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Past Seminars and Workshops

. Launch of Mapping the Pursuit of Gender Equality
. Chega: Launch of the CAVR Report
. Crises in the New Republic: Violence and State-Building in Timor-Leste
. Gender & Security in Timor-Leste
. Human Rights, Development & National Reconstruction
. Reconciliation and Colonialism in Timor-Leste
. Behind East Timor's Claim for Oil in the Timor Sea
. Barriers to Women's Participation in East Timor's Reconstruction
. Revisiting September 1999: East Timor and Australian Foreign Policy
. East Timor: Possible Futures in a Globalising World
. Nationalism and Nation-Building in East Timor

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Launch of Mapping the Pursuit of Gender Equality

Launch of Gender Report: Mapping the Pursuit of Gender Equality: Non-Government and International Agency Activity in Timor-Leste by Anna Trembath and Damian Grenfell (English and Tetun)
Timor-Leste launch: 19 July 2007, Dili
Australian launch: 28 August 2007, Melbourne

Speakers:

The Globalism Institute at RMIT University has been working with the Office for the Promotion of Equality and Irish Aid to document the gender programs of non-government organizations and international agencies in Timor-Leste. These events also saw the launch of the Timor-Leste Research Website and a scholarship program for short-term English language training for East Timorese women (a collaboration between RMIT English Worldwide and the Globalism Institute).

Please see here for a story about Dili launch of this report, held in July 2007.

(Report launch in Dili photo top right - pictured from left to right: Charles Lathrop, Charge d'Affairs, Irish Aid, Timor-Leste; Anna Trembath, co-author, Globalism Institute; Maria Jose Sanches, Director, the Office for the Promotion of Equality; and Damian Grenfell, co-author, Globalism Institute.)

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Chega: Launch of the CAVR Report

Chega: Launch of the Ccmmission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Report
14 November 2006

Speakers:

In 2006 the report of East Timor's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) was launched in Australia and Timor-Leste, Chega. Chega details human rights violations experienced from 1975 to 1999 and is the culmination of extension research undertaken within the East Timorese national community.

For more information about other Australian launches of Chega please see www.actjet.org.

This event was supported by RMIT University's Globalism Institute, the Jesuit Mission, the Mary Mackillop Institute East Timor, and the University of Melbourne Human Rights Forum.

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Crises in the New Republic

Crises in the New Republic: Violence and State-Building in Timor-Leste
5 July 2006

Speakers: Kym Holthouse and Damian Grenfell, Globalism Institute, RMIT University

The recent violence in Timor-Leste has led many to question the character of the state-building process that has followed the 1999 vote for independence. Drawing on their field research in Timor-Leste, Kym Holthouse and Damian Grenfell outlined key dimensions to the current social turmoil, concentrating particularly on the ways in which state-building processes in the wake of war can create new sources of insecurity.

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Gender and Security in Timor-Leste

Gender and Security in Timor-Leste
24 May 2006

Speaker: Anna Trembath, Globalism Institute, RMIT University

Gendered experiences of insecurity during phases of violent conflict and immediate post-conflict reconstruction are gaining more scholarly and policy attention. However the linkages between gender, security and insecurity beyond an immediate post-conflict phase still require significant examination. This argument was explored in light of developments in contemporary Timor-Leste.

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Human Rights, Development and National Reconstruction

Human Rights, Development and National Reconstruction: Timor-Leste's Independence in a Global Context
14 September 2005

Speakers:

Drawing together speakers from Timor-Leste and Australia, this panel discussion reflected on various aspects of Timor-Leste's independence and considered the kind of nation that it is becoming. Linking themes of justice, human rights, and political economy in the current global context, the speakers expressed their views on a range of current debates around reconciliation and justice, the campaign for oil and gas resources, and the nature of the reconstruction effort in Timor-Leste today.

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Reconciliation and Colonialism in Timor-Leste

Reconciliation and Colonialism in Timor-Leste
6 June 2005

Speaker: Damian Grenfell, Globalism Institute, RMIT University

Within a broader discourse of justice and human rights, this paper gave particular attention to the theme of reconciliation and to the work undertaken by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) in Timor-Leste. Pursued through processes including community reconciliation and truth seeking, CAVR's stated objectives include the reintegration of perpetrators of violence and restoring dignity to victims. At its most general level, this paper argued that the process of reconciliation can have socially integrative effects that extend beyond either public declarations of guilt or the collection of testimonies. Possibilities for social integration also occur through the social form of the network of interactions and dialogues established via the formal reconciliation process. These social forms can serve to 'reconstruct' practical connections across different communities from the local to the national. Practices of reconciliation, to the extent that they are carried out in systematic ways, can be seen to have a similar effect upon integrating a national community, temporally and spatially, as other patterns of social interconnection-from setting up referendum and censuses to developing market relations. However, reconciliation can extend forms of social integration in normative ways that can be quite distinct from conventional state-formation and market-(re)construction. Yet any sense of immediate benefit that may be derived from this process needs to be assessed in relation to broader social changes in East Timor, including patterns of colonialism and neo-colonialism that both shape and impact upon the kinds of reconciliation that are possible.

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Behind East Timor's Claim for Oil in the Timor Sea

Behind East Timor's Claim for Oil in the Timor Sea
31 March 2005

Speakers:

At the time that this seminar was held, it had been almost a year since large protests in Dili took place outside the Australian embassy as part of demands for a greater share of revenues from the Timor Sea. This forum heard directly from two Timorese activists about what is at stake for the people of East Timor and they explained why they felt Canberra's position on the Timor Sea denies livelihood and justice for the Timorese.

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Women's Participation in East Timor's Reconstruction

Barriers to Women's Participation in East Timor's Reconstruction
25 October 2004

Speakers / facilitators:

Organised by the Globalism Institute in conjunction with East Timor Women Australia and RMIT's Community and Regional Partnerships, this seminar sought to highlight the various barriers that continue to obstruct a fuller participation for women in East Timorese society. Coming largely from an international perspective, the seminar addressed the framework for discourse about women in East Timor. The keynote address was by Jacqui Siapno who presented a paper on 'Creating New Spaces, Shattering Silences: Class, Race, Ethnic, Linguistic, and Paradigmatic Questions besides the Gender Barriers'.

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Revisiting September 1999

Revisiting September 1999: East Timor and Australian Foreign Policy
28 September 2004

Speaker: Clinton Fernandes, author of Reluctant Saviour

The INTERFET deployment in September 1999 marked a crucial moment in the long struggle for East Timorese self-determination. Given that successive Australian governments had supported the Indonesian occupation of East Timor for 24 years, the Australian-led intervention marked a significant shift in government policy. Commenting on the nature of this shift Clinton Fernandes discussed the September intervention as part of an analysis that also addresses the role of the 'Jakarta Lobby', the construction of Australian national interest, and Australian relations with the Indonesian government. In doing so he critically evaluated what has often been portrayed as a noble moment in Australia's history of intervention in international sites of conflict.

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East Timor: Possible Futures in a Globalising World

East Timor: Possible Futures in a Globalising World
20 May 2004

Speakers:

In a discussion of the 'possible futures' East Timor faces, a panel of speakers presented a range of perspectives with topics including: the Friends of Baucau establishment of an educational facility and how plans for the centre were developing; development of NGOs in East Timor 'from inclusion to exclusion', tracing the ways in which groups that grew during the years of occupation have become an important part of the new nation's political landscape; the coffee industry in East Timor and the longer-term concerns over food sovereignty and export-driven market policies; the current state of negotiations between the Australian and East Timorese governments in context to the Timor Sea's oil reserves.

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Nationalism and Nation-Building in East Timor

The Clash of Everything: Some Thoughts on Nationalism and Nation-Building in East Timor
26 November 2003

Speaker: Damian Grenfell, Globalism Institute, RMIT University

Following recent research undertaken in East Timor, this paper began with a critique of the 'clash' discourse by considering the treatment such arguments have given to movements for self-determination. Over the last decade violent conflicts around the world have come to be increasingly explained as clashes of various kinds; civilizations, fundamentalisms, barbarisms, Jihad versus McWorlds. Such representations are problematic in a range of ways, not least in the tendency for drawing together very different expressions of violence into homogenizing and reductive frameworks. This critique was used to inform the paper's central concern, namely East Timorese nationalism in the transition from resistance to nation-building. After the 24-year struggle for independence, many of those who participated in the resistance movement have taken a central role in the process of building what is commonly referred to as 'the world's newest nation'. In thinking about nationalism and nation-building in East Timor, it is argued that the relationship that Benedict Anderson has drawn between temporal relations and socio-cultural changes, as central to the process of imagining the nation, need to be extended. While print capitalism remains important, other processes within the modes of production and communication, as well as modes of organisation, also need to be considered as central for understanding the ways in which East Timor is becoming a nation.