Vernacular security and the spiritual landscape in Timor-Leste

After nearly 500 years of Portuguese colonial rule and a 24-year resistance struggle against Indonesian occupation, the population of Timor-Leste voted overwhelmingly for independence in the 1999 Popular Consultation Vote. After three years of UN transitional administration (UNTAET), the nation formally gained independence in May 2002. Since then, Timor-Leste has been host to on-going international efforts to reform, develop and capacity-build the security sector with significant time and resources allocated towards supporting the formation of new state institutions. The majority of academic and policy documentation available gives the impression that the security, stability and development of the nation rests, by and large, on the success or failure of such statebuilding. In contrast to the common assumption that posits the state as the primary location in terms of the production of security, communities across the territory continue to demonstrate high levels of resilience in dealing with sources of (in)security in ways that go beyond the utilisation of and reliance on what might be seen as the conventional architecture of the state. In Timor-Leste, many people live their lives with a powerful sense of the presence and influence of ancestral and nature spirits. As part of this, the land itself is understood as enlivened by spiritual forces, where everything in nature has a spirit and where God is the source and creator of life. This worldview of the spiritual landscape has ramifications for many different aspects of people’s lives including agriculture and natural resource management, fertility, politics and national identity, and—as I will demonstrate in this thesis—the production of security. In its simplest form, this thesis argues that the spiritual landscape is often critical to how people experience and produce security in their daily lives in Timor-Leste. This overarching argument consists of three subsidiary claims: firstly, that the spiritual landscape is typically comprised relationally of humans, nature spirits, ancestors and an entity that takes the form of a Catholic God; secondly, that people’s security is most often reproduced at the local and everyday level, outside the machinations of the state; and thirdly, that there are four dimensions of social life—community, regulation, exchange and production—which are particularly relevant in highlighting the link between the spiritual landscape and security production. This thesis and its arguments are situated within the growing critical discourse problematising conventional approaches to security studies, particularly its Western and Euro-centric origins and subsequent blindness to what is often categorised as ‘the other’. Such an argument involves reorienting social inquiry onto that which falls outside the ‘status quo’ of referent objects and agents in terms of whose ideas and needs are taken into consideration and prioritised, and what lived experiences are considered relevant to discussions of security. To draw from the lexicon of human security, this entails focusing on the ‘end-user’. While terms such as fear, threat, risk, harm, danger and safety are ‘existential features’ of the human condition (Giddens 1991), how people experience and deal with such conditions are socially and culturally constituted, rooted in situated knowledge and worldviews. As such, this thesis builds on this growing body of alternative social inquiry, applying a vernacular lens in the context of Timor-Leste with the purpose of demonstrating the plurality of security. I do this by way of a particular focus on non-secular, non-anthropocentric beliefs and practices which are often dismissed as illogical or irrational, but which have very real impacts on people’s lives and experiences. This is not to say that security in Timor-Leste is constituted entirely by the spiritual landscape, but rather that to ignore the centrality of the spiritual landscape is to overlook a key dimension of security in Timor-Leste.