Property, State Land and Lisan: Reassembling the Land and the State in Post-Independence Timor-Leste

Abstract

Regulating land and property in Timor-Leste is a high-stakes game, intimately linked to identity, politics and processes of state- and nation-building. In the 17 years since Independence, land administration in Timor-Leste has been marked by protracted policy battles and contentious evictions. Beginning with colonial histories, I use an assemblage analytic to challenge the idea that laws, policies and legal definitions of property are technical acts. Instead I seek to lay bare the social and political ways in which property, evictions and the state are being co-produced across moments of contestation.

Grounded in the field of political ecology, I use a multi-sited ethnographic approach to trace how land is being (re)assembled across four prominent moments of contestation in post-independence Timor-Leste: (1) the drafting of provisions on land and property in the Timor-Leste Constitution; (2) the drafting of what is commonly referred to as Timor-Leste's 'first' Land Law (Law 13/2017); (3) land expropriations for the Suai Supply Base; and (4) land expropriations for the Oecusse-Ambeno Special Social Market Economy Zone (ZEESM). Using assemblage thinking to illustrate the contingent and laborious ways in which property is performed and assembled, I argue that post-independence land policy in Timor-Leste centres on the articulation of three main constructions of land: land as private property, land as state land, and land as rai lisan (customary land) and suggest that these performances are co-constitutive of the state. Show more