-Timor-Leste-Redemptive-Legacies/McWilliam/p/book/9780367366681


This book presents an ethnography of post-conflict social and economic recovery in East Timor following the end of Indonesian military occupation of the territory in 1999. It offers a longer-term analysis of the pathways to rebuilding and restoring local community life, and the budding prosperity that has flowed from participation in spontaneous circular labour migration and the remittance benefits that have followed.

Based on extensive comparative literature and field-based empirical research, the book explores the protracted process of recovery following a generation-long period of military repression and a sustained struggle for national independence. With a focus on the experiences of Fataluku ethno-linguistic communities in Timor-Leste, the study offers nuanced perspectives on the legacies of conflict and local forms of governance, the revitalisation of customary exchange and ancestral religion. Presenting both an optimistic and alternative narrative in which a traumatised population finds new hope and emergent prosperity, the study highlights a renewed concern with inter-generational well-being and widespread aspirations for prosperity and material benefits following decades of deprivation. It is also an analysis of post-conflict resilience against the odds, illustrating the adaptive possibilities of tradition in the context of globalisation and expectations of modernity.

As a major contribution to understanding the emergence and expansion of informal transnational labour migration out of East Timor, this book will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy makers of contemporary Timor-Leste, Southeast Asian Politics, Southeast Asian Culture and Society, Development Studies, Anthropology and Conflict Studies.


Professor Michael Leach
Politics and International Relations
Faculty of Health, Arts and Design
Swinburne University of Technology
H98, PO Box 218 Hawthorn VIC
AUSTRALIA 3122
Phone: +61 3 9214 5357

<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/health-arts-design/staff-profiles/view.php?who=mleach>
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