A01=Lia Kent
atrocity
Author_Lia Kent
burial
Category=JHBZ
Category=JP
Category=NHF
commemoration
conflict resolution
death
death studies
East Timor
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ghosts
mass death
mass violence
memorialization
memory
memory studies
memory work
necrogovernability
necrogovernance
necropolitics
necropower
occupation
peace and conflict
peacebuilding
post-conflict peacebuilding
restless spirits
social formation
social repair
South Pacific
Southeast Asia
spirits
state formation
state-building
the dead
Timor-Leste
Timorese culture
Timorese politics
Timorese society
transitional justice
Product details
- ISBN 9780299349301
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 Aug 2024
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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“What might it mean to take the dead seriously?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.
With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
Lia Kent is a peace and conflict studies scholar and a senior fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Dynamics of Transitional Justice: International Models and Local Realities in East Timor.
