Guns, gender and petroleum: a critical analysis of the underlying dynamics of Timor-Leste’s development trajectory

Abstract

This article examines the underlying political economy context of the uneven development outcomes in post-conflict Timor-Leste. We use a modified version of a structural political economy approach that is situated in a Gramscian understanding of the state-society relationship. This approach conceptualises development as a process of historically specific class-based and gender-based contestations over the distribution of resources that result in particular forms of socio-political orders maintained through a combination of institutional and ideological mechanisms of wealth generation. Our analysis of whose interests have been prioritised and marginalised in post-independence Timor-Leste is based on a systematic examination of three major factors: regulation of class relations, organisation of gender relations, and the governance of the petroleum industry. We conclude that despite some important improvements in the formation of formal democratic institutions in Timor-Leste, the processes of the distribution of power and access to resources remain far from being inclusive prioritising a class-based group of male-dominant elites that manipulates institutions to advance their interests and use a hegemonic gender ideology to justify and maintain these existing unequal arrangements in the prevailing socio-political order. Thus, the development outcomes in Timor-Leste are strongly connected to the political-economic processes from a larger historical perspective.

Keywords:

• Timor-Leste
• state institutions
• resistance movement
• gender relations
• petroleum industry

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editors and three anonymous referees of Third World Quarterly for their valuable and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Selver B. Sahin

Selver B. Sahin is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. She is the author of International Intervention and State- Making: How the Exception Became the Norm (Routledge, 2015). Her research is focused on the social dynamics of institutional and governmental outcomes and has been published in Democratisation, Development Policy Review, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Studies Review, Australian Journal of International Affairs, and International Peacekeeping.

Stepan Verkhovets

Stepan Verkhovets is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has published his research work on the political economy of institutional and governmental outcomes in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Globalizations.