[TimorLesteStudies] New Book: Melissa Johnston, 'Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste' (Oxford, 2023)

[Michael Leach]

Johnston, Melissa. 2023. Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste, New York: Oxford University Press.

https://academic.oup.com/book/46658

Men and women do not experience war, violence, and peace in the same ways. Accordingly, peacebuilding interventions now incorporate “gender mainstreaming” and stand-alone “gender-and-development.” These gender interventions should make peacebuilding more effective and sustainable, facilitating stable societies and efficient economies. But success has been mixed. Timor-Leste offers an instructive case. Interventions on gender-responsive budgeting, domestic violence, and microfinance have uneven results. Whereas women’s participation in national politics in Timor-Leste is high by international standards, deep inequalities remain, inequality between rural and urban areas is growing, and violence against women is endemic across the country. Feminists have found fault with gender interventions, saying they don’t go far enough, and scholars of the local turn have suggested that focusing on gender encourages backlash against interventions. Instead of concentrating on a clash of local and international, Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy uses gender and class to explain the uneven outcomes. The text argues that peacebuilders made concessions to elites and violent men in order to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by local-turn approaches to peacebuilding. This tendency has reinforced the valorization of armed masculinity, associated most strongly with the dominant class, which has in turn justified the unequal distribution of state petroleum resources. As well, gender, class, and domestic violence are connected through brideprice, rendering legal and political reforms ineffective. Lastly, microfinance was supposed to empower women and grow the economy, but its main beneficiaries were elites, repeating patterns of accumulation and rule through debt established during the Indonesian era.



Professor Michael Leach
Politics and International Relations
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
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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