A Laboratory for State Building: Police and Military Reform in East Timor

Following post-referendum violence in 1999, the UN established the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and mandated it with temporary sovereign authority over the country. UNTAET sought to build strong state institutions in order to bring East Timor to independence and to enable the country to exercise democratic and effective governance thereafter.The UN effort in East Timor are particularly worthy of study because according to the conventional wisdom it offered one of the most auspicious opportunities for state building in recent history. Much of the academic literature on state building understands state building as a technocratic effort that depends on the strength of the international community’s mandate and the use of well-established best practices. UNTAET had full authority, substantial resources, and included an “A-team of international technocrats.” Furthermore, East Timor had two additional qualities that made it a laboratory for state building – it was small, with under a million people, and because of the massive destruction following the war, had few existing institutions. This is why Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of UNTAET, believed that East Timor was a “pretty perfect petri-dish” in which the UN could demonstrate that it knew how to properly establish effective and democratic governance.This paper demonstrates that the UN’s experience in East Timor undermines these claims. In particular, it shows how the lingering effects of the war gave Timorese elites the incentive and ability to block certain key reform efforts. In particular, Timorese elites maintained power by associating themselves with the nationalist goals from the war and by maintaining informal patronage networks. Timorese elites therefore blocked UN reforms that would have undermined nationalist politics or their informal networks. East Timor was indeed a laboratory for state building, but one that demonstrated that the UN’s technocratic procedures were ineffective.The paper focuses on the UN’s effort to build the East Timor police and military. Effective and democratically governed security institutions are believed to be critical for avoiding a return to war and enabling long-term development. In East Timor however, police and military reform were far from successful. The failure of civilian oversight of the military, combined with the poorly disciplined and neglected police, led to violence between factions of these institutions in 2006. To be sure, police and military reform represent some of the weakest institution building by the UN in East Timor. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which the reform of the police and military failed are demonstrative of the broader limitations of the international community’s efforts to reform state institutions in post-conflict societies.The paper proceeds by tracing the development of the military and police in East Timor in two case studies. The objective of these case studies is to identify the mechanisms by which the UN’s demands for reform were or were not implemented. These case studies are based on 43 interviews in East Timor with both international and Timorese officials and analysts, which the author conducted over two trips in the summers of 2009 and 2010. The case studies also make use of primary and secondary sources, including UN documents, NGO reports, and academic publications. Following the case studies, a final section concludes and offers policy implications.