Youth at the crossroads: the politics of identity and belonging in Timor-leste

Abstract

This thesis explores the construction of Timorese youth identity through time and space. I focus on younger generation Timorese who were educated under the Indonesian New Order regime and attempt to shed light on the consequence of their struggles for belonging in the nation-state during the critical years ofTimor-Leste's independence, from 2002 to 2008. My research diverges from the dominant approach in the emerging field of Timor studies that tends to view Timar through the narrow lens of conflict and positions Timorese people as mere victims. Instead, it explores youth's attempt to make meaning out of their histories of conflict through an ethnographic account of their cultural expressions. By doing so, I shift the analytical focus from conflict to raise other questions about the nature of youth identities, independence and the nation-state in Timor-Leste. This thesis traces how the place of youth in Timor-Leste has changed over time. During the national resistance, youth became important symbols of nationalism. Upon independence, youth found they were no longer critical constituents in the national agenda. As TimorLeste moved to independent nation-statehood, it had to redefine the limits of belonging. Because of young Timorese' engagement with Indonesia, primarily as subjects of its education and language policies, they were marginalised from the new national narrative that put a greater focus and orientation towards Portugal. This marginalisation acted as a catalyst for young Timorese to persistently express a sense of identity and belonging in time and place. I begin by tracing the historical underpinnings of Timorese youth identity created in a vortex of modernity where anti-colonial nationalism and masculine patriotism was strongly emphasised. Throughout the Indonesian occupation, young Timorese molded their gendered identities and sense of community from personal and collective experiences of violence and fear. After independence, this critical community began to disintegrate. In an era marked by colonisation, power structures and relations often recurred as boundaries of self-definition delineated during independence. Through their engagement with Indonesia, international discourses of human rights, and transcultural expressions of identity, young Timorese defined their own sense of cultural citizenship following independence through music, poetry and literature. This fed into discourses on truth and justice expressed through very specific memories of Indonesia in print media and film that came to underlie attempts to maintain a sense of cultural citizenship. As the 2006 crisis demonstrated, the limits of cultural citizenship became evident as the politics of defining belonging reemerged. However, as this thesis illustrates, historical, gendered and transcultural references are continually called upon in young Timorese' attempts to construct their identity and forge a place of belonging in independent Timor-Leste.