Taking the so-called 2006 crisis in Timor-Leste as a heuristic device, James Scambary's book is an analysis of cleavages and alliances framing the conflicts existing between various institutions in the country: extended families, veterans’ associations, informal security groups, martial arts groups, and political parties, among others. Broadly speaking, the author argues that the 2006 crisis was but a chapter in a continuum of structured and long-running disputes between collective institutions which often intertwine and/or develop elective affinities (pp. 111–12). Thus conflicts between political parties are often expressed as disputes between informal security or martial arts groups and long-standing local grievances between families may translate into national conflicts through multiple mediations. Importantly, he asserts that such a pattern of interplay among institutions structures and has been structured by the political culture of clientelism and neo-patrimonialism in Timor-Leste.
The author's analysis is multi-scalar (p. 210). Step-by-step, Scambary brings to the fore the diverse scenarios and reasons informing conflicts in rural and urban, colonial and postcolonial Timor-Leste. Each of the book's nine chapters adds new layers of complexity for those interested in understanding communal conflicts. Alliances with and wars against colonial administrations, land disputes, migration trajectories, patterns of support or resistance to the Indonesian occupation, cleavages within the Timorese resistance, youth group dynamics, informal security and martial arts groups, messianic narratives and political parties are all somehow actors in contemporary communal conflicts, in direct or indirect ways, voluntarily or involuntarily. A paramount lesson from this: it is impossible to isolate one unique cause to explain the political conflicts in Timor-Leste today. Most of them are rooted in intertwined reasons hardly discernible from one another.
The book's theoretical frame is multidisciplinary. Literature from anthropology, political science, and peacebuilding as well as development reports are all brought together in efforts of cross-fertilisation. This approach highlights the need for analysis about Timor-Leste's politics to go well beyond examining the games played by official and modern institutions. It is essential for political scientists writing about the country to draw from a broad range of interdisciplinary sources. Such a critical perspective also functions as a warning against naïve cultural analysis, a reminder of the narrow connections existing between rural and urban landscapes, between what is glossed as traditional and modern. This being said, the author also takes into consideration the important role that the ethos of reciprocity and payback play in the making of a clientelist political culture.
For Timor-Leste specialists the book provides two fundamental contributions: first, it demonstrates that the 2006 crisis was much more than an urban phenomenon. The crisis continued in rural areas throughout 2007 and early 2008 and had its roots in social grievances that far exceed the tensions within and between F-FDTL (the military) and the National Police. Indeed, Scambary shows that much of the 2007 violence occurred in the countryside, where conflicts are endemic. Second, it unveils the complex and diverse character of informal security groups and their widespread presence across urban and rural Timor-Leste. The author suggests that many of these groups are responses to predicaments the state cannot solve and that they function as a source of heterodox social contracts and mutual support (p. 135). Consequently, ‘power in East Timor rests not on a monopoly of violence through state actors such as security forces (…), but in a network of non-state actors’ (p. 214).
Scambary challenges general assumptions about the conflicts and proposals to mitigate them, especially in development narratives, and is very critical of peacebuilding literature. His book clarifies that the conflicts do not result from poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and the like, and that such rationales are very narrow and ethnocentric (p. 122). Much of the conflict in the country arises from local and historical issues. Simultaneously, he provokes the readers to see beyond the criticism about the UN's legacies as the main cause of communal conflicts, arguing that the many failures which characterised UN missions in Timor-Leste do not have a direct connection with the dynamics of collective conflicts.
Last, but not least, those who had the pleasure of meeting Scambary will recognise in his book the independence of his scholarship. His brave postscript (as well as other sections of the book) calls our attention to the ways clientelist and neo-patrimonial political culture is risking the present and future of the nation through corruption and maladministration, among other phenomena. His premature passing is a major loss for the field of Timor-Leste studies. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in a deep understanding of political relations in contemporary Timor-Leste. We could honour his legacy by embarking on more multidisciplinary and well-researched studies of this nation.
