Against the odds? Pathways to peace in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua

19 May 2010

Professor John Braitwaite and Dr Michael Cookson

States rarely disintegrate in the way that former Yugoslavia did in the 1990s. Many thought Indonesia would disintegrate in the wake of a large number of violent internal conflicts at the turn of the century. East Timor was an exception that did break away to achieve independence. Aceh followed the more historically common path of reintegration after a peace process that made substantial concessions to separatists. West Papua is another Indonesian exception in failing to achieve positive peace after half a century of intermittent conflict. The dynamics of these radically different outcomes are used in this lecture to show how they can advance our understanding of unity and autonomy in the wider context of the Peacebuilding Compared project.

Broad Topics:

Sub-topics: History & Archeology, Humanities, International Law, Law, Justice & Law Enforcement, Policy & Political Science

Areas: ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific

John Braithwaite is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and founder of the Regulatory Institutions Network at ANU. He leads a project called Peacebuilding Compared. With Valerie Braithwaite, Michael Cookson and Leah Dunn, he published Anomie and Violence: Non-Truth and Reconciliation in Indonesian Peacebuilding in April 2010 with ANU E Press.

Michael Cookson recently completed a PhD in history at ANU with a dissertation on the cultural politics of Indonesian (West) Papua. For the past decade he has coordinated the Papuaweb project, a web-based initiative to promote scholarship about West Papua (see www.papuaweb.org).