Timor - the Politics of Conscience (original) (raw)
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The history of transnational activism in support of East Timor offers valuable insights for scholars seeking to understand the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international relations. This activism proved crucial in maintaining East Timor's visibility internationally from 1975-1991 and in pressuring Indonesia to allow a referendum on the territory's independence in 1999. This article examines the emergence and growth of an East Timor solidarity movement in the United States: the strategies activists pursued; the nature of the opposition; the successes, failures, and limits of this activism; their dynamic interaction with a transnational movement for East Timor; and the lessons these hold for justice movements focusing on U.S. foreign policy and for social movement and foreign relations historians.
Peace <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Change, 2004
The history of transnational activism in support of East Timor offers valuable insights for scholars seeking to understand the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international relations. This activism proved crucial in maintaining East Timor's visibility internationally from 1975-1991 and in pressuring Indonesia to allow a referendum on the territory's independence in 1999. This article examines the emergence and growth of an East Timor solidarity movement in the United States: the strategies activists pursued; the nature of the opposition; the successes, failures, and limits of this activism; their dynamic interaction with a transnational movement for East Timor; and the lessons these hold for justice movements focusing on U.S. foreign policy and for social movement and foreign relations historians.
Dissident Labour Activism in Vietnam
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2023
Scholars of Vietnam have studied different forms of labour resistance such as wildcat strikes, petitions, complaints, work stoppages, and boycotts, with which workers demand higher wages and pensions, overall better working conditions, and the implementation of workers' rights. This article pays attention to the small, yet not negligible group of dissident labour activists, who are subjected to much harsher state repression compared to labour resistance in and around the workplace. This article asks: What makes dissident labour activism a (real or perceived) threat to the state? A common and widely accepted explanation refers to the nature of the demands of dissidents, which includes independent trade unions, democratisation, and regime change. This article digs deeper and finds that dissident labour activists function as agents of an emerging epistemological third space, which permits the revitalisation of hidden knowledges about labour rights, the reclamation of the silenced idea of independent trade unions and the coexistence of critique of the status quo and imagination of an alternative future, which together threaten to endanger the Communist Party of Vietnam's political legitimacy and, by implication, capital utilisation.
CHRSPRKNSN_REMARKS_FROM_EAST_TIMOR_SMALL.pdf
This thesis investigates the specific conflicts and contexts that produced East Timor’s fledgling graffiti between 2004-2008 to demonstrate links between its local lineage and a globally contextualised backdrop. It is a work that is advanced through the epistemological propositions of Southern theory. Primarily, it is concepts of the centre and the periphery and how graffiti negotiates movement between these positions that are the thesis’ main concerns. With this in mind, the central question of how East Timor’s graffiti contributed to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict is framed. In demonstrating graffiti’s contribution to the cultural expression of East Timor’s growth into nationhood from conflict, its location at the nexus of resistance and transformation is revealed. This thesis presents graffiti in East Timor as a hermeneutic, validating the expressions of marginalized actors in geo-political contexts of conflict, reconstruction and social relationships.
Vietnam in global context (1920-1968): looking through the lens of three historical figures
2019
This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King's, Ernesto Guevara's and Rabindranath Tagore's ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause.
The Anti-Vietnam War Movement: International Activism and the Search for World Peace
The Vietnam War provoked global controversy. What began during the early 1960s with a handful of critics expressing their opposition to a conflict largely unknown outside Southeast Asia grew into an issue driving protests around the globe – allowing protestors to become transnational in an era that augured the contemporary age of globalization. By the late 1960s opposition to the Vietnam War crossed national, class, and gender lines, not just in the United States, but internationally. This chapter argues that opposition to the Vietnam War was truly global. Opponents of the war in diverse locations shared a range of motives: some emphasized the human cost of the conflict; others rejected the American-led effort to thwart Vietnamese nationalism or challenged the draft which swept up millions of unwilling young men in a conflict that was damaging America’s global credibility and authority. Another unifying factor amongst these seemingly disparate movements was their shared understanding of a new type of citizens’ participation and democracy, and a vibrant, productive debate concerning the meaning of, and the best ways to bring about, “peace.” Conflicting meanings were ascribed to the term, ranging from peaceful calls for negotiations between the warring parties, and demands that the United States and its allies withdraw their forces from Vietnam, to provocative, often violent calls for a victory for the nationalist-communist forces.