University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation

WOMEN’S MIXED EXPERIENCES DURING THE UNITED NATIONS (UN) PEACE OPERATIONS IN POST-INTERVENTION TIMOR-LESTE

LI-LI CHEN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my family and all Timorese women who have never bent in power and lost faith in love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Attaining a Ph.D. is a long and lonely journey of self-exploration full of many twists and turns. This dissertation is the final result of a continuous soul searching throughout years of reading, thinking, and writing in my room and my carrel in the library. I have been privileged enough to study in Aberystwyth University and the University of Florida, where I opened my curious eyes and mind to critical security studies and feminist security studies. My curiosity and intellectual pursuit has been nurtured and supported unconditionally by the faculty of

International Relations in the University of Florida, my supervisor, Laura Sjoberg, in particular.

In spite of her busy schedule filled with travelling, meetings, writings, teaching, and researching, she has always made time to help move forward my research and study from day one of the

Ph.D. programs. More importantly, she has believed in me no matter what happened in my life as well as whatever choices I made. Even though at times when I almost lost hope and faith in myself, she has never given up on me and reaffirmed that she will always be there for me. I would not have been able to navigate all the difficult challenges and transitions without her unconditional support, guidance, and feedback. All she has done for me is far beyond the responsibility as a supervisor, which inspires me to do the same thing in other aspects of my life in addition to my teaching and researching.

I am fortunate to have Myra Leann Brown by my side, who was always worried about me for exhausting myself. Her office has been a safe heaven for me to freely express my feelings frustrations, disappointments, sadness, anxiety, and happiness as well as to share my life. She also read and helped me clarify ideas and meanings of research in many of my proposals and early chapters. Although she is not in my committee officially, she has been involved in different stages of my Ph.D. journey as a mentor, a friend, a grandmother, and a role model of senior scholars.

In addition to Dr. Sjoberg and Dr. Brown, I am deeply thankful to Ido Oren, Larry Dodd,

Aida Hozic, and Arfi Badredine in the Department of Political Science and Anita Anantharam at the Women’s Center at the University of Florida. I developed my dissertation based on the classes I took with them, and revised it based on their feedback at different stages of my dissertation writing. Without their involvement, this dissertation would not come into being.

The Department of Anthropology and the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s

Studies Research at UF have played important roles in expanding my knowledge of ethnographic methods, development, and feminist theories. Marit Østebø led me to development studies as well as writing research reflections, Peter Collings helped me build foundations of ethnographic methods, Anita Anantharam and Tace Hedrik introduced me to different feminist theories with different layers of racism and colonialism. I am also grateful for graduate students in both departments for their constructive feedback to refine my research design.

I would not have come this far without the continuous encouragement and support of

Suezanne Lawless-Yanchsin. I have always depended on her to submit proposals, documents, reports, and degree applications. There have been moments of life when I felt I could not move forward any more. She was always there for me, and reminded me that I was enough and capable for doing what I chose to do. Her kindness and love did not cease to inspire me.

The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS) in the International Studies

Association (ISA) annual conference has been indispensable. Its panels and the Junior Scholars

Symposium (JSS) provided me a place to present my research ideas and early drafts of chapters, exchange frustrating and tedious fieldwork experiences with other scholars, and gain lots of emotional support and wisdom from senior feminist scholars. Carla Luis who opened the door for me to Timor-Leste in 2016; Annica Kronsell, Soumita Basu, and Sabrina Karim who gave

me detailed comments for my paper; Cynthia Enloe and Christine Sylvester who encouraged and listened to me compassionately, discussants in Feminist Approach and Narrative Approach of

Critical Security Studies Methods Café at ISA conferences who helped sharpen my research methods and narrow down my research questions, and the panelists of “Gender, I, and IR:

Reflections on the Theory and Practice of (Feminist) Narrative Approaches in IR,” at the ISA

Annual Conference in San Francisco who openly shared their experiences and reflections of conducting research by using a (feminist) narrative approach to conduct interviews with the disadvantaged populations in different countries.

When I stepped on the soil of Timor-Leste in 2016, my anxiety and feeling of insecurity were eased by many helping and loving internationals and Timorese. Antero da Siva and students at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies of the Universidade Nasional Timor

Lorosa’e (UNTL), Helen Hill who had helped organize weekly seminars at UNTL, Michael

Leach and his previous student Sarah Smith who offered much useful information about conducting fieldwork in Timor-Leste, Graça Viegas and staff of Fandacao Oriente who housed me, Raimundos Oki who helped introduced me to Dili-based non-governmental organizations and facilitated some interviews for me, Rania Goncalves, Francisco Jaime Alegria, and Carrol

Filipe Carvalho who hosted, fed, and drove me around Dili, Veronica Godinho Pereira and Aida da Silva who helped me translate informed consent from English to Tetun, Theresa Tam, Anjet

Lanting, and Rosa Garcia Dos Santos who always shared the information about the current situation of Timorese women with me, Prezado Ximenes who unconditionally helped arrange and connect me to the interlocutors and communities in the remote rural area, Santina da Cruz who helped me reach many of her coworkers in the UN House for interviews, Aida Pinto who unselfishly shared her experiences of working in the UN missions, Chung Ki Fu at Restaurant

Bidau who mitigated my homesickness and craving for Taiwanese food, Robert Trott who provided delicious food and hot coffee along with interesting conversation on different topics for me, Manuela Leong, mana Sara, and mana Amalia at Associasaun Chega Ba Ita (ACbit) who kindly helped me reach interlocutors in Suai, Adilsonio da Costa Jr. and staff at La’o Hamutuk who generously provided help for student researchers, my excellent Tetun teachers maun Alex, maun Mario, and mana Marta, diligent Tetun classmates mana Karla, maun Geoff, maun

Fabiano, and good friend Miqueias Mendonca Tilman at Dili Institute of Technology (DIT) who helped me improve language skills to another level, and many individuals who spent their precious time discussing the vulnerable conditions of Timorese women all the time. I cannot thank enough every individual I met in Timor-Leste for their warmth and generosity, but I can only name a few here.

Without Profirio Fernandes Xavier, I would not have been able to make it to Timor-Leste and quickly adjust to a new life style and environment back to July 2016. I might have given up due to multiple unexpected disruptions and chaos emerging from the fieldwork, such as broken hard drive, internet breakdown, ticket problems, and stress from inability to access the interlocutors. I would also have remained disconnected from the world by staying in my small room writing drafts, grant proposals, and transcriptions instead of eating seafood on the stick, drinking coconut water by the beach, or going to a concert. He was my first Timorese friend and also the first Timorese who welcomed and helped me tackle daily challenges patiently from finding a hairdryer to translating interviews since day one.

I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Flocks who patiently and carefully read many rough drafts of dissertation chapters I wrote. His humor and fast email response helped quell the sense of isolation and loneliness I developed in the writing process of my dissertation.

I am forever thankful for having friends in Aberystwyth and Gainesville who unconditionally love and support me in my Ph.D. journey: Pola, Alexandros, Mandisa, Ping,

Shao-yun, Fang-yi, Becca, Han, Chaun, Quingming, Peaches, Amanda, Jacki, and Christina.

Thank you for filling my busy schedule with lots of laughter, hot coffee, and heart-felt conversation.

I would like to thank my family, who has been hands-off and supportive since I decided to pursue my study in Florida and decided to conduct my research in Timor-Leste. They might not fully understand my research, and might worry a lot when I travel across the continents, but they always have faith in me and my dream.

Finally, I want to give my biggest thanks to the seventeen Timorese women who were willing to be vulnerable to a junior scholar they met for the first time. I saw you, I heard you, I felt you. I might be the one who wrote this dissertation, but you are the soul of this book. My life was forever changed since the day we met.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 13

ABSTRACT ...... 15

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 17

Gender as an Analytical Category ...... 19 Problematizing the Gendered Relations between Peacekeepers and Local Women ...... 21 The Militarized and Gendered Feminist Security Scholarship ...... 28 Agency of Women in the Global South and Timorese Women ...... 30 Case Study and Methods ...... 33 General Situation of SEA in Timor-Leste ...... 39 Visibility and Silence of Women in the Research of SEA in Timor-Leste ...... 40 Initial Findings ...... 42 Structural Outline ...... 43 Contribution ...... 45

2 UN PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS, GENDER, AND WOMEN: THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE OF VICTIMS AMONG FEMINIST SECURITY STUDIES (FSS) ...... 47

Women, War and Peace: Women as Peacemakers, Victims, and Perpetrators ...... 50 Women as Peacemakers ...... 50 Women as Victims ...... 52 Women as Perpetrators ...... 55 Precarious Boundaries between Peacemaker, Victim, and Perpetrator ...... 56 From Sex to Gender: the Social and Political Construction of Militarism, Militarization, and Women’s (In)securities ...... 58 Women, Peacekeepers, and Peacekeeping ...... 64 First Group of Literature: Wartime Rape, Military Intervention, and Protection of Women ...... 65 Second Group of Literature: Peacekeepers, Women, and Violence ...... 67 Third Group of Literature: Is UNSCR 1325 a Progress of Women’s Rights or Accomplice of Neo-liberal Project of Peacekeeping? ...... 79 Problems of Framing and Representing Women as Victims in Peacekeeping Discourses ....85 Defining Peacekeeping as a Discursive Practice ...... 90 Peacekeeping vis-à-vis Regime of Truth ...... 96 Technologies of the Self ...... 99 Women as a Heterogeneous Group ...... 101

Real Women Beyond the Narrative: Rediscovering Sexuality, Context, and Agency of Women ...... 103 Conclusion ...... 106

3 RESEARCH DESIGN ...... 108

SEA in UN Peacekeeping ...... 108 Research Subjects ...... 111 General Situations of SEA in Timor-Leste ...... 112 Visibility and Silence of Women in the Research of SEA in Timor-Leste ...... 114 Summary of Fieldwork ...... 115 Convenient Sampling ...... 117 Demographic Background of Interlocutors ...... 118 Women Who Have Sexual Liaisons with the UN Peacekeepers ...... 118 Timorese Men and Women Who Used to Work in the UN Missions during 1999- 2012...... 119 Directors and Staff in Dili-based NGOs ...... 119 Ordinary Individuals, Foreigners Who Have Lived in Timor for a Long Time and Local Timorese ...... 120 Research Methods ...... 120 Semi-structured Interview ...... 121 Participant Observation ...... 124 Conduct of Interview ...... 126 How to Deal with Data? ...... 128 Analytical Tools Deployed to Read the Perceptions and Experiences of the Local Interlocutors ...... 129 Bounded rationality ...... 130 Sense making ...... 132 Data Management ...... 134 Reflection ...... 135 Conclusion ...... 137

4 INBETWEENNESS OF WOMEN...... 139

The General Condition of Women in Timor-Leste ...... 141 Story 1 ...... 145 Story 2 ...... 148 Discussion of Narratives ...... 151 Women Are More Than Victims ...... 151 Women Are Embedded in Different Gender Relations and Ideas of Femininity ...... 152 The Danger of Single Narrative and Representation of Women as Gendered and Racial Subjects ...... 154 Women’s Perceptions of Self and Relationships in Their Narratives ...... 157 Meanings of (In)security ...... 157 Reasons of Ending Relationships ...... 158 Reasons of Women Entering the Voluntary Relationships with the Peacekeepers ...... 160 Unintended Consequences of Relationships on Women ...... 162

Difference between Women in Urban and Rural areas ...... 165 Reasons of Non-report or Under-report of Women ...... 166 Embedded Agency and Power of Women in Everyday Life ...... 167 Negotiation of Their Femininity with Different Men, Society, and Institutions ...... 168 Post-conflict Political Economy, Violence, and Women’s Security ...... 172 Different Strategies of Everyday Resistance against Dominant Gender Norms and Ideal of Femininity ...... 176 Resort to legal and institutional appeals ...... 176 Story-telling ...... 177 Praying and crying ...... 178 Blaming and laughing ...... 179 Silence ...... 180 Selectively choosing friend pool ...... 180 Others’ Perceptions of Women Who Have Sexual Relationships with Peacekeepers ...... 182 Excerpt 1: Sheila ...... 184 Excerpt 2: Veronica ...... 184 Discussion of the Comparison between Perceptions of Women and Others about the Relationships ...... 185 Situated Understanding of Agency and Power of Women ...... 186 Conclusion: Rethinking the Inbetweenness of Women as A Site of Contestation, Negotiation, and Resistance of Power ...... 188

5 THE RELATIONALITY OF THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE LOCAL ...... 189

How This Chapter Differs from the Literature of Peacekeeping Economy ...... 192 Local Perceptions of the Peacekeepers/UN Peacekeeping Missions and Their Effects: Three Stories ...... 195 Francisco from Suai ...... 195 Manuela ...... 196 A9 ...... 197 Peacekeepers of nationalities ...... 198 Conflict with the female UNPOL ...... 198 How Locals Perceive Peacekeepers: a Discussion of Three Stories ...... 199 Local Perceptions of the “Problems” of Peacekeeping ...... 201 Problems of the International: Different Reading of SEA between the International Male Staff and the Local Female Staff ...... 202 Problems of the International: How the International Male Staff Are Viewed by National Male Staff ...... 205 Blame the local for personal valuables loss ...... 206 Force to make national staff violate the regulation and unable to speak English ..206 Lack of professionalism of the international and increasing burdens on the local ...... 207 Problems of the International: How Peacekeepers Are Viewed by International Civilians ...... 209 Solutions to the Problems ...... 212 Conclusion: the Complex Construction of the International and the Local ...... 215

6 WOMEN AS OTHERS IN THE LOCAL GAZE: MALAE NIAN ...... 218

Three Narratives ...... 221 A3 ...... 221 Andreza ...... 222 Marilia ...... 223 Treatments and Experiences Faced by Malae Nian ...... 232 Malae Nian, Peacekeeping, and Nation-building in Post-intervention Timor-Leste ...... 235 Women and the State ...... 238 Women, Body, and Gendered Identity ...... 239 Women and Militarism ...... 243 Militarism and Women’s Agency ...... 245 Uneasy Relationship between Motherhood, Maternity, and Feminism ...... 247 Motherhood, Nation-building, and Nationalist Movements ...... 248 Malae Nian, Women, and Nation-building in Timor-Leste ...... 250 The Tragedy of Malae Nian ...... 254 Conclusion ...... 255

7 CONCLUSION...... 257

Implications ...... 259 Significance and Contributions...... 264 Future Research ...... 265

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 268

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 284

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACbit Associasaun Chega Ba Ita

ARKTL Associasaun Radio Komunidade Timor-Leste

ALFeLa Asistensia Legal ba Feto no Labarik

Berlake bride price

BiH Bosnia and Herzegovina

CAR Central African Republic

CRIS JOVEN A cross put in the neighborhood for people to pray

DPKO United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations

DDR demobilization, disarmament and reconstruction

DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

FSS feminist security studies

FB Facebook

FDTL East Timor Defence Force

FM Fundasuan Manheim

FOKUPERS Forum Komunikasi Untuk Perempuan Lorosae – East Timorese Women’s Communications Forum

FRETILIN Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor

IRB International Review Board

IDP Internally Displaced Persons

Isoka the Zulu men with multiple sexual partners

InterFET International Force in East Timor

JSMP Judicial System Monitoring Program

Malae Foreigner

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

OPMT Organização Popular da Mulher Timorense – Popular Organization of East Timorese Women

OIOS The Office of Internal Oversight Services

ONUMOZ UN Operation in Mozambique

PRADET Psychosocial Recovery and Development in East Timor

PKF Peacekeeping Force

PNTL Polícia Nacional Timor-Leste – National Police Timor-Leste

PKO Peacekeeping Operations

SEA Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

SSR Security sector reform

TNI Tentara Nasional Indonesia – Indonesian military

UNAMET United Nations Mission in East Timor

UNICEF United Nations Children's Fund

UNTAET United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor

UNMISET United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor

UNMIT United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste

UNPOL United Nations Police (formerly CIVPOL)

UNSC United Nations Security Council

UNTAC United Nations Mission in Cambodia

UNHCR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

VPU Vulnerable Persons Unit

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

WOMEN’S MIXED EXPERIENCES DURING THE UNITED NATIONS (UN) PEACE OPERATIONS IN POST-INTERVENTION TIMOR-LESTE

Li-Li Chen

August 2018

Chair: Laura Sjoberg Major: Political Science

Although women in the host countries where peacekeeping troops are deployed are usually portrayed as victims by having sex with the UN peacekeepers, I examine whether the representation of women as victims in the broadly-defined category of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) policy of the UN is justified. I consider that the argument of feminist scholars that local women should be protected from having sexual interaction with peacekeepers is off-the- mark and it is inevitably a result of human interpretation and should be considered as a narrative instead of the narrative. I contend that women in the voluntary and non-exploitative relationships demonstrate multiple forms of agency in their daily life. I argue that such a victimized representation of women in the dominant discourse fails to capture the complicated experiences of local women and local contexts. I conduct a qualitative empirical research to retrieve other omitted or hidden narratives based on the experiences and perceptions of the local population based on two extensive visits in Timor-Leste from 2016-17. I find that there are different forms of agency and power of women, which can only be understood in their social and discursive contexts. Meanwhile, I also find how gender plays into the discourses, relationships, and the political project of nation-building coinciding with the global peacekeeping. Gender objectifies women in the international and local discourse of peacekeeping, where the agency of women

tends to be consumed in relation to men. I suggest that feminist security studies (FSS) scholars as well as policy practitioners need to look through the danger of a single story and a simple representation of women as victims by centering the complex and multiple everyday experiences of the local population with a particular eye on gender, which tend to be downplayed, ignored, or omitted in the dominant peacekeeping discourse.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

My dissertation is titled “Women’s Mixed Experiences during the United Nations (UN)

Peace Operations in Post-Intervention Timor-Leste.” Although women in the host countries where peacekeeping troops are deployed are usually portrayed as victims by having sex with the

UN peacekeepers, I examine whether the representation of women as victims in the broadly- defined category of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) policy of the UN is justified. I define the UN peacekeepers broadly, including soldiers, civil police, staff, and humanitarian workers as well as those who come with the UN missions. I argue that such a victimized representation of women fails to capture experiences of local women and local contexts. Similar to Gabrielle

Simm (2013), I argue that the relationships between the women and the UN peacekeepers also include voluntary and non-exploitative relationships in addition to sexually exploitative and abusive relationships. Relationships are fluid and each is contingent on its course, which might shift from non-exploitative to exploitative, or vice versa. I consider that although such a simplified discourse and representation reflects partial reality, it is inevitably a result of human interpretation and should be considered as a narrative instead of the narrative. I conduct a qualitative empirical research to retrieve other omitted or hidden narratives based on the experiences and perceptions of the local population. I suggest that feminist security studies (FSS) scholars as well as policy practitioners need to look through the danger of a single story and a simple representation of women by centering the complex and multiple everyday experiences of the local population, which tend to be downplayed, ignored, or omitted in the dominant peacekeeping discourse endorsed by the policy practitioners and feminist security scholars.

Scholars in traditional security studies often view SEA is a natural phenomenon of war and peacekeeping. They focus mainly on national and military security. They have excluded

women and gender from the theoretical discussion. It is not until human security and feminist security studies join the debate that the academia starts to engage in the state-centered and male- centered security studies literature, which helps shift the referring object from states to individuals. Scholars in human security and feminist security studies question the narrowly- defined concept of security, as well as whose security is at stake in international relations

(Sjoberg 2009). However, without paying attention to how gender is fed into the international relations, human security cannot challenge the underlying power relations between states and human beings, as well as the victimization of women by states. What is more, human security might end up giving more responsibility to the states to protect individuals, including women, rather than questioning what constitutes the states and the individuals, as well as the possibility that the states might be perpetrators of the violence against individuals.

In fact, although the theory of human security is human-centered, it does not mean that it will always make human beings visible and free from oppression, since a theory is not in void of power. Ferdinand de Saussure points out the arbitrary nature of language in assigning meanings to events or objects. Language is “a system of signs expressing ideas” (1986, 15). The meanings and representations of the states and the individuals are predetermined arbitrarily in the language shared by a community. They also predetermine a particular kind of knowledge output in a linguistic structure. However, such a structure denotes power. Francois Debrix argues that the knowledge produced from and within this structure “that preexists human experience (from now on tied to the logic of representation) and disciplines cognitive processes (as Descartes did)” is human creation and might be representative of partial reality in nature (1999, 12). Reading theory of human security in this light, even other theories of international relations, any theory is a form of representation of the human reality with a configuration of signs and concepts couched

on power relations. In other words, a theory is socially and politically constructed, and informs a particular perspective foregrounding certain experiences and actors while obscuring others.

Starting from an understanding of underlying power of theory, I decide to write a dissertation which examines the opportunities and limits feminist security studies could have in terms of problematizing power relations, which further contributes to the reproduction and production of particular human experiences enabled by power in the first place.

The argument by feminists that local women should be protected from peacemakers by forbidding sexual interaction between these women and peacemakers is itself off-the-mark. It is disrespectful of women's capacity for judgment; ignorant about the vast diversity and complexities of the lives they live and the contexts in which they live; and ultimately if implemented could be destructive of their self-worth and personal power in the world. It is a sign that the feminists making these arguments have been co-opted by powerful, simplified and binary discourses that stereotype and silence women rather than liberating and empowering them. One urgent issue here for feminist scholars and policy makers is to make discourses and policies anchoring on women’s experiences that aid women from different background in being true to themselves and their well-being in a context where peacekeepers are exercising great power over them and their environment

Gender as an Analytical Category

Feminist security scholars utilize the concept of gender to problematize the nature and effect of power in theory and empirics. By introducing the concept of gender as an analytical category, feminist security studies scholarship sheds light on the dynamics of gendered constructions of identity and multiple experiences of women, as well as different forms of oppressions of women and other disempowered groups in war and peace.

The concept of gender as an analytical concept means that it is used to challenge the naturalization of assumptions and categories which are socially constructed, as well as why and how social and political inequality comes into existence. In The Second Sex (2011), Simone de

Beauvoir was the first feminist scholar to separate sex from gender. She disagrees with the claim that biological sex is gender. Instead, she argues that women become women in the development process where men are represented as strong and active actors compared to women as weak and passive actors. The dichotomy of aggressiveness of men and passiveness of women is constructed based on such an acceptance of passivity and activity of women and men. Femininity and passivity are imposed on women within society, and these characteristics are not determined by biology.

From another angle, Luce Irigaray (1993) searches for the linguistic origin of sexual differences as well as the subordination and domination of women and men. In Ethics of Sexual

Difference, she examines the role of language and how it creates the dichotomies of sex. She contends that because modern political, theological, and philosophical thought are skewed towards men, men become generic and innate subjects of any discussions about society and humankind. Women, on the other hand, become the containers of men and masculinity, since men are defined by their relationship to women. Women’s positioning in the society is located within the spaces of men, which reaffirms their subordination by men.

Seeing gender construction in terms of power beyond gender manifestation of history and language, Judith Butler explores how women’s position, identity, and subjects are constructed through their repetitive performative acts, through which meanings are assigned and reinforced.

She argues that these acts are performed because this is a way to avoid punitive retribution from society for deviating from established norms and rules. It is dangerous because these acts might

become coercion which imposes gender to others. What appears to be natural is actually the normalization of gender and heteronormative sexuality constituted in the society, which do not pre-exist as facts (Butler 1988).

In summary, what de Beauvoir, Irigaray, and Butler tell us is that women are not only sexed but also gendered through history, society, and language where femininity is constructed and devalued for its attachment with particular values and characteristics in relation to masculinity. The social difference and inequity results from where we position ourselves in relation to others within the society functioning through the power hierarchy between femininity and masculinity. Gender as an analytical category helps us see the power relations between femininity and masculinity underwriting political and social inequality, which do not necessarily tie to sex, as a form of power relations. Seeing women’s status and conditions through a gender lens means seeing how gender is fed into certain situations intersecting with other forces to shape political actors and structures, understanding women are not only oppressed but also produced by power in the process, as well as reflecting on how the oppression and domination imposed on some women can be subverted.

Problematizing the Gendered Relations between Peacekeepers and Local Women

Gender lens reorients the traditional explanation of sex driven by biological desire of men to power underwriting of sex. However, many feminist security scholars theorize women and their situations in relation to peacekeepers as if these theoretical constructions are true empirically. In the literature on the topics of peacekeeping, gender, and women, by conceptualizing peacekeeping as a form of hegemonic or hyper-masculinity in the militarized context, some feminist scholars argue that the UN peacekeepers sexually exploit, violate, or traffic women in the intervened countries due to the power asymmetry between peacekeepers and local women, which seems to assume that women are void of agency and victimized by the

UN peacekeepers through the interaction and dilution of civilian and military encounter (Higate

2007a, 2007a; Vandenberg 2005; Mazurana 2005; Whitworth 2004; Cockburn and Zarkov

2002). For example, Sandra Whitworth (2004) argues that military masculinity of the UN peacekeepers inevitably causes negative impacts on women, especially prostitutes, in spite of positive impacts it might have. She finds that military masculinity embodied in Canadian troops is not only conducive to violence against women in Somalia and Cambodia, but also helps construct the image of Canadian troops as benign heroes in relation to national identity.

Similarly, Punyarut Nunlada (2006) also argues the militaristic and sexist nature of the peacekeepers contributes to sexual assault and violence against women, as well as prostitutes. By presenting the evidence of behavior and discourse of peacekeepers in the missions of United

Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and the United Nations Transitional

Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) in Cambodia and East Timor, Nunlada highlights the shift of discursive construction of the image of peacekeepers from “boys are boys” to “tough and gentle guys.” She implies that the different discursive constructions of peacekeepers might obscure the fact that the UN peacekeepers help contribute to violence against women (VAW).

However, it is undeniable that peacekeepers also have positive influence on local women and local population in host countries. This indicates that women are not necessarily victims of peacekeepers. Inger Skjelsbaek (2001) argues that because women are targets of sexual violence at war, sexual violence needs to be incorporated into peacekeepers’ training and missions in order to let peacekeepers learn to recognize sexual violence against women. By emphasizing the role of women as transmitters of social identity as well as the tendency that women are subject to harms caused by the new wars, such as rape and other gender-based violence targeting women,

Skjelsbaek seems to suggest that peacekeepers have positive influence by being protectors of

women from war-related violence while carrying the ideology that women are victims. In addition to ensuring women’s security, peacekeepers also contribute to rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed in wars or peace-building tasks in post-conflict societies. Paul Higate mentions that many of those activities ranging from rehabilitation of schools and hospitals to helping facilitate the election in Liberia tend to be undocumented (Higate 2007b, 100).

Emphasizing either the positive or negative consequences caused by peacekeepers might oversimplify the complex global phenomena of peacekeeping, since it does not further investigate different gendered constructions of women in relation to peacekeepers situated in social-economic-political contexts where gender intersects with different social categories.

Intersectionality approach (Nash 2008) suggests that one has multiple identities within oneself, and they are constantly negotiated. In other words, women are heterogeneous, which challenges the single representation of military masculinity in contrast to femininity (Connell and

Messerschmidt 2005; Higate 2007c). The social constructions of social identities indicate that there are multiple femininities in relation to masculinities, which suggests different embodiment of women’s suffering and experiences based on different forms of political and social inequality.

Moreover, gender helps disturb the direct linkage between military masculinity and violence against women. Focusing on the impacts of peacekeepers in terms of military or hyper- masculinity in relation to the local people tends to reduce different masculinities to a unified form of masculinity characteristic of aggressiveness and manliness of peacekeepers perpetuated in the institutions. However, such a representation of single masculinity and its link with violence against women might undermine the existence of multiple masculinities. “Military organizations become complex, overdetermined, and sometimes contradictory mixes of the warrior and the bureaucratic ethos, combing to produce a complex range of masculinities”

(Morgan 1994, 175). The stories of peacekeepers and local population are more complicated than they seem, if we can further probe the concept of masculinity and femininity.

Feminists themselves are careful not to totalize the idea of hegemonic masculinity as cause of certain particular political phenomena, such as war. For example, Cynthia Cockburn

(2010) questions the role of gender in making war by asking how gender affects war and militarism in society in her article “Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War.” She admits that there are other causes in addition to gender, such as economic and ethno-nationalistic factors which are more likely to contribute to war. However, the existence of gender, which is pinned to the role of hegemonic masculinity, does make it easier for people to go to war since it not only normalizes militarism enabling war and violence, but also normalizes particular types of gender characteristics.

The discussion of the need to politicize the concept of hegemonic/military masculinity helps us to reject the idea of masculinity as a singular or homogenous force. There could be different forms of masculinities. We cannot bracket soldiers in the military as a unified group manifesting masculinity in the same way in relation to women, and at the same time accept easily the single form of masculinity existing within the military.

In addition to masculinities in various forms, feminist scholars add layers of political economy and culture, which might complicate women’s stories with the peacekeepers. To briefly discuss, the factor of political economy has been emphasized by feminist-Marxist scholars to explain the structural reasons behind the exploitation of women by men. In D. M. Hughes’s article “The ‘Natasha’ Trade: the Transitional Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women” (2000), she examines the factors behind human trafficking in the case of Ukraine. She not only emphasizes the economic reasons which make women more susceptible to human trafficking,

but also examines the gender underwriting of the commodification of female body which denotes human trafficking and prostitute. Similarly, discussing transactional sex in a different region,

Mark Hunter’s “The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking beyond ‘Prostitution’” (2002) interrogates the relationship between women and isoka1 as well as material factors behind sexuality in South Africa. Hunter explains the emergence of sex for gifts between South African men and women with the change of traditions which promise marriage as well as the erosion of economy of families in South Africa. Consequently, men are less interested in supporting multiple wives than multiple girlfriends. Both articles contribute to how women’s productive and reproductive force are marginalized and commodified, as well as how women are gendered and exploited in modern economy, though do not pay sufficient attention to the connection between global and personal, as well as the political underpinning of binary categories of public and private realms, including men and women.

On the role of world culture in relation to peacekeeping on the global scale, Ronald Paris

(2003) tries to explore why we find peacekeeping acceptable nowadays as well as why peacekeeping forces only adopt certain strategies in spite of other available options. He argues that after the demise of the former Soviet Union, peacekeeping operations which are based on building peace and proper form of governance in the form of liberal democracy become global norms. Paris suggests that globalizing peacekeeping operations in the form of liberal democracy might be limited when dealing with failed states and establishing long-lasting peace, since peacekeeping operations only adopt liberal democracy instead of other routes to build sustainable peace and security. Paris pinpoints the limit of exporting peacekeeping without regard to the diverse contexts of countries where peacekeeping or peacebuilding are implemented. He reminds

1 The Zulu men with multiple sexual partners

us that global peacekeeping might be too ambiguous and inclusive to show us how it is practiced as well as its counterproductivity in different contexts. By pushing forward the critical gender thinking underpinning world culture and peacekeeping, A. M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling

(2003) argue that peacekeeping tends to reconfigure with racism and sexism in the form of neoliberalism. The neoliberal world peacekeeping promotes inevitably results in oppression and domination at the expense of others.

Adding discussion of political economy and world culture to military masculinity on the topic of peacekeeping and women help us set the stage to see how and why focusing on structural approaches of military masculinity, political economy, and culture could limit our understanding of women’s lived experiences after the intervention. They do not tell us much about how peacekeeping is practiced and embodied in peoples’ everyday life. Although it is not necessarily the case that gender is always salient in the literature of political economy and world culture, they help provide material components and structural explanations of women’s conditions. Yet, a story of structure may not be able to tell the whole story of women’s condition.

By drawing our attention to the limitations of literatures of structures of political economy and military masculinity, feminist scholars make salient their contributions in problematizing the gendered dimension and implications of political economy and military masculinity. For instance, Jill Steans (1998) highlights the constraints of political economy for its lack of discussion of the role of agency and subjectivities in the process of globalization, as well as the transformative power of globalizing force if we can rethink the dynamics between structure and agency in terms of its possibilities of multiple construction. More importantly, she challenges the distinction between global and personal, since global is personal.

Seeing structure of political economy from a gender perspective, Kathleen Jennings

(2010) asks under what conditions that peacekeeping will exacerbate women’s vulnerability in the post-conflict context of political economy. She argues that peacekeeping economies are likely to become sex tourism economies, since some gender roles and relations are constructed and reinforced in peacekeeping practices. Without directly accusing that peacekeepers are the causes of sexual violation of local women and girls, Jennings claims that the gender norms established through the practices of peacekeeping resonate with the patterns shown in the post- conflict economy of non-peacekeeping areas, in spite of the links between military presence and sex tourism. peacekeepers might not directly involve in sexual activities with local women in their missions, but it has gendered impacts on local populations and societies.

Focusing on military structure, Higate (2007c) critically engages with some feminist scholars who propose the negative impacts of peacekeepers in relation to women by applying the category of military or hegemonic masculinity as a cause of exploitation of women. Following the critical studies of men suggested by Jeff Hearn (2004), which suggests that men are both a social category and agents of gender system, Higate argues that the use of military masculinity naturalizes the sexual exploitation in the case of peacekeepers and local women. Rather than simply bracketing the universal idea of military masculinity, Higate suggests that it also intersects with other categories and varies contingent with different socio-economic contexts.

In sum, Jennings and Higate highlight the limits and opportunities of a structural approach based on the binary of structure and agents, since agents internalize and act on structure to sustain it. Agent matters. It is necessary to go beyond the dichotomy of structure and agents in order to see how structure is embodied through agents, and how agents mediate structural forces.

The Militarized and Gendered Feminist Security Scholarship

Although these structure-based literatures do not exclude the existence of agents, without critically questioning their natural tendency of reading gender in sex along with the heterosexual ontology, as well as the antithesis of structure and agency, feminist security scholars tend to risk undermining the agency of women by portraying women as powerless and disempowered actors in relation to peacekeepers enabled and intensified by the structural forces. What is worrying is that feminist security scholars who adopt these approaches do not problematize their own gendered assumptions, which tend to frame women as the consequence of peacekeepers’ violence through the use of dichotomous categories of women as victims and peacekeepers as perpetrators of violence. Therefore, feminist security studies are not only gendered but also militarized with its emphasis on conceptualizing women as victims of peacekeepers. Without problematizing the discourse of peacekeeping adopted by feminists in conceptualizing women’s suffering, feminist security studies scholars risk reproducing women as a homogenous group of victims who are relational to peacekeepers and affected by peacekeepers. Moreover, by sustaining the dichotomous categories of victims and perpetrators, women who are in-between the categories of victims and perpetrators become invisible. Binary categories seem to assume that only women who confront other actors in war and conflict as perpetrators, participants or supporters of violence have agency. Only women who respond to or are victimized by violence are captured in these categories while many other women and forms of political agency of women are excluded. If categories of perpetrators and victims are integral to determine whether women have agency or lack agency, finding other ways allowing excluded and invisible women to express themselves and narrate their stories become crucial to feminist scholars to challenge this simple representation of women.

Inspired by deconstructive and postcolonial feminism, which uses gender as an analytical category to problematize power relations underlying social rules and norms as well as discourses,

I challenge the simplified representation of women as victims of the UN peacekeepers in feminist security studies scholarship, which can be enriched by an empirical research of gender relations between the UN peacekeepers and women in Timor-Leste. Seeing femininity and masculinity through gender is to both concepts as politically and contextually constructed and contingent. If the categories of perpetrators and victims are gendered, which only express some women and their agency, then feminist security studies scholars must acknowledge that they are re-victimizing women by reproducing gender difference without paying critical attention to what is produced and is producing. I believe that women do not just respond to war and conflict as perpetrators and victims-contingent with gender constructed categories, but also actively exercise their agency in different ways. Often such an embodiment and practices of agency of women are deeply embedded in local norms and practices. The ways we scholars see will help centralize or obscure what form of agency is exercised in which way. I hope to retrieve these women’s agency practiced in their everyday experiences, which are mostly left out in the literature. Instead of focusing on structure, I propose to return to women themselves by listening to women’s own stories.

“Everyday experiences” of women not only reorient our attention to what happen to real women, but also serve as a normative tool to discover “marginalized narratives” (Randazzo

2016, 1355). This means that scholars have to centralize women’s experiences in order to know how their identities are constructed through which their agency is embodied. More importantly, everyday problematizes the “paradox of selectivity” (Randazzo 2016, 1356). A paradox of selectivity highlights the power underpinning of women’s agency because not all different forms

of local agency and identity will be represented. By focusing on what and who is silenced and invisible, women’s lived experiences can help problematize the ways through which feminist scholars perceive women, especially the application of categories of women as victims- /non- victims and mothers/wives as well as their hidden assumptions.

Agency of Women in the Global South and Timorese Women

Categories informed by particular theories might skew our understanding of women.

Women in the Global South tend to be understood as powerless and disempowered mothers and wives of men whose social roles and responsibilities are defined by patriarchy from the perspective of some feminist security scholars in the Global North. Women as mothers are related to child caring, and the category of motherandchildren constitute their immunity.

According to Robyn Charlie Carpenter, “[t]hrough their association with children, women, but not men, have been constructed as possessing the attributes associated with a claim to immunity: innocence and vulnerability” (2016, 31). Nadine Puechguirbal argues that it is that patriarchy that fixes the representation of women as victims and target of civilian protection with the category of motherandchildren, thereby denying the agency of women in conducting violence, as well as leaving other forms of violence other groups endure unexamined (Puechguirbal 2010).

Meanwhile, women as wives are responsible for stabilizing households and recreating greater communities while their husbands do their own jobs. Cynthia Enloe (2010) argues that women have been responsible for creating diplomatic and military communities. Military wives and diplomatic wives serve to develop and maintain an environment which is conducive to military and diplomacy. Wives of combatants might also serve as comfort women, which erodes women's autonomy (Cristalis, Scott, and Andrade 2005, 33). Taken together, women's agency in the Global South is embodied as mothers and housewives in contrast to men in public, which

restrains women's agency and feminized roles in the private realm. The underlying message is that if women want to regain their agency, they have to challenge the patriarchal structure.

Challenging the idea of agency formulated by the feminist scholars in the Global North, feminist scholar Saba Mahmood (2001) argues that women do not necessarily challenge or subvert the norms which oppress them. Women’s agency needs to be understood in different light in contrast to the forms of resistance or conformity by the theory proposed by some feminist scholars who suggest that patriarchy is women's problem. By emphasizing the structural oppression by and through men and norms which validate their superior status, the agency of women is simplified to binary response: resistance or subordination. It is not necessarily the case in many non-Western societies, since the fact that women are subordinate to men or their cultures might be reconfigured as a result of their practices of religions and institutions of masks as this research claims. Mahmood suggests that passivity and docility can be also forms of agency. Therefore, women’s exercise of agency might not lead to change but continue gender hierarchy in their societies. Relating Mahmood’s argument to women’s agency as mothers and wives, women as mothers and wives can be agents, which requires different ways to approach what the agency is and in which form it is manifested in the contexts where women are embedded.

Looking back to history, Timorese women are far from passive and powerless actors.

They are not only present but also active in war and peace, although they have been threatened by different forms of violence. By tracing women’s activism in history, the agency of Timorese women has been demonstrated in the form of combatants and supporters of national movement, or caregivers as mothers and wives limited by gender norms in a patriarchal society. In the resistance period from 1975-1999, women were the backbone of the resistance movement within

the armed, clandestine, and diplomatic networks (Kinsella and Kent 2015). The women’s front of

Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretlin), Popular Organization of Timor-

Leste Women (OPMT) helped carry weapons, provide support, cook for the army, and take care of their families and communities (Cristalis, Scott, and Andrade 2005). After the independence in 1999, many women organized themselves into women’s Non-Governmental Organizations

(NGOs) and advocacy networks. These women’s organizations also got together to form the first ever Women’s Congress, which worked to address women’s exclusion and marginalization through formal politics. Although women are empowered by conflict to step out the traditional roles of wives and mothers they used to play in the household, women tend to be victimized for the same reason. Women were the target of violence during the independence movement because they were related to Timorese men, broader community and the nation as wives or mothers (Franks 1996). However, they are not passive victims lacking agency. The historical evidence of women’s activism demonstrates that women as wives and mothers also exercise a certain kind of agency in their individual action, even though they do not change gender norms regulating their body. For example, Timorese women refused to go to schools or avoided

“Indonesian clinics and doctors if they can” to avoid forced sterilization (Franks 1996, 164).

They also tried to avoid being wives of soldiers. Emma Franks shows “the woman resigning themselves to being ‘kept women’ of the soldiers” (Franks 1996, 160).

Women respond to violence positively or passively, when violence is prevalent.

However, what is noteworthy is the various ways femininity is contained and embodied in women’s agency. J. Kaufman and K. Williams mentioned that in Sri Lanka and Palestine, women have to be rationalized in order not to “upset the dominant culture and norms” (2013,

42). Even though women gain power during the war, it is difficult for them to maintain it after

the war ends, especially when they are expected to return to the normalcy of gender role. In order to be accepted by the patriarchal and gender society, women have to renegotiate their femininity between their activities and the gender roles. In this light, femininity in the post-conflict context should not be considered as just an expression of patriarchy, but a result of women’s choice, which has a potential of subversion of gender roles and norms imposed on women embodied in personal action. Therefore, more forms of agency masked in the seemingly passive forms of activism as well as women’s agency in terms of femininity in relation to masculinity not conformed to normalcy of gender role of women need to be discovered by exploring women’s multiple experiences.

Timorese women’s agency embodied in different historical periods and contexts indicates that their agency is not fully consumed by historical and social circumstances but enabled or limited by them. Despite the fact that women are situated in different political and social relations, which condition their life experiences and personal security, it remains unclear to me what kind of self-identity is constructed as well as how it is interweaved in the narratives of their gendered experiences and personal security from their perspectives. The meanings and interpretations attached to women’s own experiences and identity construction after the war and conflict tend to be left out from the examination of possible consequences of war and conflict which have definite starting and ending date but continue to have an impact on how they perceive themselves and their security in relation to other people and society at large.

Case Study and Methods

I address my question through a single case study of Timor-Leste. The benefit of a case study is to produce contextual knowledge about gender, sex, and conflict. Timor-Leste, East

Timor, means “East East.” Geographically speaking, Timor-Leste is located within Indonesia and Australia, occupying the eastern part of Timorese island with a total population of 1.2

million. This country is not unfamiliar with colonizers and violence. To introduce the history of this country briefly, it had been a former Portuguese colony for hundred of years until 1975. It was then followed by 24 years of Indonesian occupation until 1999. Several resistance force emerged to fight against Indonesian occupation for independence; however, it was not until 1999 when the violence of the Indonesian military and militia, especially “members of the Tentara

Nasional Indonesia (TNI) and its paramilitary allies,” against Timorese referendum that Timor-

Leste gained international attention and support for its independence in 2002 (Nevins 2005, 4).

In my opinion, Timor-Leste is unique because both its social and institutional norms are gendered and gendering. It is a post-colonial country like many other Southeast Asian countries, but unlike most of them, it is a laboratory of the UN, which has governed Timor-Leste for 13 years until the end of 2012 since the United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor

(UNAMET) and Australian-led International Force for East Timor (InterFET) arrived in Timor to stop Indonesian violence against Timorese and help their referendum, leading to independence from Indonesia. On the one hand, it has a legacy of colonialism and the Catholic Church, which socializes and limits women to the household as mothers and wives. On the other hand, through the assistance of the UN, Timor-Leste adopts a gender-sensitive scheme based on international norms in both missions and the post-conflict political processes. The controversial gendered nature of international and local norms makes Timor-Leste particularly intriguing in terms of its selective translation and establishment of international gender policies, which ironically contributes to gender equality and awareness of gender-violence nation-wide while creating the exclusion and silence of some women. Furthermore, its history seems to demonstrate that violence has been “normalized in its society,” (D’Costa 2006, 104) which helped reaffirm the gender roles within the society after intervention. Examining why and how certain women are

included yet silenced in a gender-sensitive post-conflict Timor-Leste requires us to investigate how power and social structure work together to construct women’s identities and life experiences in a broader social context which contains legal, moral, and social-economic dimensions. I interviewed women in both rural and urban areas to compare whether their agency is limited in different contexts, as well as how their agency is embodied. Although my focus is

Timor-Leste, it has broader implications about the long-term consequences of the UN peacekeepers on local populations in other intervened countries.

My case study is built on fieldwork incorporating semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations. In summer 2016 and 2017, I travelled to Timor-Leste twice, 5 weeks and 3.5 months individually. Overall, I successfully conducted 65 semi-structured interviews, email and face-to-face, in Tetun and English, as well as informal discussions with 13 directors and staff members of women’s NGOs which are Dili-based, 22 Timorese men and women who used to work in the UN missions during 1999-2012, 17 women who had sexual liaisons with the

UN peacekeepers in municipalities of Dili, Ainaro, Oecussi, Lospalos, and Suai, as well as 13 ordinary individuals, foreigners who have lived in Timor and local Timorese. A few of these individuals overlap among the groups. My purpose of interviewing 4 groups of interlocutors is to compare what they say and feel about women and their relationship with the UN peacekeeping personnel in Timorese contexts; to collect information about how Timorese experience the UN missions and violence as well as interact with the UN personnel in different contexts; and to understand social taboos and stigmatizations against the free pursuit of sexuality and sexual relationship of Timorese women.

Ethics and International Review Board (IRB) approvals for the research were obtained from the University of Florida in 2016 and renewed in 2017 prior to the conduct of interviews

(Protocol #201601007). By combining different qualitative methods, I could provide contextual understanding and better probe how different groups perceive and understand women who have relationships with peacekeepers in the Timorese context while avoiding being totally guided by researchers’ assumption and bias. I used a snowballing method to choose my interlocutors because of the difficulty to find and access potential interlocutors in spite of over-dependency on key-interlocutors and their selective judgment. In terms of data analysis, I use a feminist narrative approach with an eye on gender relations where women are situated as well as those between the researcher and the interlocutors for my data analysis. Similar to Bina D’Costa, I see

“narratives obtained as sources of data whose meaning I interpret” (D’Costa 2006, 104). I come up with some common themes and categories which repeatedly come up during the interviews.

For example, Timorese used “malae nian (of foreigners)” to label and describe women who have intimate or working relationship with peacekeepers. I took notes on how Timorese generally understand the word, and how individuals interpret it in their experiences during the interview. I reviewed my field notes and transcriptions to find out how meanings of words attached to women are related to women’s experiences mediated by themselves and their society. I found that although women tend to reaffirm femininity in relation to ex-partners, family, and children in their narratives, they demonstrate their agency and power against gender norms imposed on them in delicate yet subtle ways. Consequently, it is necessary to centralize women’s views and experiences about peacekeeping through their stories of relationships to challenge and even subvert the discourse which constructs and perpetuates the representation of women as victims.

Nevertheless, I still have reservation about my method of in-depth and semi-structured interview. I do not feel very comfortable by listening to the interlocutors about what they might have to say according to the questions I list. In my preliminary research experiences in summer

2016, I encountered a Timorese woman who had a toddler from her previous partnership with a

Portuguese peacekeeper in a home-based dinner event. She had a degree from Australia; she spoke multiple languages; she dressed differently from most of Timorese women who didn’t show much of their skin and bra; she had a full-time job aside from having a shop. She was planning to get married and buy a house with her current British partner. She was not an informant on my interview list, and she told me upfront that she will not participate in my interview. Suddenly, she opened up talking to me about how she thought of those peacekeepers as well as her dissatisfaction with Timorese men. She said, “If Timorese men treat women better, they will not be with those peacekeepers” (A15 2017). I was very surprised by her honesty, which led me to reflect on my choice and limits of method and methodology. Did I follow feminist ethics by using semi-structured and in-depth interview? Did I do justice to my interlocutors by allowing them to freely express themselves without representing them in a particular way? Did I treat my interlocutors like human beings rather than data? Did I do harm to my interlocutors? How can I create a space to connect the experiences of researchers and the researched subjects as well as their interaction? My encounter with this woman contributes to my reflection on method and conduct of research in my methodological chapter, especially the power of researchers in the research process in relation to the researched.

I do not deny the value of using in-depth interview to collect data, but I feel that simply collecting stories of women dictated by my pre-setup questionnaire does not conform to my feminist ethics, which requires one to listen to women with compassion and a sense of awareness of power. Moreover, presenting the results as they are might oversimplify and sacrifice the details of what happened to women. It is at this point that I think that a narrative approach is better in incorporating my awareness of power hierarchy embedded in in-depth and semi-

structured interview as well as giving agency to people who tell their own stories. I would like to challenge my dependence on institutions through recovering narratives of women and unstructured interviews. I believe that I can better capture what victimization means to women without presuming what victimization means or perpetuating certain narratives formulated in the existing order.

A feminist narrative approach pays attention to contexts and experiences where narratives are hidden. Context-based meanings help determine how peoples’ lived experiences are organized in a particular manner. Since there are different experiences and narratives told by people in different contexts, listening to them helps retrieve other hidden narratives, inconsistencies, and fractures of the narratives, which show how people perceive and represent events and stories in their narratives. In doing so, subjects can be brought back to the center by breaking the silence and invisibility perpetuated in the dominant narratives. Annick Wibben sees experiences as narratives, which reflect how people make sense of their surroundings and experiences from particular perspectives shaped in everyday life, which are not totally captured by the dominant narratives. This implies that individual narratives could be reformulated to serve as a resistance tool to fight against the dominant narratives, which tend to curtail narratives which do not conform to the dominant ones (Wibben 2011).

Bringing Timorese women’s diverse lived experiences to light in the form of stories and narratives helps not only complicate the gender relations between women and the UN peacekeepers, but also retrieve the political agency and power of these women in their daily life.

The victimization of women in the previous literature is a function of gender, which denies the recognition of some groups of women and their life experiences. I argue that we feminist scholars need to problematize the victimization of women to retrieve the voice of women. By

problematizing the categories and their underlying assumptions perpetrated in the discourse of women as victims in the light of gender, I argue that we need to return to listen to women’s stories which are anchored in their everyday lived experiences. By listening to women, I also find different meanings of agency and power embodied in women’s experiences. Some women are victimized by peacekeeping and peacekeepers, but they are not powerless and weak victims who lack political agency.

General Situation of SEA in Timor-Leste

The cases of allegations of women in intervened countries where women are involved in relationships with SEA are documented by interviews as well as surveys. Like many other post- intervention countries, Timor-Leste was exposed to the SEA by the UN peacekeepers. In the

United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) (2006-2012), there were 13 allegations of SEA reported (Smith 2017, 402). However, “This figure does not illuminate an understanding of the nature of SEA or the frequency of its occurrence in Timor-Leste” (Smith

2017, 402). Cases of SEA were reported in Timor-Leste. Shukoko Koyama and Henri Myrttinen

(2007, 26) reported cases of SEA in United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor

(UNTAET) (1999-2002) and the United Nations Mission of Support to East Timor (UNMISET)

(2002-2005) based on 35 interviews with “representatives of the Timor-Leste government, the

UN administration, the PKF2 and UN police (UNPOL) officers, representatives of other UN agencies, representatives of Timorese and international civil society organizations, media representatives, sex workers and their clients.” Those cases range from sexual assault, harassment, prostitution, to abandonment of mother and children fathered by UN personnel.

During interviews conducted by Sarah Smith, “There were reports of peacekeepers frequenting

2 Peacekeeping Force

brothels, and UN vehicles could be seen outside brothels and picking up women outside popular bars and nightspots” (Smith 2017, 413). Although there is positive relation between the presence of peacekeepers and the prostitute, the cases of SEA involving other forms of transactional sex if not prostitution as well as non-transactional sex remain unknown.

Visibility and Silence of Women in the Research of SEA in Timor-Leste

Although cases of different forms of SEA were reported since UNTAET, it is not clear what happened to the victims of SEA after cases were reported, not to mention those who were never known to the public. Smith noted that this happens because the international staff “keep changing every six months or every one year. And mostly when they change, they take all the documents. So you lost the chronology of what’s happening or what’s going on with the victims”

(2017, 415). Due to lack of documentation and comprehensive survey on SEA by UN personnel, we still cannot go beyond the fact that the presence of the UN is relevant to the prostitution and sex market. The reported cases equally could not tell us more about the intensity and duration of

SEA in one case as well as whether the victims were assisted or supported in any ways by anyone. Since the last UN mission withdrew from Timor in 2012, it becomes more challenging to get insiders’ information about the life conditions of these women and peacekeeper babies, which might be compounded by social norms and post-conflict economy.

I examine women who form relationships with peacekeepers but do not engage in transactional sex for food or money. This group of women are considered as victims by zero tolerance policy. To explain, zero tolerance policy was made by the UN in 2003 in order to stop and prevent a series of sexual violence conducted by the UN peacekeepers. Sexual violence tends to cause direct and indirect harms towards the local population, sexual exploitation and violence (Karim and Beardsley 2016), AIDS/HIV and other sexually-transmitted-disease (Bratt

2002), and peacekeeping economy-related sex industry, which in turn strengthens local gender

roles and relations (Jennings 2010). Facing the sexual scandal of the UN peacekeepers in DRC,

Sierra Leone, the Balkans and other countries, mostly in African countries, where peacekeepers predate on local women and girls to exchange sex for food and money as well as prostitute, the

UN adopts a “zero tolerance policy” against sexual exploitation and abuse, which forbids peacekeepers from having sexual contact with prostitute and children under the age of 18 to protect local women and children in 2003. According to the UN, sexual exploitation is “any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes, including, but not limited to, profiting monetarily, socially or politically from the sexual exploitation of the another” (United Nations 2003). Sexual abuse means “the actual or threatened physical intrusion of a sexual nature, whether by force or under unequal or coercive conditions” (United Nations 2003). Olivera Simić and Melanie O’Brien (2014, 350) contend that

“the policy bans sexual activity amounting to sexual exploitation or sexual abuse, between UN peacekeeping personnel and local women, and it ‘strongly discourage[s] sexual relations between

United Nations staff and beneficiaries of assistance.’” Though “zero tolerance policy” demonstrates the resolutions of the UN to prohibit misconduct of peacekeepers, especially those practices which might amount to the cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, the policy implies that sex between women and peacekeepers is coercive and harmful and hence sex should be prohibited.

In addition to zero tolerance policy, the UN adopts gender mainstreaming through including more female peacekeepers and staff in the UN missions to prevent male peacekeepers from sexually exploiting and abusing women. “That would facilitate the missions’ task of making meaningful contact with vulnerable groups and non-governmental organizations in the local community in its effort to eliminate sexual exploitation and abuse” (United Nations 2005).

Maxi Schoeman (2010, 2) points out that the importance of female peacekeepers in the example of South Africa: “They are required for specific tasks that sometimes relate to cultural differences,” “monitoring excessive conduct among male soldiers,” and “role models for the local population.” In sum, including female peacekeepers helps to correct the military behavior as well as men’s conduct in relation to women in a system rewarded by the aggressive masculine behavior.

One exception among women involved in cases of sexual exploitation and abuse is women married to peacekeepers, according to the policy. However, the policy does not take into consideration the nature of peacekeeping operations which allow only for short stay and constant shifts to other posts, which might contribute to the precarious nature of marriage bonded between local women and peacekeepers. The situations of women who have voluntary relationships with the UN peacekeepers are vague because they might also be vulnerable to peacekeepers due to the physical mobility and financial capability of peacekeepers. Even though it is possible that local men might be abandoned as well, no study has been done yet. Therefore, I would like to examine the condition of SEA of a group of women who have seldom received public attention before, that is, women who form voluntary relationships, married or unmarried, mothering peacekeeper babies or not, with UN personnel. Most of them remain anonymous in this dissertation to protect their identities.

Initial Findings

From my interviews, I found that in contrast to the common belief that women are too victimized, ashamed, and reluctant to talk about their stories of abandonment, they are open and willing to share their stories with me along with the company of Timorese men during the interviews. A few of them are curious to meet me in spite of their past disappointing and annoying experiences working with foreign researchers. Some of them tell me that they have

never told their stories to anyone but me. Some ask me to advocate their cases to the people from outside and the UN to increase the international awareness. Additionally, different from the image of victims, many of them overcome the fear and plight resulting from the experiences of their past relationship, take up the responsibilities as a mother and a father, and continuously seek help for the best interests of their children rather for themselves. Some of them only feel ashamed when their family members or other people use extreme words against them repeatedly, but they do not automatically feel ashamed by being abandoned or having a relationship with foreigners.

Among all four groups I interviewed, I found that the boundaries of their identities are blurry and subject to change. The blurry identities also indicate that these categories and groups of people are interconnected. In my three empirical chapters, I demonstrate how identities of the local women shift in the narratives of interviewees, how the international are relational to the local, and how women who have sex with the UN peacekeepers are constructed as others by other local residents who live in the same society.

Structural Outline

I divide my dissertation into 7 chapters. The first chapter is an introduction that explains how the four empirical papers are tied together and a summary of the research background and question.

The second chapter presents a dominant narrative of victims among feminist security studies, its limits, and the importance of discovering the contexts and the agency of women which further guide the empirical research in the next four empirical chapters.

The third chapter is a description of the research design, methodology, the components of four groups of participants, data collection, as well as some reflections.

The fourth chapter “Inbetweenness of women” examines the mixed, multiple, overlapping, and changing identities of women based on tiny excerpts of their everyday life. This is the first empirical paper of my dissertation. It analyzes my interview results with 17 Timorese women who had or were still having voluntary sexual relationship with the UN peacekeepers from 1999-2012. Stories of these women reflect their points of view about the peacekeepers and the UN missions, as well as the long-term impacts of peacekeeping, which are not fully captured by the dominant discourse which portrays women as victims. I argue that the inbetweenness of women is the source of their silence as well as a site of formulating their resistance of power.

The fifth chapter “The relationality between the international and the local” explores what is hidden under the categories of the international and the local. The binary categories which are used to reduce and categorize human experiences enable the separation, the interplay of different level of analysis, and the interaction of international and local actors. However, the categories also homogenize, essentialize, and simplify each group and the interrelatedness of both sides. I argue that by perpetuating the dominant discourse and the use of binary categories without problematizing its political underpinning and consequences functioning along with the politics of exclusion and inclusion, different forms of violence and other causes of problems of peacekeeping perceived by the local might be undermined. My findings suggest that alternative framings and solutions of peacekeeping can only be made based on the perspectives and everyday experiences of the local actors with a more contextualized understanding of peacekeeping in Timor-Leste.

The sixth chapter “Women as others in the local gaze” discusses how local people perceive women as “malae nian (of foreigners)” and how these women are treated based on these perceptions the local have. I use stories of locals to show different meanings of “malae

nian” among locals. I show how they defy and erect the meanings of good women in the eyes of the local interlocutors. I discuss how women labeled as “malae nian” are treated by the locals in violent and non-violent ways for tarnishing the reputation of family, community, and the nation.

I argue that women who are “malae nian” are gendered and racialized subjects in relation to nationalism and broader global peacekeeping discourse in post-intervention Timor-Leste. I suggest that the meanings of malae nian need to be understood politically in relation to the nation-building project of post-intervention Timor-Leste instead of moral deviation from the standard of good women.

The conclusion chapter summarizes my arguments in previous chapters, my policy suggestions which call for inclusion of the local knowledges and perspectives in agenda setting, policy-making, and implementation process of peacekeeping in the host countries, and the significance of this dissertation’s findings to the future research as well as their implications to women in other post-intervention countries in Global South.

Contribution

I contribute to feminist security studies and feminist international relations (IR) scholarship by providing a more complex picture of the intimacy between women and the UN peacekeepers. Women’s experiences of relationships cannot be understood simply by certain categories of victims and non-victims as well as wives and mothers in dominant discourses of peacekeeping and patriarchal society. These women have and exercise agency in different ways which could not be captured by existing discourse of women as victims, and these women and their agency can only be seen and understood in their contexts. Moreover, in my three empirical chapters, I demonstrate that gender operates in the levels of discourses, structures, and institutions, which leads to victimized representations of women and lack of agency, feminization of the local and masculinization of the international, and the social constructions

and governance of bodies in relation to peacekeeping. This dissertation concludes by providing some gender-sensitive policy suggestions for future peace-building and state-building schemes in post-conflict societies. These women’s experiences of discursive, structural, and institutional violence enabled by gender can be fertile soil for social and political transformation by deconstructing current gender relations which undermine or exclude women. I believe that my findings can provide alternative perspectives by collecting formerly-neglected women’s stories and their agency with a gender awareness which helps challenge and even transform the existing gendered feminist scholarship as well as political frameworks of peacekeeping and peacebuilding.

CHAPTER 2 UN PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS, GENDER, AND WOMEN: THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE OF VICTIMS AMONG FEMINIST SECURITY STUDIES (FSS)

Feminist scholars in feminist security studies have long established a literature highlighting the mutual construction between women as well as war and peace. Three categories have been made by feminists to identify and acknowledge women’s agency in making peace and war: peacemakers, victims, and perpetrators. These categories determine which women’s story can be told and heard as well as how they are told. What is relatively less paid attention to is the process of subjectification in relations of power: such categories are subjectively framed and chosen by feminist scholars to interpret and represent women’s stories in particular ways.

Moreover, the selection of which and how agency is expressed within the academia conforms to the dominant form of discourse which tends to portray women in developing countries as victims situated in gender relations with peacekeepers without problematizing other power relations, such as race and colonialism. In other words, stories featuring different women’s agency and forms of representation in the form of competing discourses formulated by FSS scholars within the broader framework of peacekeeping, cannot problematize but only affirm gendered roles and identities of women largely in or against the narrative of victims, which in turn justifies the security-seeking behavior of peacekeeping. Without interrogating the selective expression of agency of women as well as the particular underpinning assumptions and meanings behind generalized and binary categories denoting the discourses, where women are labeled and presented in particular ways, the predominant narrative of victims is sustained and curbs feminists’ capability in representing women’s multiple experiences of war by masking women’s complicated and multiple agency and experiences with abstract categories, which fails to recognize women as agents with power in relationships in the real world.

I reexamine the feminist disputes around peacekeeping by conducting discourse analysis.

I incorporate the concept of regime of truth as well as technologies of self. By treating theories of

FSS which have a primacy of women and (in)security, as objects of examination, I argue that the normative assumptions and implications underling the categories and stories made by FSS scholars about women’s experiences of war and peace inevitably impede our understanding of complex women’s wartime experiences. What we perceive is guided by how we approach. The violence of narratives reinforces gendered ideology and particular forms of dominance, but it also bears the deconstructive potential from within to challenge and destabilize the underlying ideology. As a result, I suggest that it is necessary for us as FSS scholars to be able to engage in peacekeeping yet avoid falling into the trap of reproduction of gendered violence throughout the discussions of peacekeeping, gender, and women by calling into question the mutual construction of knowledge and power.

In this chapter, I first examine different discourses featuring different categories of roles and identities of women in making war and peace as seen by feminists, and how feminists focus predominantly on narrating women as victims vis-à-vis women as victims empirically, though the boundaries between categories are not necessarily fixed. Second, I review three debates within the literature of women and peacekeeping/peacekeepers to demonstrate the dominance of a victimized narrative, and why it is necessary to critically engage in its underpinning power relations, which is inclined to totalize women’s experiences and deny women’s agency which does not fit the dominant frame. Third, I will discuss some cautionary consequences of endorsing such a narrative without questioning the underlying assumptions with the example of feminists’ attributing women’s victimized experiences to military masculinity embodied in peacekeeping. I argue that without paying attention to the power of peacekeeping discourse, feminists help

sustain the gendered construction of women as victims in the discourses, which further abstract them from the complicated and multiple experiences of women as well as strip the critical power of feminism in interrogating the normative construction and implications of women. Last but not the least, by critically examining the intellectual debates and the narratives of with a primacy of criminalizing and normalizing sex among feminist scholarship from the perspective of poststructural and postcolonial feminist approach, I argue that divorcing women from military and social structure obscures complicated forms of gender relations in social relations, which operate to silence women economically and socially as well as obfuscate the political constructions of women. I contend that although there are competing narratives of women in these three groups of literature surrounding women and peacekeeping, these narratives are re- inscribed in militarism in contingency with peacekeeping, which generalizes and overlooks real women. I suggest that feminist security scholars should listen to women themselves in order to understand what happened to them and what peacekeeping mean to them from their points of view by problematizing peacekeeping narrative as regime of truth, which enables and perpetuates the marginalized status of women. Feminist narrative approach not only highlights the inconsistency between narratives of peacekeeping in academia and field site, but also problematizes the ideological construction of women’s agency and stories in the dominant discourses. Only when feminists anchor their theories and narratives on women’s real experiences can feminists go beyond and transform the narrative of victims to a narrative of survival, which captures not only complex experiences of women but also retrieves women’s agency in ceaselessly navigating and negotiating their femininity through the power dynamics.

Women, War and Peace: Women as Peacemakers, Victims, and Perpetrators

In traditional security studies, women have been excluded from the security realm as soldiers, policy makers, and academics (Willett 2010, 144). In reality, women are far from non- existent. Women tend to be used as justifications of war through representation of women as vulnerable and powerless actors in wars, who need to be saved or protected by men (Orford

2003). Moreover, women are often victimized in wars, since women and children are easily killed, enslaved, raped, or tortured in wars (Mazurana, Raven-Roberts, and Parpart 2005).

Although women are constitutive of war stories, they are systematically absent or silenced in both policy and intellectual realm. The absence of women in contrast to men's presence in the security arena renders the security studies and international relations man's playground. This invisibility of women is enabled by the binary of peace/war and women/men. By associating women with peace, women are portrayed as idealized and passive actors in war, though “many believe that the unproblematic association of women with an idealized and passive definition of peace has worked to devalue both women and peace” (Tickner 2014, 24). By asking where women are in the international relations based on the fact that women are constitutive of yet absent in the men-led field, FSS scholars attempt to bring women and gender back to the field where women and gender have not existed before. In general, women are labeled as peacemakers, victims, and perpetrators during and after the war.

Women as Peacemakers

Although limited, feminists have used this women-and-peace essentialism to fight against war detrimental to women by encouraging women to step in political realm in order to stop war

"with the vision of women as innately pacifist, and men as innately warmongering (di Leonardo

1985, 602). Some feminists emphasize the fact that the peaceful nature of women renders that women often are targeted at war against their reproductive rights by showing various kinds of

women's victimized experiences, such as sexual violence, rape, torture, and sexual slavery. They argue that including women in peace processes is vital to address sexual violence and human trafficking (de la Vega and HaleyNelson 2006). Some consider the necessity of including women in the decision-making process to create peace in post-conflict societies. Swanee Hunt (2000) argues that because women are more capable in bridging people, providing the knowledge of conflict and local community, leading grass-root activities, as well as more motivated to stop and prevent conflict compared to men, they should be included in formal and informal peace-making or peace-negotiating processes. Similarly, the passing of United Nations Security Council

Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 in 2000, which calls for incorporating women and gender to build peace, shows feminists’ desire in defending women’s rights against patriarchy, militarism, and war. Resolution 1325 aims to address “protection of women during armed conflict, and calls for an end to impunity for gender-based abuses during and after conflict, the integration of a gender perspective in peace-making and peace-keeping, and the participation of women in all levels of decision-making and issues related to prevention management and resolution of conflict” (2006,

439). However, Hannah Wright claims that Resolution 1325 is narrower than its focus in terms of women’s participation and gender equality by focusing largely on sexual violence (Wright

2015). The stereotype of women related to peace-making or preventing violence has been perpetuated within feminism security studies.

Nevertheless, it is worrisome associating women with peace because peace is dependent on feminine values along the masculine logic. “While it might be politically more advantageous to posit women as peacemakers, and certainly there are many women peace makers (Boulding

2000; Cockburn 2007; Meintjes, Turshen, and Pillay 2001), seeing women only as peacemakers

is incorrect; it devalues women’s work in other areas” (Wibben 2016, 6). By seeing women as peacemakers, women’s military identity and agency might become unthinkable.

Women as Victims

Many feminists represent women and girls as victims at wartimes in need of protection by men, even though all individuals are vulnerable to war. According to Vesna Nikolic-

Ristanovic, “In all forms of warfare, women are victims even if they are not wounded on the battlefield” (2000, 21). Feminist claim that men and women “experience many of the same phenomena, such as sexual assault, injury, torture, displacement, loss of livelihood, and the death of loved ones, they do so in related but distinct ways” (Cohn 2013, 22). The common belief that women and girls suffer differently from men and boys during wartime among feminists is demonstrated in two aspects:

First, women in the intervened states tend to suffer most because they might face sexual violence enforced by different men: peacekeepers, local men, and men from different sides of war groups. Although peacekeeping operation aims to save people, Anne Orford (1996) argues that women tend to become sexual slaves or suffer sexual violence from peacekeeping operation troops. Similarly, Paul Higate and Marsha Henry (2004) argue that through the delivery of goods and resources via tasks of humanitarian assistance, international peacekeepers exploit local women and girls sexually through exchanging needed food for a date or sex. El-Bushra claims that women are also subjected to victimization by their fellow men, since militarization and access to guns enhances young men’s capacity to take sexual partners forcibly (2003, 259).

Karen Engle (Engle 2007b, 942, 943) also mentions the victory of feminists in legalizing rape to be a war crime, and in one case a crime against humanity in the ICTY, which assumes that “all men (but especially Serbian men) were seen as sexual perpetrators,” which suggests that Bosnian women who have sex with men from their enemy side are inevitably victimized.

Second, militarization of the target states results in more chaos and disorder in economy, society, and politics in the long run, which makes women and children more vulnerable to the problems of public health, food and water, which do not cause immediate insecurity or death.

This would result in the breakdown of social relations and norms, as well as family life, which makes women more vulnerable in the situation (Plümper and Neumayer 2006). In some cases, women and children in the intervened states become traumatized and are suffering from poor health due to food shortages or diseases (Staub 2000). For example, “The collapse of primary health services obviously affects women differently, leading to appalling rises in maternal and child mortality and morbidity” (Cockburn 1999, 11). The breakdown of infrastructure society results in lack of employment and insufficient income, which makes women and children more vulnerable in the precarious war environment.

Similar to the women as peacemakers, essentializing women as victims also risks of trapping in the same masculine logic, since women’s agency in exercising violence is denied when they are relegated to the private realm and the category of victims. Representing women as victims functions to gender women through the construction and naturalization of particular subjectivities compared to men. For example, Jacklyn Cock (1994) examines the gender underpinning of category of women as victims under militarism. She argues that militarization, which is crucial for mobilization of resources for war, helps to exclude women from combat and military service and shape the identities of women as victims and mothers.

What is at the heart of this narrative of women as peacemakers and victims is the relation of women with sexism, which naturalizes the immanent values of femininity of women in narratives. Moreover, sexism perpetuates women's insecurity and subordination to men mainly through reinforcing the gendered ideology of women as mothers and wives. Traditionally,

women as mothers and wives are limited to households. Women as mothers are related to child caring, and the category of motherandchildren constitutes their immunity. According to Robyn

Charlie Carpenter, “[t]hrough their association with children, women, but not men, have been constructed as possessing the attributes associated with a claim to immunity: innocence and vulnerability” (2006, 31). Nadine Puechguirbal argues that patriarchy fixes the representation of women as victims and target of civilian protection with the category of motherandchildren, which denies the agency of women in conducting violence, as well as leaving other forms of violence other groups endure unexamined (Puechguirbal 2010).

Some non-feminist gender study scholars challenge the label of victims only attached to women by calling for broadening the scope of victims to include men and male adolescences.

Carpenter (2003) argues that civilian is a gendered category by examining the casual relation between gender and the civilian protection network in order to know why men and male adolescences who are more vulnerable in besieged areas are not protected by civilian immunity principle.

However, gender is more than sex, since sex is just one category through which gender functions to shape the identities and life experiences of people. Helen Kinsella (2003) and

Marysia Zalewski (1995) challenge that Carpenter does not problematize why and how gender is constructed. Kinsella contends that gender is not a natural concept but a symbolic and cultural construction. Zalewski contends that gender is not just about women, but refers to different forms of injustice women suffer.

In spite of the majority of literature demonstrating women as peacemakers and victims by reading gender in women, some feminists portray other roles of women which are not necessarily related to labels of peacemakers or victims. For example, Christine Mason argues

that women who are perceived as passive or powerless actors might still engage in nonviolent resistance in a non-aggressive way (Mason 2005). Empirical evidence shows that women are capable of killing as soldiers or terrorists (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). They also support war activities in households and institutions through sexual division of labor (Elshtain 1987). More political identities and forms of agency of women discovered in empirics lead to reconsideration of the role of women in violence beyond the victimhood of women.

Women as Perpetrators

In fact, women as peacemakers or victims only represent women in partial war stories, which motivates some feminists to probe in the possibility that women are perpetrators. Cynthia

Enloe (1993) points out the disproportionate representation of women as soldiers compared to women as victims in the media coverage. Megan MacKenzie (2009) mentions that in the recent civil war in Sierra Leone, women constitute 30 percent of the fighters. Laura Sjoberg (2014, 40) argues that “women have not only been combatants on behalf of state militaries in state- sanctioned wars, they have also been terrorists, insurgents, and rebels, fighting against governments, for national self-determinations, or for some other cause.” Women can also join peacekeepers who play important roles in protecting local women “from local men and from male peacekeepers” (Simić 2010, 188).

In addition to directly involving in war and war-fighting, women also indirectly help the preparation for war or support men’s military service as mothers, wives, or prostitute. Enloe

(2014) argues that women have been responsible for creating diplomatic and military communities. Military wives and diplomatic wives serve to develop and maintain an environment which is conducive to military and diplomacy. “A ‘good’ wife puts the need of her husband’s job ahead of her own (if she has one) and participates in the community of other military wives and families that she belongs to” (Mathers 2013, 129). Wives of combatants

might also serve as comfort women to satisfy the sexual desire of male combatants, which erodes women's autonomy (Cristalis, Scott, and Andrade 2005, 33). Rather than merely serving the sexual needs of men in the household, women support military on another homefront. For instance, the governments of the US and South Korea agreed to have a stable supply of prostitutes in the military town for US soldiers during and after the Korean War (Moon 1997).

Women’s capability to exercise violence disturbs the feminist’s narrative of victims, since women could be perpetrators of violence and men could be victims. The former Minister of

Family and Women’s Affairs Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was charged committing genocide and crime against humanity due to “inciting Hutu men to rape Tutsi women” (Engle 2007b, 953).

The photos of female U.S soldiers’ torturing male prisoners in Abu Ghraib demonstrate “female sexual sadism in action” (Engle 2007b, 953).

Precarious Boundaries between Peacemaker, Victim, and Perpetrator

It is not always clear that the boundaries between these three categories are exclusive. On the one hand, female combatants can also be victimized. Sjoberg argues that “women soldiers were ‘not soldiers but women soldiers; their gender marked their identities in militaries’”

(Sjoberg 2007, 83). She then gives an example of a female American female soldier Jessica

Lynch to illustrate the blurry line between perpetrators and victims. Lynch joined the war as a solider, but soon became a captive of the Iraqi soldiers and then needed to be saved by the UN troops. “Jessica Lynch was at once presented as a glorified war hero and an innocent woman – a

Beautiful Soul who could not escape the mold, even though she carried a gun and wore a uniform” (Sjoberg 2007, 84). Her identity as a female solider was quickly replaced by her identity of an innocent woman who “who just wanted to become a kindergarten teacher” and needs to be rescued by American soldiers (Pin-Fat and Stern 2005, 84). Women are also victimized in the process of demobilization, disarmament and reconstruction (DDR). MacKenzie

(2009) examines the causal relation between gendered construction of women and desecuritization. She demonstrates that category which defines women as war victims has undervalued the role of former female soldiers in post-conflict programs in Sierra Leone. While men are securitized as a key element of transforming war to peace, women are desecuritized and considered as a social issue. She argues that because the DDR programs failed to include female soldiers, they might not be able to recognize the agency of women in making wars and peace.

This further renders DDR process ineffective. Sandra McEvoy (2009) holds a similar argument to MacKenzie’s. McEvoy challenges the traditional views of peace negotiations and their tendencies in excluding the voices of female combatants. She argues that the inclusion of female combatants in peace process will make conflict resolution more likely to succeed.

On the other hand, women who are perpetrators can be also protectors. The examples in

West Africa, Argentina, and Northern Ireland demonstrated the agency and different forms of activism of women as mothers and wives in traditional patriarchal societies by supporting or protesting the ruling power within militarized societies. Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey

(2012) have shown that women in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been involved in the combat economy as “fighters, commanders, heads of Small Girls Units, as well as the more conventional subordinate roles as porters, intelligence gatherers, food providers, spies and

‘wives’” (2012, 116). In Argentina, in fighting against the junta for disappearing their children, some women gathered together at the Plaza de Mayo. The Mothers of The Plaza de Mayo (The

Mothers of the Disappeared) gathered to express their dissatisfaction toward the violence of the junta, which eventually led to the collapse of the military government (Kurtz 2010). In Northern

Ireland, although women are restrained by patriarchal structures as mothers and wives, they connect to other communities to protect themselves and children (Kaufman and Williams 2007,

171). Women from different communities formed Northern Ireland Women's Coalitions (NIWC) and helped the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, which indicates not only the existing vibrant activism of women at the communal level but also women's determination to participate in decision-making process, which excludes women from mainstream politics in

Northern Ireland (Kaufman and Williams 2007, 183).

From Sex to Gender: the Social and Political Construction of Militarism, Militarization, and Women’s (In)securities

What underlies the uncertain boundaries in different discourses where women are peacemakers, victims, or perpetrators is that women as a consistent and autonomous entity who are capable of making peace and violence is erected, which triggers many critics within the feminists, particularly those pointing out the difference between sex and gender. The narratives of women as peacemakers and victims seem to read gender in women’s bodies in association with feminine values. However, gender is more than biological sex, since sex is just one form of power. Gender as a social construct is constituted in power. It is relational, and it embodies itself in interpersonal relationships. By redirecting the focus from biological sex to gender as social construct, the social constructed nature of gender in terms of femininity and masculinity is highlighted. Women are situated in social contexts, where women’s bodies are in congruence with social norms and rules which operate to define women’s femininity. Moreover, according to

Huysman’s conceptualization of security as a thick signifier, we can apply gender to problematize the violence of structure where discourse is constructed, through discourse individuals or groups within the structure define ourselves in relation to others. “These structural relations reflect the division and inequality of power between those involved and affected by the discourse” (Kinnvall 2004, 745). In other words, gender is a signifier of power relations (Wilcox

2015). In the light of deconstructivist feminism, Judith Butler argues that gender only exists

through repetitive performance, since subjects and subjectivities do not preexist the act (Butler

1988). The performativity of gender suggests that women’s position, identity, and subjects are constructed through their repetitive performative acts, through which meanings are assigned and reinforced. R. W. Connell also considers gender as practice of power, which is “actively negotiated by men and women, in relation to both their physical embodiment and social structures within which they live” (Duncanson 2009, 64). The violence of gender helps to fix and perpetuate women's subordination to men in societies and institutions in order to maintain the privileged and priority status of men, but it is not always the case and might vary depending on the contexts. Instead of one form of gender, there are multiple forms of gender (Duncanson

2009).

By reorienting feminists' unquestioned gendered assumption of women and peace, from reading gender with sex to reading gender as social construct and as practices of power, feminists in IR begin to probe the origin of women's (in)security in broader social contexts, which draws attention to the sources of women’s insecurity not only from individuals but also gender in discourses, structures, and institutions. Enloe and Tickner highlight the relevance between gender, militarism, and insecurity of women by constructing women as a homogenous military subject.

To conceptualize militarism, Catherine Lutz defines it in terms of social process:

This process involves an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals. Militarization is simultaneously a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimate the use of force, the organization of large standing armies and their leaders, and the higher taxes or tribute used to pay for them (2002, 723).

It might be confusing to adopt the definition proposed by Lutz, since she seems to assimilate militarism with militarization in terms of process without further explaining the

difference or similarity between social and discursive process denoting militarism and militarization. It is necessary to separate these two while knowing their relevance conceptually. I agree with Dubravka Zarcov and Cynthia Cockburn’s reading of Enloe: Militarism is the result of militarization (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002, 10). Since militarization is characteristic of a social process, militarism eventually creeps in civil life, which not only valorizes military values but also fixes social beliefs and values in alignment with military goals. Similarly, by seeing militarization as a continuous and transforming process, Enloe also argues that militarization creeps into our daily lives (Enloe 2000). This suggests that how we think, how we live our lives, what we long for, are militarized without necessarily participating in war or the military (Enloe

2000). Moreover, militarism celebrates a culture of militarized or hyper-masculinity (Enloe

2000, 2004; Whitworth 2004a). Since the logic of the military is to inculcate men to be soldiers to kill, it socializes men to be combatants to adopt “a combination of traits and attitudes including aggressiveness, competitiveness, and the creation and dehumanization of the ‘enemy’”

(Kinsella and Kent 2015, 414). Overall, militarism valorizes male combatants over other citizens

(Enloe 2004, 221–23).

In fact, Enloe launched the pioneering work in extrapolating the relation between militarism and women’s security. She argues that militarism might exacerbate gender inequality by endorsing an ideology of ideal femininity and militarized masculinity. In Does Khaki

Becomes You and Maneuvering, she interrogates how the government and the military creates the ideals of women, as well as the role of militarized women, which is necessary for the militarization of men, as well as the institutionalization of the military (Enloe 2000, 1988). In other words, Enloe indicates that women could voluntarily or involuntarily participate in militarism by fulfilling the feminine role in relation to militarized masculinity. Lia Kent and

Kinsella argue that the construction of a militarized masculinity “reinforces a problematic binary construction of ‘men as combatants and political actors’ and women as ‘naturally’ peaceful homemakers and nurturers who require men to act as their protectors” (Kent and Kinsella 2015,

475).

Like Enloe, Tickner, who focuses on gender structure from a different angle, draws attention to the gendered nature of sexism, which denotes and perpetuates militarism. She argues that whether women are peacemakers or warriors, sexism only reinforces a war system or militarized masculinity. Therefore, she suggests that feminists should move beyond binary categories, which help support war and militarism. “Since the way we construct knowledge cannot be separated from the way we act in the world, perhaps these feminist attempts to move beyond gender dichotomies that support militarism and war can help us all to construct more robust definitions of peace and security” (Tickner 2014, 26). A particular gendered ideology is erected through the binary of peaceful women and militant men in militarized culture. Tickner warns us of the danger of embracing the stereotypical view by devaluing women while celebrating masculinity. In her words, “Although feminists caution that it is too simplistic to state that all men are innately aggressive as it is to assert that all women are naturally peaceful, aggressive behavior-necessary for soldiering and the conduct of war - is encouraged through appeals to masculinity” (Tickner 2014, 29). It seems that as long as militarism continue to exist, the security of women or gender equality will not be achieved with assumed male dominance and militarized masculinity. If half of the population is insecure with the function of gender relations, peace is never attainable. Cynthia Cockburn argues that “these war-horned gender relations, ‘after war’, again tend to feedback perennially into the spiraling continuum of armed conflict, forever predisposing a society to violence, forever disturbing the peace” (Cockburn

2010, 152). Whether women could help contribute to peace depends on how they overcome or navigate through the constraints of militarism, where the subjectivities of women are implicated.

Enloe and Tickners' findings really challenge the women-and-peace notion shaped in the discourse of military masculinity, since they suggest that women could also be coopted in violence or war directly or indirectly because of gender relations underpinning militarism. In other words, although women do contribute to peace, the notion that women are peace makers is constructed in terms of sexism in the logic of masculinity. By affirming women’s agency of peacemakers without questioning the subjectification of women as a power construction, it is worrying that feminists might lose sight of the origin and formation of subjects which are implicated in relations of power.

The overlapping and unclear distinctions between labels of victims, perpetrators, and peacemakers along with the selective delineation of boundaries and labels highlight the gendered discourses perpetrated by the feminist scholars the broader context of militarism which enabled gendered violence. Laura Shepherd once cautions that feminists need to pay attention to not just gender as social construct but also gendered violence “as constitutive of subjectivity, has historically been absented from academic theorizing of security” (Shepherd 2007, 240). It means that violence can also take the form of discourse, which operates to exclude or marginalize others. Shepherd warns that among feminist scholars, “there is little work being done on the ways in which the organizational logics of security and violence are discursively constituted

(Shepherd 2007, 240).” Regardless the fact whether women are capable of conducting violence or not, the categories that women are victims/peacemakers and perpetrators of violence delineated by feminist scholars are intersected with sexism, which indicates that feminists tend to understand women’s war experiences in gendered discourses. In the narratives of militarism,

women are considered as military subjects either incapable of violence or capable of violence.

Borrowing the words of Christine Sylvester, Chris Rossdale mentions that women is militarized subjects, since “the history of the autonomous, self-determining, non-dependent subject in many ways precisely the history of the militarized (and masculinized) subjects” (Rossdale 2015, 383).

In the stories of gendered violence women encounter presented by feminists, women are recast as gendered and militarized subjects in the masculine logic: they are either victimized because they are women, or they are agents of violence as combatants but have different treatment and experiences of soldering compared to male soldiers.

Acknowledging that the agency of women as victims or as perpetrators of violence does not necessarily go beyond but reaffirm the gendered construction of women in discourses in the logic of military masculinity, from which women are excluded or coopted in violence, Elina

Penttinen draws on Zillah Eisenstein (2007) to warn that feminist scholars might be “at risk of falling victim to the lure of sexual decoys as the focus is placed on either women active in peacekeeping and the military, or women to be protected and saved in conflict zones and war”

(Penttinen 2013, 11). Women cannot be recognized as victims or agents of violence simply because they are women, otherwise feminists might become accomplice of what they oppose to.

Boundaries among labels also impede us to understand the complex and diversity of women’s stories, although they are used to make sense of women in relation to violence in the first place.

Nevertheless, what is noteworthy is that these categories and labels are created and used by feminists based on their bias and particular perspectives. This needs to be acknowledgedand questioned. Ana Christina Ibanez (Albanez 2001) argues that women are perpetrators but they are also victims in the case of El Salvador: women are perpetrators of the war, but in post- conflict times, families and communities “penalize them for ignoring female responsibilities

(chastity and motherhood) during the war.” More forms of women’s agency and life experiences of war await to be discovered.

Women, Peacekeepers, and Peacekeeping

Although feminists are credited for demonstrating multiple roles and agency of women in making war and peace, they focus disproportionately on narrating women as victims in relation to peacekeepers in stories of gendered violence embodied in women’s bodies. I survey and find that competing discourses orienting around legitimacy of peacekeeping in relation to women emerging from these three groups of literature might end up sustaining the victimhood of women sustained in the narrative of women as victims. I conduct a discourse analysis of feminists’ engagement of peacekeeping in these literatures. I argue that the violence in these particular discourses is reproduced based on the construction of particular identity of women as victims within discourses by prioritizing gender yet ignoring other power relations, such as race and colonialism in post-conflict societies (Henry 2013). This makes feminists’ intervention of peacekeeping operate within and along the framework of peacekeeping without challenging but sustaining the subjectification of women in alignment with gender violence preexisting in the social sphere.

To illustrate, in the first group of literature about the legitimacy of peacekeeping in terms of the use of force, some argue that military intervention and peacekeeping should be used to protect women from wartime rape, while others claim that military intervention helps oppress women by perpetuating the problematic gendered ideology. In the second group of literature about unintended consequences of peacekeeping, some feminists state that women in the intervened states tend to be exposed to the danger of the UN (male) peacekeepers, while others note that it is the economic structure of post-conflict society rather than military masculinity or male soldiers per se who make women insecure. In the third group of the literature about

measures and policies to avoid negative consequences of peacekeeping on women, particularly

SEA policies and practices, while some feminists claim that SEA policies are a success of the feminist movement by incorporating women’s rights and issues through mainstreaming UNSCR

1325, others oppose that SEA policies help foster the neo-liberal ideology of peacekeeping which recasts peacekeepers as protectors of women and managers of risks in relation to women as victims, which have more cautionary political implications to women and other local populations in developing countries through exporting peacekeeping worldwide.

First Group of Literature: Wartime Rape, Military Intervention, and Protection of Women

In the first group of literature lies the debate between whether military intervention protects or suppresses women. Rape has long been used as a strategy or weapons of war targeting women (Kirby 2013). What is more, rape is also “a tool of ‘ethnic cleansing’” by warring parties, because women are bearers of symbolic meanings of culture and nations

(DeLargy 2103, 63). Although women are not the only ones who suffer from violence in war, some feminists might tacitly justify the use of peacekeeping by criminalizing wartime rape to protect women in war. In this vein, feminists might welcome peacekeeping in the name of protecting women by securitizing wartime rape. For example, Catherine MacKinnon (2006) argues that military intervention should be justified based on the violation of women rights in the form of wartime rape. She challenges the idea that violence against women alone has not constituted “a use of force in the legal sense,” and does not get the same treatments when men attack other men (2006, 21). In her words, “Rape is an act of dominance over women that works systematically to maintain a gender-stratified society in which women occupy a disadvantaged status as the appropriate victims and targets of sexual aggression” (MacKinnon 1991, 1281). She argues that wartime rape should be viewed as war crimes in order to invoke state’s serious actions against threats to women and children.

Inger Skjelsbaek (2001) argues that because women are targets of sexual violence during war, peacekeepers must protect women by incorporating sexual violence in peacekeeping missions and trainings. By emphasizing the role of women as transmitters of social identity as well as the tendency that women are subject to harms caused by the new wars, such as rape and other gender-based violence targeting women, Skjelsbaek seems to suggest that peacekeepers have positive influence by being protectors of women from war-related violence while carrying the ideology that women are victims.

In opposition to justifying peacekeeping on the basis of women’s protection, Karen Engle

(2007a) argues that the feminism scholarship might help to oppress women through the effort of supporting the use of military intervention to protect individuals, as well as the valorization of rape to genocide. She argues that in so doing, the necessity of intervention will be emphasized, which helps produce the situation of conflict and war feminists want to address in the first place.

In addition, she questions what constitutes genocide in the first place, upon which peacekeeping is enacted. Engle cautions that by foregrounding some human rights violation to the concept of genocide, other kinds of harms to human beings are excluded and invisible. Moreover, the images of women as victims are also maintained. Regarding these consequences of authorizing peacekeeping to protect women from wartime rape, Engle suggests that feminists should rethink when and how to intervene to protect women from different forms of violence.

Similarly, Gardam and Charlesworth (2000) questions what constitutes women suffering.

Women’s sufferings have multiple sources. Their research is built on the previous finding that women suffer in a different way compared to men in conflicts. They want to add to the previous achievements by arguing that woman’s experience of suffering is far more diverse and complicated since there are many factors causing the abuse and oppression of women. Going

beyond sexual difference which was considered as source of women’s discriminatory treatment and source of suffering, Gardam and Charlesworth incorporate other contextual factors which codetermine women’s wartime experiences, and highlight the fact that they vary among cultures and individuals. In addition, other dimensions of woman’s experiences which have been ignored are also considered, such as economy. Conflicts make women more vulnerable because of financial and food problems. In general, their stance is similar to Karen Engle.

From another angle, Megan MacKenzie (2009) examines the causal relation between gendered construction of women (effect) and desecuritization (cause) in post-conflict Sierra

Leone. After the conflict ends, society is rebuilt through peacekeeping and its related policies and programs regarding state reconstruction. In such contexts, while men are securitized as a key element of transforming war to peace, women are desecuritized and considered as a social issue.

Through the example which shows the challenges of ex-female combatants when reintegrating to society yet excluded from DDR program, she demonstrates that peacekeeping might reinforce gendered norms of society in post-war Sierra Leone.

The arguments laid out by these feminist scholars considering whether to protect women from wartime rape through public policies and legalization or not highlight the possibility or limit of using peacekeeping as a policy tools to improve women’s security. Consequently, women are portrayed either as victims of war or victims of peacekeeping, which in turn justifies the intervention of peacekeeping as well as the role of peacekeepers as protectors.

Second Group of Literature: Peacekeepers, Women, and Violence

In the second group of literature about women and peacekeeping, feminist scholars have been highlighting different forms of unintended consequences of peacekeeping on women in the forms of sexual exploitation and abuse. They demonstrate them in case studies, such as Haiti, many African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Guinea,

Haiti, Southern Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, as well as a few Eastern European and Asian countries, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Cambodia. They argue that the UN peacekeepers sexually exploit, violate, or traffic women in the intervened countries due to the power asymmetry between peacekeepers and local women, which seems to assume that women are void of agency and victimized by the UN peacekeepers. In addition to discussing what harms women suffer from sexual discrimination, feminists also engage in explaining the underlying causes, masculinity or economic structure. In the discussion of military masculinity, feminists debate the utility of military masculinity in relation to sexual violence perpetuated by peacekeeping. On the other hand, those focusing on the structural constraint of post-conflict economy demonstrates its conceptual limitation in explaining why women tend to become disempowered and marginalized in post-conflict society.

What forms of unintended consequences, which may take place with peacekeeping, might put women in a more precarious condition? In many studies we see that peacekeeping brings negative effects to local economy and population, including increasing sexual tourism and industry (Jennings 2010), spread of AIDS/HIV and sexually transmitted disease (Heinecken

2003), price increases in goods and services and economic instability (Edu-Afful and Aning

2015), reinforcing the gender hierarchy and exclusion in local community (Edu-Afful & Aning,

2015), sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) (Higate 2007), as well as one common yet receiving less public attention-peacekeeper babies (Simić and O’Brien 2014). Among all forms of harm happening to women, SEA1 is common and empirically verified in different countries and

1 UNDPKO Standard Operating Procedure include information about what constitutes SEA: sexual activity with children (under 18) regardless of national or local laws; exchange of money, employment, goods services or assistance to beneficiaries of assistance for sex, including sexual favours or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior. This means UN staff are prohibited from soliciting or engaging prostitution; the SGB strongly discourages (but does not prohibit) sexual relationships between UN staff and beneficiaries of assistance, since they

regions resulting from the liaisons of local women and the UN peacekeepers. Liaisons include voluntary and non-voluntary, exploitive and non-exploitive, consensual and non-consensual relationships. The problem of sex economy and survival sex due to peacekeeping is prevalent in many cases of UN peacekeeping. The first allegations occurred in the UN Operation in

Mozambique (ONUMOZ) in 1992, and sexual allegations have not disappeared to date. Cases of different forms of sexual exploitation and abuse are documented in Balkans, Cambodia, Timor-

Leste, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and Libya, etc. In DRC, cases of sexual exploitation and abuse take the form of “the exchange of sex for money (on average $1-$3 per encounter), for food (for immediate consumption or to barter later), and for jobs (especially affecting daily workers)” (General Assembly 2005).

To explain why women disproportionately suffer from harm in relation to their sexuality by peacekeeping, feminists are divided between the role of military masculinity and economic structure of post-conflict societies. I start my discussion with the group who attribute women’s suffering to military masculinity. To illustrate, R. W. Connell (1995) defines masculinity as a series of practices embodying masculine traits. Additionally, masculinity also refers to discourses which shape and perpetuate the superiority of masculine characteristics and traits within the society. On the value of hegemonic or hyper-masculinity, Connell and Messerschmidt

(2005) reformulate the idea of hegemonic masculinity by rejecting the single narrative of masculinity dominating femininity and the essentialization of masculine traits and defends that other forms of masculinity in addition to hegemonic masculinity also exist. Their

are based on inherently unequal power dynamics, and undermine the credibility and integrity of the work of the United Nations (Department of Peacekeeping Operation Statement 2006, 13–14).

conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity is useful with its emphasis on the different ways of co-constitution of masculinity and femininity.

The concept of hegemonic masculinity is helpful for us to reject the idea of masculinity as a singular or homogenous force. We cannot bracket soldiers in the military as a unified group in relation to women, while accepting easily the single form of existence of masculinity within the military. Nevertheless, when it comes to the discussion about the sexual relationships between women and the peacekeepers, the rich concept of hegemonic or military masculinity tends to be shrunk to sex-seeking behavior of male soldiers. Using military masculinity to explain the military behavior in forms of sexual exploitation and abuse as well as other forms of sexual or gender-based violence evokes some serious concerns towards the normalization of violence and oppression of women among feminist scholars. Higate (2007) points out that the predominant use of military masculinity is limited to explain variation of women’s suffering experiences in post-conflict countries because military masculinity highlights the aggressive and arrogant traits of male soldiers in hetero sexual relationships, such as rape or other forms of exploitative behavior, but they might lose sight of other kinds of moderate masculinities which indicates other forms of sexual relationships. In other words, Higate thinks that military masculinity cannot fully explain why some peacekeepers did not engage in SEA as well as the behavior of non-military personnel.

Moreover, military masculinity is erected in relation to a universal and essentialized group of female victims in the discourse of sexual exploitation and abuse, which conflates consensual with non-consensual relationships and further masks the existence and different forms of consensual sex, such as long-term relationships (Otto 2007, 12). Ratna Kapur cautions that the emphasis of native victimized subjects justifies not only the protection of the state, but

also the need of imperialism to step in because “women in the Third World are infantile, civilizationally backward, and incapable of self-descriminalization of autonomy” (Kapur 2001,

862).

The concept of military masculinity focusing on the behavior of military personnel embodying masculine traits tends to be isolated from the contexts and circumstances they are situated in. This might leave other forms of masculinities and femininities unquestioned, which calls for many researches in multiple masculinities. Even though military masculinity might help construct the conditions of exploitation and violence of women, those women do not exist in social vacuum, and women might also be oppressed by other gender relations and structural violence in post-conflict societies preexisting the presence of the UN peacekeepers. For example,

Paul Higate and Marsha Henry note that “in post-conflict settings, women are not just victims of military (or military masculinities), as they are positioned in a variety of complex relations with both local civilians and military personnel” (Higate and Henry 2004, 482). The multiplicity of positions of femininities and women highlighted at war times might be eradicated when the war ends, since “women usually suffer a backlash against any new-found freedoms, and they are forced ‘back into kitchens and fields’” (Pankhurst 2003, 161).

The idea of military masculinities highlights the debate between structure and individual, since it might fail to capture the patterns of SEA in UN peace operations when it comes down to the individual level (Karim and Beardsley 2016). Focusing on the structure level might lose sight of the composition of the individuals by lumping all kinds of men altogether. Karim and

Beardsley point out that military masculinity could not reflect the composition of peacekeeping missions, since they contain military and police personnel. On the one hand, “Military personnel face greater exposure to institutionalized hyper-masculinity and a greater disconnect between

their expectations as soldiers and their expectations as peacekeepers. On the other hand, personnel in police operations have greater access to and engagement with local populations, resulting in greater opportunities for SEA of local communities” (2016, 103).

Focusing on the individuals might also risk omitting the influence of the structure. In contrast to the focus on individual behavior by Karim and Beardsley, Ragnhild Nordås and Siri

C. A. Rustad (2013) discuss the impossibility of reducing structure to individual. Both discuss

“structural reasons” of peacekeeping and their relations to SEA in a comparative framework.

Different from the idea of military masculinity, both authors highlight the structure of peace operations in general, which might not be necessarily reduced to individual military personnel.

Their study of SEA and its variation among international peacekeeping missions is the “first statistical study that explores the issue of what can account for variations in reported SEA across peacekeeping operations” (Nordås and Rustad 2013, 511). Their findings suggest that from 2005 onward, there has been an increase of numbers of SEA. Although they claim that it might be because of more report after the SEA received more public attention since 2003, they do not exclude the possibility that it is because of the presence of “more complex and larger peace operations” (Nordås and Rustad 2013, 530).

Similarly, other scholars claim that peacekeeping contributes to the probability of women becoming victims subordinate to SEA. For example, Beber et al. (2016) argue that there is positive relation between peacekeepers and SEA from their study of Liberian women who engage in transactional sex, most of which are with the UN personnel. In fact, “Each additional battalion of UN peacekeepers caused a significant increase in a woman’s probability of engaging in her first transactional sex” (2016, 1). Similar to Beber et al., Karim and Beardsley (2016)

contend that peacekeeping results in cases of SEA conducted by peacekeepers, which significantly affect local women and girls.

Structure could refer to other kinds of structure in addition to military structure. Another line of research focuses on the economic structure of post-conflict society and indicates poverty as the main cause of women’s social and economic injustice. After the war, women are expected to return to gender roles and norms preexisting war. Women are not only unable to keep the gains in income and status, but also take on more burdens and responsibilities as breadwinners

“as a result of armed conflict and the loss of men to the battlefront or death” (Raven-Roberts

2012, 43). Peacekeeping helps nurture predatory economy, which is conducive to prostitution, sex trade, sexual violence and human trafficking in the post-conflict societies by recommodifying women and children as resources to be trafficked and exploited (Koyama and

Myrttinen 2007; Raven-Roberts 2012). In this context, K. Jennings (2010) contends that a peacekeeping economy is likely to become a sex economy, since peacekeeping encourages propensity of peacekeepers to spend money locally and creates gendered opportunities which reconfigures with the structure of post-conflict society. Another dimension in relation to peacekeeping economy is HIV/AIDS. Bratt finds that UN peacekeepers facilitate the spread of

AIDS in the deployed countries (Bratt 2002).

Jennings in her later article explores the relation between peacekeeping as performance and the (in)security of local population, including women, which approaches structure from discursive perspective and touches upon other non-economic areas of peacekeeping. Her main argument in that article is UN rules and regulations encourage peacekeepers to bypass or exclude locals to maintain its mission (Jennings 2016). The underlying argument is that such a distance between locals and peacekeepers is crucial to maintain effectiveness of the peace operations.

Nevertheless, such a divide or bypass affects how the local population perceive and interact with peacekeepers, which shapes to what extent locals feel safe with the presence of a peacekeeping force. Higate and Henry (2010) shed light on the link between provision of peacekeeping and perception of peacekeeping through everyday security by reconceptualizing peacekeeping as

“embodied, spatial-security practice that is performed ‘out front’ for the ‘beneficiary’ audience”

(Higate and Henry 2010, 32). Jennings, Higate and Henry highlight the inseparability and interrelatedness of structures and individuals in discourses, since structures cannot exist without being performed by individuals, and individuals’ behavior are always informed by structures.

Apparently, peacekeeping affects not only the ways locals perceive peacekeeping but also the local environment where locals live. Laura Zanotti (2008) reflects on the imperial nature of international intervention in the form of development or peacekeeping. By employing the ideas of technologies of government in terms of governmentality to investigate the model of state- building and its consequences with the case study of the UN peace operation in Haiti, Zanotti demonstrates “the overarching imperial scope and ethnographic character of these endeavors or the shortcomings of the institutions carrying them out” (Zanotti 2008, 541).

In sum, these scholars do not just point out the negative impacts of peacekeeping on local political economy, but also highlight the limits and opportunities of using military masculinity as a concept and an analytical category, and the need to go beyond the dynamics between soldiers and women. Gender functions differently to affect men and women, masculinity and femininity, in both military and social structural contexts, varied from region to region. Nevertheless, the use of military masculinity is still limited in many ways in capturing the complexity of women’s experiences.

First, it ignores the particularity of peacekeeping compared with other military activities in military bases, and might lump all military activities altogether. Marsha Henry argues that contemporary peacekeeping is racial and colonial in nature, and gender violence between peacekeepers and local women might be built on the existing discourse of racism and colonialism which presents Third World women as helpless victims.

Second, the concept of military masculinity seems to suggest that power inequality always exists between peacekeepers and women, which leads to men’s exploitation and even violence against women. This inevitably highlights on the behavior of individuals, especially peacekeepers, while downplaying the role and the influence of the structures. However, power inequality among individuals does not necessarily cause disempowerment of women. Karim and

Beardsley point out that “Patriarchal beliefs as an important factor that makes some individuals more prone to committing exploitation and abuse than others” (Karim and Beardsley 2016, 103).

It is undeniable that power asymmetry between soldiers and women is one important factor of exploitative and abusive behavior of soldiers, but Karim and Beardsley also claim that such a behavior is a learned behavior through the socialization of men within structures. Although military masculinity does not exclude the possible effect of structures, the concept itself cannot easily distinguish whether peacekeepers’ sexually exploitative and abusive behavior against women is an embodiment of structural traits, or individuals’ aggressiveness. By focusing disproportionately on the individual level, cultures or nations which might help nurture particular kinds of behavior could be obscured.

What is noteworthy is that scholars who apply the concept of military masculinity tend to focus on peacekeepers while losing sight of the perspectives and experiences of locals. The category of the local is thus labelled as passive and helpless victims, which provides very limited

insights into the agency of the locals, the encounters of the international. and the local on the ground. It is unclear whether all locals are victims in the racial or gendered projects of peacekeeping, especially when power relations tend to reconfigure with existing or new peacekeeping orders.

Lastly, assuming that the relationships between local women and peacekeepers are exploitative and power hierarchical preclude the possible relationships of equal power, as well as the agency of women in non-exploitative and transactional relationships as someone’s wife, girlfriend, and lover.

As a result, their attempt to go beyond the unequal and exploitative relationships between peacekeepers and local women can only strengthen the victimized image of women.

Furthermore, the victimized experiences with a primacy of military masculinity embodied in peacekeepers’ behavior or peacekeeping operations as a whole in this group of literature help simplify and totalize women’s life experiences as if they are true and universal to all women. Such a simplified and generalized representation of women is dangerous in two ways: on the one hand, the victimized image of women absolves a woman’s agency in pursuing or articulating sexuality in any form of sexual relationship with peacekeepers. Though there are multiple accounts of sex tourism, peacekeeper babies, and forced marriage in different countries, these diverse experiences are obscured, since transactional sex is extended “as violence” (Henry

2013, 135). Stories or narratives from women themselves are rare. No women’s agency or voice exists in the dominant narrative through the function of military or hyper-masculinity, since all women who have sex with peacekeepers are victims. Moreover, it also has implications to other women and men by banning sex between the local with peacekeepers. “The dominance of the narrative, which totalizes women’s experiences to ‘war kills everything’, including sexual desire,

serves to further dehumanize women and men, who are already victimized” (Simić 2012, 134).

On the other hand, different forms of exploitive and non-exploitive relationships are lumped together in the narratives of women as victims presuming all heterosexual relationships are power hierarchical. It is unclear about the definition of SEA in policies, such as between “what amounts to ‘consent’ and what is meant by ‘forced,’ (Grady 2016, 941). If exploitation means partial consent while violence indicates sex without consent. “it is not clear how the

‘discouraged’ but not prohibited consensual sexual relationships between UN peacekeeping personnel and beneficiaries differ from relations that fall within the definition of sexual exploitation,” nor what constitutes a case of non-exploitive case which might exist in the form of consensual relationship, such as marriage (Simić and O’Brien 2014, 357). What is more, the definition of SEA tends to be broadly used and lack of precision. Simić (2009) examines different studies and reports on SEA from 2002-2008 and finds that sexual exploitation is

“broadly used and contentious (2009, 288),” which might risk conflating “all forms of sexual relationships with forced prostitution, rape, human trafficking and other forms of sexual offences” (2009, 288). The unclear delineation between consensual and non-consensual relationship affects the way the UN defines sex in transactional term, which “allow for long-term sexual ‘relationship’ to be regarded as part of the same phenomenon as one-time, contracted sexual encounters, where those relationships are considered exploitive and/or have as a central element the exchange of money or material goods for sex” (Jennings 2010, 229–30). The lack of clarified definition of military masculinity as well as sexual exploitation and abuse point to a bigger problem emerging from a false, biased, or partial representation of women’s experiences of sex and war through the gendered construction of women as a homogenous group of victims

within discourses presented by feminists: women with different stories of intimacy are absent under a universal dominant narrative of victims, but they are present.

The gap between discourses and reality exacerbated by lack of a critical ability of discourses reflects the tendency that feminists tend to read gender in women’s bodies, which perpetuates the causal relationship between male soldiers and women with a heterosexual ontology preexisting in theories. For example, Sandra Whitworth (2004) argues that military masculinity of the UN peacekeepers inevitably causes negative impacts on women, especially prostitute, in spite of positive impacts it might have. She finds that military masculinity embodied in Canadian troops is not only conducive to violence against women in Somalia and

Cambodia, but also helps construct the image of Canadian troops as benign heroes in relation to national identity. Similarly, Nunlada Punyarut (2006) argues that because of the militaristic and sexist nature of the peacekeeping, it contributes to sexual assault and violence against women, as well as prostitute. By presenting the evidence of behavior and discourse of peacekeepers in the missions of United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) and United Nations

Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) in Cambodia and Timor-Leste (East

Timor), Punyarut highlights the shift of discursive construction of the image of peacekeepers from “boys are boys” to “tough and gentle guys”. She highlights the discontinuity between the discursive construction and the behavior of soldiers, as well as the possibility that peacekeepers might keep resulting in violence against women (VAW). From another angle, Susan Willett claims that the UN constructs and sustains the image of women as victims who need protection from the UN peacekeepers. Despite the fact that the UN has been recognizing the importance of gender by mainstreaming gender into its practice, it barely changes the institutionalizations of

power relations and its militaristic and masculine nature. By reducing gender to women, the UN limits women's agency and identity to the objects of protective action by men (Willett 2010).

Third Group of Literature: Is UNSCR 1325 a Progress of Women’s Rights or Accomplice of Neo-liberal Project of Peacekeeping?

In order to protect women from the violence, as well as to build sustainable peace, the

UN Security Council announced UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 31 October 2000.

Resolution 1325 not only recognizes women as agents, but also pays attention to the special needs of women. In 2009, Resolution 1820 and 1888 were passed, pushing to end the war rape as well as other forms of sexual violence. They reaffirm the need to protect women, while regarding the oppression of other categories of people, such as men, children, young boys and girls, etc.

This series of gender-aware movements in the UN highlight its effort in incorporating women and gender into the international framework, nationally, internationally, and institutionally, in order to achieve broader human security.

Feminists mostly agree that peacekeeping is detrimental to women because it signals the intimate relation between gendered ideologies and violence, which motivates some feminists to seek to keep distance from gendered peacekeeping. In contrast, some feminist scholars believe the value of including gender in peacekeeping.

On the one hand, some scholars argue that the birth of 1325 is a formal response of the

UN to such a feminist request. “Resolution 1325 is a watershed political framework that makes women-and a gender perspective-relevant to negotiating peace agreements, planning refugee camps, and peacekeeping operations and reconstructing war-torn societies” (Rehn and Johnson-

Sirleaf 2002, 3). They are also considered important milestones of feminist ideas and the feminist movement in international security and peace by making the UNSC officially incorporate gender perspective and experiences of women into their concern for the first time. Janet Halley et al.

suggest that feminists and feminist ideas have successfully institutionalized through legal installation by examining the impact of UNSCR 1325 in different regions after its legalization while Laura Shepherd argues that resolution 1820 characterizes the feminist achievement in bringing attention to women’s insecurity in war (Halley et al. 2006; Shepherd 2008).

On the other hand, some people worry that 1325 is limited since power is inscribed in the institution of peacekeeping. The institutionalization of feminist ideas in the UNSC might be because it is “useful for promoting its own agenda” (Otto 2010, 99). Therefore, Otto warns of the danger of “protective stereotypes of women” (Otto 2010). Dianne Otto claims that UNSCR

1325 and 1820 are not unmarked by power, even though they are the results of lobbying by the

NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (NGO Working Group). “It may look as though the NGO Working Group’s focus on the Security Council treats power as coercive and top-down, but their advocacy is clearly marked by an understanding of power as dispersed, fragmentary and highly mobile in their efforts to make the resolutions widely accessible and understood as levers for supporting local action by women” (Otto 2010, 118).

For the scholars who see peacekeeping as a reflection of order orchestrated by dominant power, any move within the current peacekeeping framework is doomed to fail due to its underlying gendered ideology which tends to objectify women in non-Western cultures as others who need to be saved and helped in Western gaze. Liberal and democratic form of peacekeeping has its particular origin: the West. Ronald Paris (2003) claims that current peacekeeping seems to acknowledge that the form of liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of peacekeeping, which assumes that the governance of non-Western or illiberal countries is problematic. As a result, peacekeeping is no help to build sustainable peace because it fails to diagnose the root causes of violence inherent in structures. Each peacekeeping mission has a definite beginning

and end date, which might be separating itself from the moment when violence exists. It is misleading to grasp the continuous nature of violence before and after the conflict. To define,

Cynthia Cockburn points out the continuity of violence and argues that “these war-horned gender relations, ‘after war’, again tend to feedback perennially into the spiraling continuum of armed conflict, forever predisposing a society to violence, forever disturbing the peace” (Cockburn

2010, 152). In this sense, violence does not necessarily end with the peacekeeping, even though peacekeeping might bring the end of war but not necessarily the end of violence. Moreover, the concept of violence indicates that it stems from systematic factors and is the result of the system, which cannot be easily eliminated by the use of personal violence (Galtung 1969). Take the process of demobilization, disarmament and reconstruction (DDR) for example: DDR has been highly male-dominated, since female combatants have been excluded from participating. DDR is part of international peacekeeping which aims to “bring wartime violence to an end” and “lay the groundwork for a sustainable peace” (Enloe 2007, 126). However, it tends to adopt a gender perspective that “DDR is about that men and boys,” which is related to the naturalization of violence and manliness (Enloe 2007, 127). Since gender relations might be strengthened after the war ends, peacekeeping risks obscuring violence nurtured in and through the gender relations, and this helps reinforce violence on women in post-conflict societies.

Nevertheless, some feminists do not totally deny the value of peacekeeping, since it helps incorporate gender and women’s rights through passing UNSCR 1325 and its following policies.

The cooptation of feminism in peacekeeping and its limits. In response to the UN’s action to prevent SEA, many feminists see SEA and gender mainstreaming in the spirit of

UNSCR 1325 as a form of governmentalities of states enabled by the discourse of peacekeeping.

Audrey Reeves argues that UNSCR 1325 is a form of governmentality of peacekeeping coopting

feminism into the system. The approaches to prevent and punish “SEA and HIV/AIDS, based on disciplinary mechanisms, leave untouched the idea that ‘boys will be boys’ and do not engage with conceptions of sexuality as socially constructed (2012, 8). The meanings of sex are socially and culturally constructed in history; however, by framing sex as the problem to address from the perspective of scholars and experts, different meanings of sex from the local perspectives are depolitcized and excluded.

Some feminists claim that SEA come from the imperial and colonial nature of international peacekeeping. Sandra Whitworth (2004), Marsha Henry (2013), and Laura Zanotti

(2006, 2008) point out the imperial and colonial nature of liberal peacekeeping, which leads to particular dominance of political orders in favor of colonizers and empires. While Whitworth and

Marsha formulate peacekeeping as a civilizing political project conducted by intervening states in the intervened states, Zanotti highlights the imperial nature of peacekeeping, which marks and regulates the host states as chaotic places through a sound system of surveillance. Although feminists engage in peacekeeping from different angles, the colonial and imperial nature of peacekeeping and its practices tend to turn women and men in the intervened states into subjects subordinate to the rule and management of the intervenors from outside.

Feminists also point out the effects of SEA. SEA frames that peacekeepers not only can harm but also can protect women through self-discipline by abiding by the moral standards of conduct set by the UN. Carol Harrington well argued that peacekeeping operations “coped with this self de-legitimating tension by developing “sexual exploitation peacekeeper sexual violence as a manageable risk on any PKO” (Harrington 2010, 11). In this vein, the sexual desire of women, prostitute in particular, need to be regulated in the name of women’s protection, while peacekeepers could get away under impunity (Awori, Lutz, and Paban 2013). In a more critical

tone, Otto claims that the policies are for the sake of “institutional survival” through the repressive politics of body, which deflects our attention from the responsibility of international community to correct the structural injustice and the gendered dimension which denotes the

UN’s humanitarianism (2007, 23).

Otto (2007) and Jena McGill (2014) criticize the consequences of such policies. They contend that by seeing sexual exploitation and abuse policies and their practices, the policies objectify sex as problems to address and women as sexualized subjects to be victimized or protected. Both add gender to the previous scholars’ discussion of peacekeeping in terms of RE- solving from a Foucauldian approach by problematizing how the policy of zero tolerance limits the violence against women’s body to physical violence with sex.

Moreover, Otto and McGill point out that focusing on the individual behavior of heterosexual sex divorces the sources of gender violence from the structure of political economy in post-conflict societies. The social structure which reproduces the social and economic injustice of women through the matrices of norms as well as military structure of peacekeeping become relatively insignificant. Otto and McGill suggest that women’s oppression does not just come from patriarchy as zero tolerance portrays but has different forms in different social and military contexts. In particular, McGill points out that women are driven by structural factors for survival sex facing poverty and unemployment. Banning sex might render these women to lose their livelihood.

By focusing on the discourses in terms of power, Otto and McGill highlight the tendency of abstracting and categorizing forms of sexual relationships from reality in the policy discourse of sexual exploitation and abuse. According to Simić, “The policy prohibits almost every kind of sexual activity between local women and peacekeepers, regardless of age, consent, and mutual

agreement” (Simic 2012, 9–10). In other words, prosecuting and criminalizing sex is to punish both forced and non-forced sex. This misses the violence of problematizing sex which is in itself imbued with power to suppress sex. The meanings of sex are socially and culturally constructed in history; however, by framing sex as the problem to address from the perspective of scholars and experts, different meanings of sex from the local perspectives are depolitcized and excluded.

What is more, by focusing on sex as a problem, we are also limited to see the ways in which how we see sex is gendered in the first place, which turns women into discursive subjects through discourses. The focus on allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse as figures and numbers further distracts us from their sources and contested meanings of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Kate Grady argues that “One allegation may represent more than one victim and/or more than one perpetrator, the data under-reports the scale of the phenomenon” (2016, 936). Grady further cautions that focusing merely on the decrease of numbers of allegations and seeing it as a success of UN’s combating sexual exploitation and abuse might render the UN to make no legal move to address the structural causes of injustice.

The above feminist works inspired by a Foucauldian discourse analysis mention individual women and the embeddedness of social and power relations but then diluting them in the discussion of survival sex, who portrays women as doing anything to survive. Meanwhile, they seem to reduce the process of meaning construction to a particular performative act which is said and done all at once. By focusing on problematizing category and assumptions of discourses, feminists risk tacitly accepting discourse and practice of sexual exploitation and abuse as performative acts, which is automatically perpetrated by itself once created. Texts which are repeatedly performed become static and even separate themselves from the actors who

create the discourses and contexts from which actors draw meanings, naturalizing their own practices.

In sum, this group of literature problematizes the gender construction of women in the discourse of SEA while not totally abandoning institutionalizing feminism through SEA and the state-centered framework. However, by limiting its focus on gender violence between peacekeepers and local women as well as the exploitative nature of such a relationship, the representation of women as victims can only be reproduced rather than being challenged.

Moreover, by prioritizing gender while undermining other forms of power relations, the complex of relationships in pot-conflict societies where certain narratives and stereotypes are already present might be sacrificed. Henry uses Cheng’s work on military prostitution to demonstrate that “commercial exchanges are not solely determined by men’s ability to buy women. Instead, a narrative of ‘a romantic parable of discovery’ is deployed by soldiers” (Henry 2013, 127).

Problems of Framing and Representing Women as Victims in Peacekeeping Discourses

Gender shapes women’s experiences, but women also help shape gender as well as their own experiences of masculinities. Nevertheless, from the above discussion of three groups of literature, it is apparent to see that feminists tend to frame that women are different subjects from men in terms of reproductivity, prone to rape, sexual exploitation and abuse, as well as predatory economy where women’s body is commodified, and thus need to be protected during and after war. Moreover, the literature suggests that sex is detrimental to women either by violating women’s physical integrity or commodifying women’s body. To protect women, consequently, sex should be banned, since sex is a form of exploitation. By objectifying sex and women, as well as representing women’s experiences as if they are victims of sex, women’s multiple experiences are reduced to particular experiences of victimization in certain types of relationships, represented in particular discourses. What is more, women’s agency is obscured

because they are represented as if they are victims who suffer from one violence, that is, gender violence. The gendered violence against women is produced and reproduced in this discourse, which functions to affirm the sexualized women’s experiences while obscuring the violent subjectification of women as gendered subjects, makes it hard for feminists who engage in peacekeeping discourses to imagine and capture women’s other experiences of agency and victimization under different forms of violence beyond the narrative depicting women as victims.

Feminists’ predominant focus on the victimhood of women as well as the allegations of

SEA conducted by the UN peacekeepers leaves no space for problematizing the absence of women’s sexuality and sexual desire. Nevertheless, it is important to note that “women do have agency even within a patriarchal system” (Kaufman and Williams 2013, 13). By representing women as victims of sex in relation to male soldiers in most of peacekeeping literature, feminist scholars might be possibly trapped in the narrative of victim, which assumes that all heterosexual sex is harmful to women due to the asymmetrical power hierarchies between men and women.

Moreover, feminists might mistakenly reduce gender to sex, and thus fail to demonstrate women’s pursuit of sex and relationships which are beyond the limit of scope of women’s victimhood in discourses. I wonder whether other kinds of experiences exist which do not fit the dominant discourse of victims, where sex and women are both gendered as problem and subjects.

To move away from the traditional war story, which narrates women as victims of violence, it is necessary to look beyond the discourses with a primacy of protection of women’s rights, which has its origin from the experiences of elites. Feminists have to keep inquiring the unquestioned assumptions underlying the discourses of victims: whose security is protected in the discourses?

What does the dominant narrative do? How can examination of sex and sexuality help us as feminists better understand the conditions of women who live through and after the war?

The dominant narrative of victims only demonstrates some dimensions and experiences of women. This operates to frame sex as problems and sources of women’s suffering, as well as prescribes relevant solutions to protect both women and the UN peacekeepers. Nevertheless, such a partial representation of women’ experiences of war based on particular discourses along with the framework of peacekeeping should be problematized. What is problematic is the underlying binary categories, which construct and fix women as victims and peacekeepers as protectors or perpetrators erected by legal feminists, who call for using legal and political tools to protect women from wartime rape (by men) and from sexual exploitation by (male peacekeepers) without problematizing the framings and the representations of women and their stories within the narratives. I have two examples of how different feminists who see women as agents or victims might end up falling into the discourse of the narrative of victims, which seeks to but always fails to represent women and their experiences of sexual relationships with the UN personnel.

Feminists risk the danger of simplifying women’s multiple experiences and underestimating women’s agency by reading women’s role in the narrative of victimization of war. Life is too complicated to easily separate a consensual from an exploitive relationship, and any case is always subject to change in contingency with many factors. For example, Simić and

O’Brien (2014, 349) argue that the case of a Timorese woman, Lily Nehu and her child, Marko

Susnja, abandoned by a Bosnian police, fails to constitute a case of exploitation, because Lily

“was in a romantic relationship which resulted in a marriage and the subsequent birth of their kid

Marko.” However, if both authors are willing to pay a visit to the country and the district where

Lily and Marko live, and take time listening to Lily’s story in her small restaurant, they will know her case is more complicated than a case of consensual relationship where Lily freely

began and ended a relationship with a foreign man. Lily did marry her Bosnian husband and went back to his country together after his contract in Timor ended, but then “decided to return to

East Timor and gave birth to their son in her home country,” as if she had free will and choice to act in a consensual relationship, as authors claimed in their article. In fact, Lily was told by her husband to leave because he was leaving for the next UN mission and could not take care of her and the place he was posted was dangerous for her (Simić and O’Brien 2014, 349; Nehu 2017).

Moreover, the narrative of victims functions not only to exclude and include women who fall within or outside the categories of victims, but also to determine which case should be represented or examined by feminists so as it conforms to the category of SEA. By focusing on the clear case of SEA, Koyama and Myrttinen argue that the relationship which resulted in abandoned women and peacekeeper babies “have been much more inconspicuous and have attracted much less attention” than the case of SEA, “both in the public eye and in terms of research” (2007, 37–38). Both authors point out how abandonment of women and children might negatively affect women and their children due to social stigmatization and cultural connotations associated with it: “the women are viewed as ‘damaged goods’ and often face ostracization by the community” while their children “may or may not be in a slightly better situation if the community is ready to accept them in spite of-or in some cases even because of their ‘foreign’ origin” (Koyama and Myrttinen 2007, 38). However, due to lack of systematic assessment of such cases, both authors cannot “gain any information on the numbers involved”

(Koyama and Myrttinen 2007, 37). Additionally, due to lack of information about these women and children, whether abandoned women and children get support in all ways or enter “further exploitive relationships with peacekeeping personnel and others in order for them and their children to survive” is far from clear (General Assembly 2005). Another more serious problem in

this examination of unintended consequences of the UN mission in Timor-Leste comes from the fact that both authors did not include women who have sexual relationships and are abandoned by the UN personnel in their 35 interviews while representing the stories of these women in the words of “representatives of the Timor Leste government, the UN administration, the PKF and the UN police (UNPOL) officers, representatives of other UN agencies, representatives of

Timorese and international civil society organizations, media representatives, sex workers and their clients” (Koyama and Myrttinen 2007, 26).

In sum, without realizing that the narrative of victims operates to categorize, select, and represent women and their stories in particular ways, feminists might re-victimize women by excluding or neglecting them when interrogating the unintended and intended consequences of the behavior of the UN personnel in the missions. Some women might be misrepresented, misinterpreted, or silenced by focusing on the case of SEA. Moreover, women are likely absolved of agency by fitting in the category of victims in relation to the UN personnel as perpetrators. Not all relationships are exploitive, and no relationship can be easily fit in the pure case of victims of SEA. Relationships might happen between local women and the male UN peacekeepers, local men and the female UN peacekeepers, and even between same sex. They are also subject to change in contingency with the proceeding of time, political and economic structure, context, and power dynamics between both sides. Although all sexual relationships might be exploitive, it remains unclear to differentiate what constitutes an exploitive and non- consensual relationship or to what degree a consensual relationship becomes exploitive.

Moreover, relationships do not happen in a social vacuum. Examining the impact of the relationship to women or other local population requires further attention to the context, culture, family relationships and other structural factors, as well as how women negotiate and balance

power relations with different actors as well as local norms, rules, and values. The complexity of the sexual relationships between women and the UN peacekeepers as well as how women’s

(in)security is caught up in the matrix of social and power relations might be consumed, subordinated to, or naturalized in the gendered discourse and practice of sexual violence, exploitation, and abuse in academia and politics. What is more, by bracketing women in the category of victims, the conditions and well-being of women and children who might be left behind remain unclear, which further impedes the implementation of zero tolerance policy as well as compensation and assistance to the abandoned women and children. As a result, I suggest that feminists need to return to women themselves who experience and go through the relationships with the UN personnel in order to have a better understanding about what happens to these women, what these relationships mean to them, and how they navigate their relationships and their life in spite of all possible challenges and stigmatizations surrounding the relationships.

Defining Peacekeeping as a Discursive Practice

One intriguing question remains to be asked is: how a dominant discourse which perpetuates the victimized construction of women works? Feminists’ debates are framing either that peacekeeping is necessary when practiced with caution, or that peacekeeping can be improved through better legalization and practices. None of them challenges the value of peacekeeping in saving and protecting a local population. However, Henry concurs with S.

Razack’s claims that peacekeeping is a colonial project, and prostitution is a form of colonial violence rather than sexual violence. Therefore, “local women in peacekeeping missions (the majority of which are located in Global South) are always ready to be viewed in racially inferior and sexually suspect manner and cannot take up the position as an agentic subjects” (Henry

2013, 129). Moreover, while feminists draw on the empirics which demonstrate different

dimensions and forms of SEA in different case studies, most of them tend to affirm the SEA between male soldiers and local women without questioning the meanings and categories of different forms of SEA. This feminist move within the framework of peacekeeping without questioning the political underpinning of SEA policies and its practices, from my perspective, risks recasting women as passive victims in contrast to the peacekeepers as perpetrators along with the gendered discourse of peacekeeping, which worryingly undermines the feminist goal of empowering women of agency.

These debates along with different suggestions and solutions approach problems of peacekeeping from moral and legal angles, but all frame peacekeeping as technical problems, which are assumed to be addressed or improved by competing moral discourses or strengthening current legal tools within the current international framework of peacekeeping. Drawing on the piece of Michael Prugh’s “Peacekeeping and IR Theory: Phantom of the Opera” (2003), I argue that these suggestions of reformation of peacekeeping conform to problem-solving tradition in the discipline of IR, which did not really problematize the underlying theoretical assumptions and implications which are both value-laden and subjective. However, theory behind peacekeeping does exist and “has impacts on how the world works because it influences what people think of as legitimate or illegitimate… ” (Pugh 2003, 105). In other words, how we think about peacekeeping from a particular perspective helps create and strengthen the world we live in. By refusing to accept the problem-solving tradition in IR, which fails to question the power relations constitutive of the theory and discipline, I embrace another tradition of critical theory, which seeks to problematize the theoretical underpinning of peacekeeping as discursive practices, especially by feminism which recovers the gendered underpinning of peacekeeping. In fact, Elisa Randazzo (2016) has called us to think beyond the “structure,” which enables and

limits the feasibility of peacekeeping under certain conditions in practice. I wonder where such a structure comes from, what it means, and how it impacts our perception and practices of peacekeeping. I would like to illustrate it in the example of SEA, which is part of the broader peacekeeping discourse.

Why cannot FSS scholars go beyond the “structure” which enables the peacekeeping and shapes the field where peacekeeping is operationalized? Here I want to focus on the role of scholars in shaping discourse of peacekeeping as well as the mutual construction between knowledge and discourses. I define structure as social structure which is constitutive of power.

Discourse, which emerges from the social structure, is theorized as a form of practice by Michel

Foucault. Foucault uses discourse to emphasize the relations of power to different elements and the construction of objects in the process, which demonstrates the interrelatedness of knowledge and power. “To seek for the unity of a discourse is a quest for dispersion of elements,… ”

(Foucault 1972). Foucault’s understanding of knowledge and power through discursive practice sheds light on the social construction of knowledge in relation to power. The way we think about something or someone is never beyond discourse, and it is possibly dominated by a particular way of thinking or perspective, which controls our conceptualization and perception of events, things, and people based on a series of assumptions and ideas.

How can we benefit from Foucault’s idea of discourse in FSS’s study of peacekeeping?

According to Paris (2014), while many scholars acknowledge the immanent good of peacekeeping in association with peace and saving lives, they do not examine the theoretical underpinning of international peacekeeping, which is constitutive of power. One reason which impedes scholars from critically examining the underlying normative assumption is that peacekeeping discourses operate to acculturate and bind states to conform to rules and norms

internationally agreed on while erasing their violent origins in contingency with the emergence of international order established by dominant power. B. Arfi sheds light on this interrelation between power and discourse in the institutionalization process in “Rethinking international constitutional order: the Auto-Immune Politics of Binding Without Binding” (2010). In this article, Arfi challenges G. J. Ikenberry’s main argument in After Victory (2001), which seems to claim that once an institution is established, it will function and perpetuate, since all members will follow the rules and norms. Arfi argues that instead of the effects of institutions, it is the power that works and reworks itself through institutions. “Binding institutions are constitutively dependent on an ‘arbitrary exercise of power’ that has ‘forgotten’ its originary violence” (2010,

301).

Developing on Arfi’s interpretation of institution in terms of power, I consider peacekeeping as institution in terms of rules or organizations where it embodies itself through violence in the image of dominant power, which further spreads the violence and gender worldwide with its export to other countries. Arfi is not alone in highlighting the power underpinning of institutions. Earlier Peci et al add the dimension of power to institutional research in order to investigate how the practices of discourses are reified and reproduced through institutionalization. Interpreting peacekeeping in this light, the debates concerning legitimacy and legality of peacekeeping can be reinterpreted as a function of power, which helps perpetuate the need of peacekeeping without questioning what is at the heart of theory of peacekeeping as well as its impacts.

I adopt a Foucauldian approach to examine feminists’ reduction of discourses to power. I argue that Foucault highlights the danger of power without compromising the importance of human agency in contexts. Feminists might underestimate the danger of discursive construction

of knowledge and power by seeing discourse analysis as structural analysis or textual analysis, although both highlight different dimensions of power. However, Niels Åndersen (2003) cautions that discourse analysis is neither of them. First, a Foucauldian approach is not the same thing as deconstructivism. The gap between both points to a possible way to reflect on peacekeeping as well as feminists’ critics of peacekeeping from a distance. As feminists in the camp of deconstructivism tend to see discourse as structure which functions to sustain and embody itself, they are not the same thing to Foucault. “Discourse is not a structure” (Anderson

2003, 2). Structure made by language is the central target of deconstructivism, which is both “a transcendent and an empirical being” (Anderson 2003, 6). However, focusing on structure might erase the human footprint. He says, “Where there is a sign, there men cannot be, and where one makes signs speak, there men must fall silent” (Foucault 1998, 266). The divide between main focus between Foucault and deconstructivism is obvious: discourse and structure.

Following this divide comes the second difference between Foucault and deconstructivism: the former highlights the transformative power of discourse in excluding and reproducing subjects while the latter reduces everything to power. Although Foucault’s main concern is “The questioning of discursive assumptions,” he also cautions what and how discourse excludes, since “any discourse involves excluding procedures, which not only exclude themes, arguments, and speech positions from the discourse, but also produce outsiders, denounce people who are sick, abnormal or irrational, and grant other groups the right and legitimacy to other people” (Anderson 2003, 3). It is true that Foucault does not use gender in his discourse analysis, but he notices what exists outside the discourse, including individuals and social contexts. Without totally abandoning the value of Foucault simply because “He does not take gender into consideration,” what I want to emphasize here is how feminists’ use of a

Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine peacekeeping is limited based on their biased readings of Foucault’s discourse analysis.

Many feminists highlight what the discourse of peacekeeping does in terms of power inspired by Judith Butler, but by reducing discourse to a particular policy or event which is a performative act rather than an ongoing process, feminists separate texts from the social environment where individuals and discourses are situated. Although feminists’ use of

Foucauldian approach pinpoints the discursive violence of peacekeeping, it only highlights the second layer of violence of discourse but fails to problematize the first layer of gendered violence of peacekeeping practices through reinforcing the gender norms on individuals on the ground. The first layer of gendered violence embedded in social contexts is omitted by feminists based on their limited interpretation of Foucault. Therefore, gendered violence preexisting the discourse might be unknown and continuously be perpetuated through the operation of the violence of discourse of peacekeeping. Foucault once said: “Any truth is always founded on an injustice” (Anderson 2003, XVII). Seeing peacekeeping as a self-serving and self-validating institution which is both an agent and structure where discourses are made and practiced might make us lose sight of the role of agency of individuals and their lived experiences in validating real people as well as challenging the dominant institution.

Feminists who only perceive sexual exploitation and abuse policies as performative acts fail to see these policies as part of the ongoing and multi-layered peacekeeping process as a

Foucauldian approach indicates. A process is not just a top-down practice but a dynamic and dialectical political process where which and how a decision or behavior will occur as it unfolds down the road. T. Donais and E. McCandleness (2017) examines the concept of inclusivity in the example of New Deal, and they argue that the norms of inclusivity “emerge and evolve through

complex systems of interaction and channels of influence that run not only top-down and bottom-up, but also horizontally across borders, types of actors and networks” (Donais and

McCandless 2017, 305). In other words, local actors do have agency, and they exist in various forms.

Although a Foucauldian approach does acknowledge the agency of local actors in peacekeeping, it warns that the danger of norms constitutive of power might wipe out the visibility of human agency through normalization. By revisiting Foucault’s thinking on normalization and norms, Dianna Tylor argues that sex is not just sex because it creates sexual subjects (Taylor 2009). Accepting sex means unquestioning the power behind sex norms which defines and conditions the knowledge of self, that is, who we are. Utilizing her argument to understand feminists’ engagement of sexual exploitation and abuse policies, we can see that feminists unproblematize women as victims by endorsing sex as something natural through illegitimate. Gender is only one form of violence, and by prioritizing it, feminists might risk underplaying other kinds of violence experienced by the locals.

From the above discussion, we know that a Foucauldian approach highlights the power of a discourse in naturalizing and masking its origin, as well as the footprints of local agency and contexts on the ground.

Peacekeeping vis-à-vis Regime of Truth

Peacekeeping has been considered as a problem-solving framework which normalizes a top-down structural approach and the priority status of international actors in designing and delivering peace. For example, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is “Internationalized rather than localized and fail to engage with everyday life other than basic emergency and narrow security terms” (Richmond 2010, 666). What a problem-solving framework does is that it perpetuates the practice without questioning the normative assumptions underlying peacekeeping, such as: why

is peacekeeping carried out by the international in their ways? Moreover, it obscures many other forms of power and inequality outside the chaos and conflicts peacekeeping seeks to address

(Zanotti 2006). Within this framework, people tend to fix their eyes on technical and superficial problems defined in it. I consider that peacekeeping is integral to a broader discursive context, though its practices evolve and take place in different forms. Therefore, it is more appropriate to think of peacekeeping as a discursive practice, which not only limits what people see but also how people see. In other words, the discourse of peacekeeping conditions the way we see, as well as produces the reality we live.

In terms of definition, peacekeeping is usually understood as institutions. Elisabeth

Prugal (2004) claims that feminists tend to understand institutions as regulative rules, the conduit of world culture which produce meaning globally, international regimes which “produce hegemonic order,” and “regimes of truth” which proliferate gender meanings in global space.

Although these distinctions are valid in capturing different traits of peacekeeping, it might reduce the complexity of peacekeeping as a global phenomenon where rules, cultures, regimes, and regime of truth are intertwined. Moreover, such a conceptualization might simplify the power of regime of truth, which determines truth claims and facts. Regime of truth needs to be interrogated in order to foreground the power-knowledge construction of institutions and the

(im)possibility of human agency inherent in it.

Regime of truth, according to Lorna Weir, contains multiple formulae which stabilize “a network of elements: a relation between presentation and representation (words and things), truth and non-truth, and the place of the subject in discourse” (Weir 2008, 367). To explain, regime of truth is a site where subjects are spatialized through categories assigned by the truth narratives.

Certain narratives are selected, normalized, and sedimented through time. Only some narratives

and subjects which conform to what is considered as true in the truth regime are visible, normal, and legitimate. Seeing peacekeeping vis-a-vis regime of truth sheds light on the power of peacekeeping enabled and stabilized by discourses because “What is considered right (and therefore ‘rational’) is really merely ‘point of view,’ but is rendered as discursive truth”

(Fetherston 2000, 199). Even though competing narratives might coexist in a particular time and space, not all of them can be represented. Representation and presentation is a matter of power.

Moreover, Fetherston argues that peacekeeping functions to “manage a RE-solution of the war rather than transformation of the system itself” (2000, 197), where problems will have to be RE- solved again later (2000, 196). This means that peacekeeping is self-serving since it operates to maintain its existence as well as the status quo of the war system where it is practiced. Without challenging the status quo of the system, actors in power will not be challenged, and those less powerful can only conform to the order designed in favor of powerful actors.

Peacekeeping as a regime of truth not only masks its origin and trace of power construction, but also normalizes its legitimacy and practices in its course. B. Arfi (2010) and

Alketa Peci et al. (2009) highlight the political nature of institutions in terms of power as well as how the practices of discourses are reified and reproduced while the traces of power are obliterated through institutionalization. Although there might be competing and agnostic narratives in the peacekeeping process, the logic of selectivity and arbitration innate in the truth regime operates to exclude or marginalizes narratives which do not conform to the dominant narratives. The debates of peacekeeping might end up legitimizing and naturalizing the need of peacekeeping. Therefore, dominant narratives erect themselves as if they are universal truth by separating themselves from other illegitimate claims, but also from the complex of social realm

where the human agency is exercised. Moreover, discourses transform the environment and people when they are realized and normalized.

In sum, I consider peacekeeping as regime of truth where a particular form of discourse is constantly practiced, normalized, and embodied through the violence of dominant power, which further spreads the violence and gender worldwide with its export to other countries worldwide.

Feminists criticize against peacekeeping by focusing on individual behavior of sex and women’s victimized experiences. Nevertheless, without problematizing the constructive and normalizing power of peacekeeping discourses, feminists might risk affirming the dominant discourses while recasting women as victims by bringing women’s experiences of peacekeeping to the center.

Since there is no necessary connection between diversity of women’s experiences and subverting the power of dominant discourses of peacekeeping, I adopt another Foucauldian concept of technologies of the self, which provides a theoretical basis of human agency against the power of peacekeeping situated in the social sphere with an eye on the power of truth regime.

Technologies of the Self

Rather than accepting the reductionism of peacekeeping to power, which might sacrifice the complex of social realm and the agency of individuals, I would like to explore another concept of Foucault, technologies of the self, to demonstrate how individuals can negotiate with power rather than reinforcing power. Technologies of the self, is “how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of self” (Foucault 1988, 19). In this seminar, Foucault demonstrates how individuals relate to truth differently in history. For example, in ancient Greece, Plato’s dialogue shows that individuals can listen to the truth at the time while “listening to the self for the truth within” (Foucault 1988, 33). Weir interprets Foucault’s concept of techniques of the self as “forms of rigorous self-cultivation through which the subjects tried to establish a personal

relation to universal truth” (Weir 2008, 374). This suggests that it is possible for the subject to distance himself from power/regime of truth instead of duplicating power (Weir 2008, 374).

It is on this point I see the potential of challenging the power system/regime of truth from within through the individual actors. Although Foucault did not illustrate how individuals in current times implement the technologies of the self, he pointed out the practices of the technologies of the self have their roots in the society and the possible terrain where individuals can occupy and (re)construct the meanings of their life by themselves in their everyday life. The agency of the individuals is expressed through their interpretations of their life experiences and their identities. Applying technologies of the self to individuals themselves is a continuous process, where self-identities, meanings of events, and their life experiences are interpreted and reinterpreted. In other words, there is a mutual constructive relation between the society and individuals, where systemic oppressions are imposed on individuals and individuals are embodying the dominance of the society. The social milieu which constructs one’s experiences and identities is the soil which feeds one’s skill of practicing the technologies of the self. The concept of technologies of the self suggests that one’s agency may not necessarily take the form of fighting or resisting against the dominant power or truth in public. Rather, it could take place in the implicit form of story-telling or other forms of human agency, which mean to and matter to individuals only. Through technologies of the self, individuals who live in the regime of truth are conditioned, but they are able to relate to the dominant truth differently in their ways. Using technologies of the self to oneself enables one not only to (re)construct one’s identities different from how one is understood by others through time, but also to (re)construct relations with others in one’s story. Although Foucault points out multiple forms of technologies of the self are possible, these forms of human agency can only be understood in a particular place and time in

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history. Regime of truth and technologies of the self are a function of power in time and contexts. Therefore, it is necessary to revisit particular cases to understand how individuals in regime of truth relate to power differently through applying technologies of the self.

In the next section, I address the experiences of these women in a securitized context of peacekeeping operations in Timor-Leste where peacekeeping and sexual exploitation and abuse policies are imposed and implemented. In the context of Timor-Leste, many women who mother peacekeeper babies and are abandoned by peacekeepers tend to bear responsibility of taking care of kids while facing social and economic challenges. Through women’s stories, I will show that although these women who have voluntary sexual relationships with peacekeepers are invisible for not technically fitting the categories of victims of sexual exploitation and abuse, they do demonstrate their capabilities in negotiating the truth regime in their society. I argue that

Timorese women constantly (re)negotiate with socio-linguistic and socio-power contexts where peacekeeping is operationalized on the daily basis as a form of micro-agency/challenge against social and discursive power. By telling their stories different from the dominant discourse of victim in the context of peacekeeping operations, women possess the potential to disturb and even transform the construction of discourses and practices perpetuated in the UN as well as among feminist scholars.

Women as a Heterogeneous Group

Women tend to be represented as a unified group connecting with each other through the common experiences of victims of gender violence. Nonetheless, it does not necessarily mean that all women in the same category come from the same background or share the same experiences of injustice. Sometimes women are represented as a whole in that by doing so women can be acknowledged or included in the current public policies or the legal scheme where they were excluded or undervalued before. Scholars of intersectionality argue that women are

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different because of race, economic class, ethnicity, age, etc. (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983;

Harris 1990; Lorde 1984; Nussbaum 1999). Intersectionality redirects feminist to pay attention to the multiplicity of life experiences of women. Women might have some common experiences, but their positionalities intersected in different gender norms also mediate their experiences of injustice enabled by different forms of oppression. The benefits of intersectionality are to contribute to feminists’ understanding of injustices and their structural origins through the intersecting gender and other social categories and norms, as well as how they shape women’s identities and life experiences. However, it is not clear “as a model for understanding structures”

(Beisel and Kay 2004). “As yet there are no studies that analyze if all the possible intersections might be relevant at all times or when and where some of them might be more salient” (Verloo and Lombardo 2007, 25). Furthermore, by categorizing women based on the identity difference among women without understanding how these differences are situated in different forms of power struggle, intersectionality scholars might not be able to problematize the construction and performativity of identities through time and place. “Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and this stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identitification” (Puar 2007, 212).

In spite of its possible conflation with identity politics, the discussion of intersectionality is helpful to reject the idea that women have the same suffering experiences under male norms or masculinity as a singular or homogenous force. Masculinities have different forms, vary through time and space, and are mediated by individuals in different ways. Therefore, feminists need to avoid portraying soldiers in the military as a unified group in relation to women, as well as accept easily the single form of existence of masculinity within the military. I agree with what

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Alan Peterson argues, which rejects the essentialization of masculine attributes which all men necessarily have. Peterson contends such a thinking of masculinity in men in the mainstream is flawed because it attempts to ground itself in supposedly objective scientific findings without realizing that scientific explanations of difference between sex are grounded in socially conditioned claims. Such a situated understanding of masculinity is valuable in highlighting the possibility of non-violent characteristics of male soldiers as well as women who are supportive of violence and war directly or indirectly. More importantly, it tells me that gendered experiences cannot be fully captured by the sexed experiences of men and women, which suggests an urgent need to return to women as individuals of agency beyond the social categorizations and identifications.

Real Women Beyond the Narrative: Rediscovering Sexuality, Context, and Agency of Women

Concerning the limitation of narrative of victims and the above problems, I refuse to easily accept the simplified and gendered construction of women as victims in the sexual relationships by destabilizing the category and boundary of victims and agents largely used by

FSS scholars. I resonate with Otto (2010) and Simić (2012) who argue that the dichotomy of agents and victims should be rejected in order to recognize the multiplicity of positions of women who are victims, perpetrators, and survivors. Moreover, without totalizing women’s experiences of intimacy through narratives of victimhood, I acknowledge the intersectionality of women, which constitutes not only women’s multiple identities but also life experiences. Women are heterogeneous and only organized in the same group labeled as women, but “women’s experiences of conflict and post-conflict are multiple and varied, and will be shaped by gendered identities as well as other intersecting identities such as race, religion, or ethnicity” (Smith 2015,

37). Gender interacting with other categories of ethnicity, class, religion, rural/urban settings

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helps to create spaces for women to question how some people are excluded from while others are included in these categories. Therefore, listening to the stories of women who have been marginalized and silenced about one phenomenon, which is the sexual relationship with the peacekeepers, is important to retrieve women’s agency as survivors and their complicated life journey.

In addition to including women’s own narratives, I would like to examine the contexts where the sexual relationship between women and the UN peacekeepers occur. Contexts mediate the consequences and the degree and scale of stigmatizations of the peacekeepers and women.

Moreover, contexts can reveal more details about the silence of women and some issues surrounding sex, war, gender, military, and violence in a particular place. I plan to discuss moral, political, and economic contexts where discourses of victims are created and embodied in the single case of post-conflict Timor-Leste. From these contexts emerge particular institutional and social norms where women and sexuality are constructed, restrained, and ignored. Contexts matter in embedding sexual relationship in the complex of a post-conflict society, where different power structures operate to limit women’s pursuit and expression of sex and expression of sexual desire. Contextualizing sexual relationships in one case helps us to investigate and comprehend the meaning of sex for individuals and collective, as well as why and how women’s pursuit and articulation of sex and sexuality is possible or impossible in a war-torn environment.

I plan to investigate the sexual liaisons between local women and the UN peacekeepers in empirics, which aims to disturb the naturalization and normalization of women’s victimhood in order to retrieve the agency and sexual experiences of women with the UN personnel which are unable to be captured by the representation of victims. Considering the danger of a simple presentation of women in purporting such a discourse in broader social and power contexts, I

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will adopt the feminist narrative approach of Annick T. R. Wibben (2011). She highlights the gendered nature of identity construction and establishment of security by seeing gender as an analytic perspective. I will use women’s stories to challenge the gendered construction of women as victims, as well as the conflation of long-term relationship with different forms of sexual relationships in the hegemonic discourse of women as victims by focusing on women’s own agency and the contexts which shaped their experiences and relationality to others.

Through centralizing women’s narratives and contexts conditioning sexual relationships between the women and the peacekeepers, I hope to highlight different dimensions and perspectives about the sexual relationships between local women and the UN peacekeepers by anchoring on micro experiences of women. Each woman’s story might highlight some dimensions or factors related to the occurrence of sex during and after the war, which will not exhaust yet complicate the simplified picture of the sex framed in the gendered discourse of sexual exploitation and abuse. Instead of affirming that sex is harmful to women in relation to peacekeepers, I hope to put the silenced politics of sex in the context of war or post-war on the table, which have long been subsided by the hegemonic narrative of the victim’s story in academia and politics. Moreover, by viewing women as survivors who struggle to live through the violence, I want to demonstrate how women negotiate different social and institutional norms to create spaces to live and love out of everyday violence in a post-conflict society.

Furthermore, by foregrounding the politicization of sexuality, contexts, and the agency of women in sexual relationships, I hope to revive the emancipatory project of feminism by feminist narrative approach through destabilizing the fixed and uncontaminated categories of sex, culture, and sexuality. Not all women’s experiences of sex in war are harmful or traumatic, nor do they last long, but the main narrative, particularly endorsed by legal feminists, tends to

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paint sex as rape presuming that sex happens in a possibly coercive environment. Consensual sex exists, but it is not usually recognized. Karen Engle shed light on the danger of the acceptance of narrative of victims: “in part by not permitting a defense of consent in what the tribunal labels

“inherently coercive” circumstances, the ICTY’s jurisprudence risks labeling “all sex between members of opposite sides of a conflict” as rape (Engle 2007a, 957). The similar situation also exists between local women and the UN peacekeepers. Nevertheless, feminists need to bear in mind that not all sex with the UN peacekeepers leads to longtime dismal and suffering of women. Consensual relationship, if not love, might exist. Without endorsing that women are victims of sex who are void of sexual agency and who need to be protected from sex, they can be transformed into, according to Ratna Kapur, “sexual subaltern subjects.” With an example of two lesbians, Radha and Sita, who fall in love with each other in an India film Fire, Kapur demonstrates not only the sexual agency of women, but also the mutual constitution of their relationship and culture. By seeing culture and sexuality as categories, which “are sites of negotiation, contestation, and reconstruction, the power of which has the potential to be mobilized through ambivalence and hybridity, creating space for a passionate politics of pleasure and desire, at least in my sexual subaltern imagination” (Kapur 2001, 362–63).

Conclusion

By recognizing the limitation of the current narrative and framework of victims in peacekeeping which frames and represents women of victims of sex and the UN peacekeepers and further perpetuated by the gendered categories and assumptions, I argue that the narrative of victims should be and can be challenged, reversed, and pluralized in order to bring real women and their stories to the fore. Moreover, I claim that the experiences of women indicate the existences of multiple forms of power relations as well as the agency and power of women, which cannot be easily captured by the discourse of victims which seems to prioritize gendered

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impacts on women in feminists’ intellectual engagements of SEA. Gender violence is only a form of power relations and violence women face in the peacekeeping context. Moreover, gender violence might operate in the structural and individual levels and interact with each other, which leads to particular representation of women, socialization of relationships between the local and the international beyond the intimate relationships, as well as gendered and racialized construction of bodies in the peacekeeping project. I suggest that feminists should further problematize “the cultural, ethnic, national, and ‘racial’ perspective of peacekeeping” by looking into the micropolitics where different sense of power and agency can only be understood in the local contexts (Henry 2013, 137). The direct connection between women and gender relations should be carefully interrogated, since perpetuating the idea that women are victims of gender violence imposed by structures or individuals might lead to the denial of women’s agency. In my three empirical chapters, ch.4-6, I will demonstrate how gender plays into experiences and perceptions of women as well as the local through socialization of particular perspectives and ideas informing interaction among the local as well as between the local and the international.

Moreover, I will show how women and other locals negotiate with power underlying the dominant discourse and relevant categories by applying technologies of the self to tell different version of stories of peacekeeping.

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CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH DESIGN

This chapter explains how the fieldwork is designed and carried out. I divide this chapter into three sections: first I outline the status of research on sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in comparative basis, and the current situation of allegations of SEA in Timor-Leste. This section intends to demonstrate what has been done, what can be done, and what needs to be done.

Second, I explain the process of my fieldwork in Timor-Leste from 2016-2017. I detail how I gained approval from International Review Board (IRB) and created interview questions, the selection of methods to address my topics, and the process of the selection of interlocutors, the demographic components of interlocutors, how I conduct semi-structured interview and participant observation during the interview, and how I analyze data and manage data after leaving the field site. Reflection and conclusion follow after the discussion of research design.

SEA in UN Peacekeeping

Similar research focusing on women to examine why and how they engage in the SEA with the UN peacekeepers as well as how such a relationship affects women has been done in

Cambodia (Mackay 2001), in Mozambique (Orford 1996), in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)

(Simić 2012, 42), in Somalia (Lupi 1998), in Timor-Leste (Charlesworth and Wood 2002), in

West Africa countries-Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone (UNHCR and STC-UK 2002), in DRC and Sierra Leone (Higate 2003), in Liberia and Haiti (Martin and Gantz 2005), in Liberia (Save the Children UK 2006), in DRC by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services agency (The

Office of Internal Oversight Services 2005), in BiH and Kosovo (Gustafsson 2005), in DRC (The

Office of Internal Oversight Services 2007), in BiH (Simić 2012), in DRC (Simm 2013), and in the Central African Republic (CAR) (Aids Free World 2015). Instances of SEA ranges from systematic rape in CAR, and sexual violence in Cambodia to human trafficking in BiH.

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However, the findings of these case studies also show that there are examples of voluntary relationships between local women and the UN peacekeepers, which are not easily separated from the cases of SEA. Therefore, all voluntary and non-voluntary relationships are lumped together as if there is only relationship of SEA between local women and the UN peacekeepers under the category of SEA. Otto (2007) argues that the category of SEA is too broad to explain the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary relationships, while Jasmine-Kim

Westendorf and Louise Searle assert that different “forms of SEA coexist in most peacekeeping settings, but combine in different ways to produce different behaviors” (Westendorf and Searle

2017, 375). What happens is that only certain simplified forms of SEA are highlighted and that the assumption that women are vulnerable to sex with the UN peacekeepers is reproduced.

Such a representation of women as victims leaves no space for discussion of the agency of women who might be engaged in cases of SEA based on their choices, regardless whether it is coercive or not. Women and girls might participate in having sex with the UN peacekeepers for different reasons: love, fun, or out of survival. On the one hand, survival sex might be driven by structural reasons, such as “poverty and local of economic and livelihood options, which are the main causes of ‘sexual exploitation’ of children,” as cases in DRC and Liberia demonstrate. For example, Save the Children-UK (2006) interviewed children who live in Internally Displaced

Persons (IDP) camps in Liberia, where it found that children use sex for survival of themselves as well as their families, while the OIOS investigated 217 allegations of peacekeepers “who paid girls, aged 18 and under, for sexual relations with money, food, or clothing” in DRC (2007, 1).

On the other hand, Simić demonstrates that women might engage in sex in war based on their personal wills and exercise of agency. She highlights the sexual agency of women in conflict zones, whose motivations range “from love to sex for fun” (Simić 2012, 131). Although women

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and girls might be mobilized by structural-driven or individual-oriented reasons to have sex with the UN peacekeepers, Otto does not think that the former totally eliminates the individual agency: “Although survival sex is the result of economic decision making in highly invidious circumstances, it nevertheless involves a level of agency and negotiation that distinguishes it from sexual offences like rape, sexual assault, forced prostitution, and sexual slavery, where consent is absent” (Otto 2007, 260–61). In contrast, Westendorf and Searle (2017, 373) argue that survival sex is the result of “structural conditions of poverty and unequal power dynamics between intervenors and locals,” which indicates that individual choice made in this condition is not meaningful. However, it is not clear according to which criteria we scholars determine whether women have agency or not. It will be limited to consider agency of women in terms of choice to have sex or not, which appears to isolate women from their life experiences and a more complicated post-conflict context in a longer span of time where different structures exist and interact with each other.

The representation of women and girls as victims not only obscures the agency of women and girls in different forms of relationships with the UN peacekeepers, but also forecloses the possibility for scholars to understand the heterogeneity of local contexts and actors where and from which meanings of sex are produced, which point to a more situated and fabricated networks where women, other locals, and the UN peacekeepers are interrelated. Otto reminds us of the importance of meanings of sex in particular contexts. For example, in West Africa countries-Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, children have sex with the UN peacekeepers because they use sex to “ensure their own survival and, often, the survival of their families”

(Otto 2007, 265). Simić interviewed women who have sex with the UN peacekeepers, and 8 of them answered that “local women are more vulnerable as a result of war” rather than because of

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sex. Sex, from the perspectives of many local women, signals “the right to private life and free choice” (Simić 2012, 199). Sarah Smith (2017) drew on the definitions of sexual violence understood by the community in Timor-Leste to demonstrate that sex with the UN peacekeepers is considered as a form of sexual violence by the community. Community defined sexual violence includes “sexual relationships that ‘caused a woman to become pregnant but the male partner did not want to take responsibility’” (UNFPA 2015, 16, cited from Smith 2017, 414).

Simic and Smith highlight the different perspectives about sex between regions as well as those between women and communities, which tend to be ignored by SEA policy prioritizing sex as a forms of gender violence against women. Although such a definition of sex conforms to the meaning of sex endorsed by the local communities, as the example of Timor-Leste demonstrates, women’s perspectives and narratives are still hidden and omitted, since the local power dynamics might reconfigure with the existing international peacekeeping framework where local women are silenced while some local or international actors are dominant.

Research Subjects

Simic and Smith challenge the simple relation between sex and women’s agency, which is integral to the broader power dynamics and contexts where women and different locals and internationals are located and interact at different levels of post-conflict societies. However, both seem to frame that women are victims of their environments or outsiders by focusing on sexual experiences of women, although they disagree on the meaning of sex as an agentic act or act indicative of lack of agency. Without denying these women’s experiences acknowledged by the academia and practitioners as well as women’s agency, I choose to focus on the experiences of women as the starting point, and the collective silence of women in policy world and academia is a crucial part of it. Silence can be a form of choice of women, which is indicative of women’s agency “that can protect, challenge, or protest” (George and Kent 2017, 520). “Although this

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choice may not be made freely and autonomously, agency is nonetheless present, which suggests that silence cannot be dismissed simply as something imposed on women, a silence of repression or pathology” (George and Kent 2017, 520). However, identifying the agency of women might also be challenging because these works also caution that this topic “is highly sensitive within both the UN and also the local populations, which is what makes it difficult to obtain any precise data about this phenomenon” (Simić 2009, 294). For instance, Paul Higate (2007) needed to protect the identity of peacekeepers he interviewed, and the OIOS had to avoid naming refugee women and girls as well as witnesses to prevent exposing their identities. Although interviewing women and peacekeepers helped researchers extract valuable information and insights about the impacts of peacekeepers on women through SEA, I focus on women instead of peacekeepers because I want to know why silence is present among women, whether women are agentive of silence or forced to perform it, and how women make sense of peacekeeping from their formed relationship with UN personnel. I choose to interview women in Timor-Leste because of lack of data about these women and characteristics of Timor as a country with a post-conflict economy, of 13 years of UN presence and comprehensive administration, and bearing an awareness of gender in UN missions.

General Situations of SEA in Timor-Leste

The cases of allegations of women in intervened countries where women are involved in relationships of SEA are documented by interviews as well as survey. However, “Reports from

Secretary General detailing allegations only began in 2005, and it was not until 2007 that these figures were broken down by mission” (Smith 2017, 412). Allegations conducted by peacekeepers in Timor can be dated back to the 1990s. “Allegations conducted by peacekeeper

SEA arose in the Balkans, Cambodia, and Timor-Leste in the 1990s and in West Africa in 2002”

(Stern 2015, 8). Like many other post-intervention countries, Timor-Leste was exposed to the

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SEA by the UN peacekeepers. In UNMIT (2006-2012), there were 13 allegations of SEA reported (Smith 2017, 402). However, “this figure does not illuminate an understanding of the nature of SEA or the frequency of its occurrence in Timor-Leste” (Smith 2017, 402). Koyama and Myrttinen (2007, 26) reported cases of SEA in UNTAET (1999-2002) and UNMISET

(2002-2005) based on 35 interviews with “representatives of the Timor Leste government, the

UN administration, the PKF and UN police (UNPOL) officers, representatives of other UN agencies, representatives of Timorese and international civil society organizations, media representatives, sex workers and their clients.” Those cases range from sexual assault, harassment, prostitution, to abandonment of mother and children fathered by UN personnel.

Although both authors suggest that “The drawdown of the UN missions also led to a reduction of sex workers,” in other words, there is positive relation between the presence of peacekeepers and the prostitute, the cases of SEA involving other forms of transactional sex if not prostitution as well as non-transactional sex remain unknown. Additionally, during interviews conducted by

Sarah Smith, “There were reports of peacekeepers frequenting brothels, and UN vehicles could be seen outside brothels and picking up women outside popular bars and nightspots” (2017, 413).

Some random cases of SEA were revealed in UNMISET: “several Singaporeans CIVPOL1 in

UNMISET were caught in a massage parlour and were repatriated, as was a CIVPOL officer of undisclosed nationality in another Polisia National Timor-Leste (PNTL)/UNPOL raid” (2007,

36). In addition, cases of sexual misconduct, such as sexual harassment and assault, conducted by UN personnel also came up from their interviews. Another form of SEA was mentioned as local women and children who were abandoned by UN personnel. They estimate “the number of children left behind would be in the dozens and the number of tens to a maximum of one

1 CIVPOL: civilian police officer

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hundred” (2007, 37). Concerning the conditions of these women, Koyama and Myrttinen note that they “are in a very precarious position,” and they might face stigmatization and ostracization by communities (2007, 38). However, they also mention that their situations are vague and receive less attention compared to sex workers. As to the children who were fathered by UN personnel, or “peacekeeper babies,” Anne Barker (2006) documented that at least 20 peacekeepers fathered peacekeeper babies in UNTAET and UNMISET. Although peacekeeper babies are not limited to Timor, this issue did not come to light until UNTAET (Simić and

O’Brien 2014).

Visibility and Silence of Women in the Research of SEA in Timor-Leste

Although cases of different forms of SEA were reported since UNTAET, it is not clear from the statistics published by the UN to know what happened to the victims of SEA after cases were reported, not to mention those who were never known to the public. Smith noted that this happens because the international staff “keep changing every six months or every one year. And mostly when they change, they take all the documents. So you lost the chronology of what’s happening or what’s going on with the victims” (2017, 415). Due to lack of documentation and comprehensive survey on SEA by UN personnel, we still cannot go beyond the fact that the presence of the UN is relevant to the prostitution and sex market. The reported cases equally could not tell us more about the intensity and duration of SEA in one case as well as whether the victims were assisted or supported in any ways by anyone. Since the last UN mission withdrew from Timor in 2012, it becomes more challenging to get insiders’ information about the life conditions of these women, which might be compounded by existing social norms and post- conflict economy.

I did not set off to investigate the overall situation of SEA, which also involves men and boys. It is also not my intention to examine the cases of SEA conducted by the UN and non-UN

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peacekeepers. Instead, I want to know women who form relationships with the UN peacekeepers but not engaging in transactional sex for food or money. Technically speaking, this group of women is considered as “victims” according to the UN zero tolerance/ SEA policy. One exception is that when women are married to peacekeepers, according to the policy. However, it does not take into consideration the nature of peacekeeping operations which allow only for short stay and constant shifts to other posts, which might contribute to the precarious nature of marriage bonded between local women and peacekeepers. Even though it is possible that local men might be abandoned as well, no study has been done yet. This makes it harder to identity those men. In my dissertation, I would like to examine the condition of SEA of a group of women who have seldom received public attention before, that is, women who form voluntary relationships, married or unmarried, mothering peacekeeper babies or not, with UN personnel.

Summary of Fieldwork

In summer 2016 and 2017, I travelled to Timor-Leste twice, 5 weeks and 3.5 months individually. Overall, I successfully conducted 65 semi-structured interviews, email and face-to- face, in Tetun and English, as well as informal discussions with 13 directors and staff of women’s Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) which are Dili-based, 22 Timorese men and women who used to work in the UN missions during 1999-2012, 17 women who had sexual liaisons with the UN peacekeepers in municipalities of Dili, Maubisse, Oecussi, Lospalos, and

Suai, as well as 13 ordinary individuals, foreigners who have lived in Timor and local Timorese.

A few of these individuals overlap among the groups. My purpose of interviewing 4 groups of interlocutors is to compare what they say and feel about women, culture, and their relationship with the UN peacekeeping personnel in Timorese contexts; to collect information about how

Timorese experience the UN missions and violence as well as interact with the UN personnel in

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different contexts; and to understand social taboos and stigmatizations against the free pursuit of sexuality and relationship of Timorese women.

Ethics and IRB approvals for the research were obtained from the University of Florida in

2016 and renewed in 2017 prior to the conduct of interviews (Protocol #201601007). I gained oral consent from my interlocutors before interview and made sure they knew before the interview began that they can stop the interview if they didn’t feel comfortable or felt emotional.

I asked my interlocutors whether they wanted to remain anonymous or not. I also gave women who are in potentially vulnerable populations and might be traumatized by recalling some of the frustrating and emotional past information about the consulting center, Psychsocial Recovery &

Development in East Timor (PRADET), and the service regarding mental health and shelter it offers. In sum, I interviewed 4 groups of interlocutors, and each interview lasted from half an hour to up to two hours. An interview usually took place in coffee shops, women’s or neighbors’ homes, my hotel room, police station, café in Katua’s Hotel, and in their shops. All interviews were conducted in English and Tetun, either by myself or with the help of my friends Raimundos

Oki, Prezado Ximines, and Profirio Fernandes Xavier. Unlike anthropologists who conduct life history interview for hours and sometimes repeatedly return to interlocutors for interview, I did most of my interviews with interlocutors once because my interlocutors’ time is limited between family and work. Moreover, since this topic is sensitive to some interlocutors, especially women who had sexual relationships with the UN peacekeepers, multiple visits in a small and enclosed community might cause concerns of their family and communities. Since the sensitive nature of this topic might cause concerns to women I interviewed, I always brought local translators with me to conduct interviews within their contexts. I also asked permission from women ahead before setting out interviews.

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Convenient Sampling

I used snowball sampling methods to choose my interlocutors like Higate (2007). I found women and men who are willing to talk to me by Facebook (FB), by being introduced by friends to mutual friends, NGOs staff, or random encounters on the street. Snowball sampling has been criticized as a convenient method which might find interlocutors in particular groups as well as lack of representations of populations of a culture under study. Moreover, it might make researchers over reliant on “the counterpart’s subjective selections and also carries the risk of being inhibited by gatekeepers” (Margetha-Barthel 2016, 151). Some key interlocutors might be more knowledgeable, talkative, and accessible compared to other locals. However, it is undeniable that snowball sampling is “particularly applicable when the focus of the study is on a sensitive issue, possibly concerning a relatively private matter, and thus requires the knowledge of insiders to locate people for study” (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981, 141). Among the study of gender and women in post-conflict zones, Sarah Smith adopted this method in her dissertation examining gender in peace operations in Timor-Leste because “it was difficult to identify participants from a distance and the individuals taking on particular roles were often transient”

(2015, 5). Similarly, Mageza-Barthel used snowballing in her process-tracing of Rwanda women’s rights because “when tracing processes transpired several years or decades ago, the researcher has to find contact information for interlocutor identified elsewhere” concerning the fact that these individuals might be difficult to pinpoint (2016, 151).

Because of the difficulty to find suitable interlocutors due to the distance between districts, lack of reliable demographic data of women and children who are left behind by the UN peacekeepers and share of data, as well as the sensitivity of the research topics, I chose snowball sampling to find interlocutors. I tried to present myself in different groups of people who might be able to direct me to women and men who have or have not exposed themselves to foreign

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researchers on this topic before. I used different ways to access communities and build rapport with locals, which further led me to the homes of women: cooperation with a community radio station, Associasaun Radio Komunidade Timor-Leste (ARKTL) and a women’s NGO,

Associasaun Chega Ba Ita (ACbit), being a voluntary makeup artist for the disabled, English teacher to the administrative staff and journalists in Timor Post, joining weekly seminars for visiting scholars in UNTL in Caicoli organized by Dr. Helen Hill, attending a Tetun course for one month in Dili Institute of Technology (DIT), and numerous informal social events and talking to people in hotels, on the street, and in the NGOs. The connection with the foreigners who are researching and working in Timor as well as the community allowed me to talk to different groups of interlocutors, such as people who used to or are currently working in the UN missions, as well as foreigners and Timorese who were married to or are in interracial marriages with foreign spouses.

Demographic Background of Interlocutors

There are four groups of interlocutors in my research: women who have sexual liaisons with the UN Peacekeepers, Timorese men and women who used to work in the UN missions during 1999-2012, directors and staff in Dili-based NGOs, and ordinary individuals, foreigners who have lived in Timor for a long time and local Timorese.

Women Who Have Sexual Liaisons with the UN Peacekeepers

These women are either officially married or unmarried, and most of them had at least one kid with the peacekeepers. Most of them are now between their late twenties and forties. In terms of their social and economic background, most of them are civilians who did not work for or with the UN. They were chefs, cleaners, landlords, housewives, police women, NGO workers, small shop owners and employees, street vendors, restaurant owners, or unemployed individuals.

A few of them worked in the UN missions as language assistants or police women. The

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educational background and the amount of salary of women are unknown to the author. Now most of them still work as the only supporters in their family, since they are mostly single parents who do not receive compensation from the UN or their ex partners.

Timorese Men and Women Who Used to Work in the UN Missions during 1999-2012

These Timorese participated in different UN missions at least once from 1999-2012.

Their employment ranged from several weeks to several years. Most of them joined UN missions when they were very young, since the UN were in great need to find locals who can speak

English to work with them. They held positions as interpreters and translators, drivers, police, administrative assistants, in different units. They earned better salary by working with the UN compared to ordinary Timorese at the time, in spite of the extreme income disparity between the international and national staff. Working in the UN missions did not guarantee them employment after they left UN missions, although many of them found it easier to find a job in private companies, NGOs, and the government with their work experiences, trainings, and English skills. A few of them also had liaisons with the UN personnel.

Directors and Staff in Dili-based NGOs

This is the first group of people I interviewed during my visits in Timor. A few of them also worked with the UN in their early age before they took on current position in 1999-2000. I contacted them through Facebook, texts, and email. Due to their busy schedule and unstable internet provided in Timor, texts have been the most useful way to make contact with local

NGOs. Almost all of them were interviewed in English, except Asistensia Legal ba Feto no

Labarik (ALFeLa) and Casa Vida. These NGOs included Associasaun Chega Ba Ita (ACbit),

Forum Komonikasaun ba Feto Timor Leste (FOKUPERS), ALFeLa, PRADET, Alola

Fundasaun, Casa Vida, The Asia Foundation, Fundasuan Manheim (FM), Judicial System

Monitoring Program (JSMP), La’o Hamutuk, Oxfam in Timor-Leste, and Timor Aid. A

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journalist in Timor Post Raimundos Oki helped facilitate my interview with the staff of NGOs in

Farol in 2016. Only a few of them saw or knew women who had sexual liaisons with the UN personnel themselves (i.e. ACbit, FM, and Oxfam in Timor-Leste), while most knew nothing about these women. None of them had projects or data assisting women who were left behind by the UN personnel but only addressed women who suffer from domestic and gender-based violence conducted mainly by Timorese.

Ordinary Individuals, Foreigners Who Have Lived in Timor for a Long Time and Local Timorese

In addition to the above three groups, I also conducted formal and informal interview with ordinary foreigners and Timorese. I mainly found my interlocutors on FB page-Dili Expats.

I introduced myself on FB and informed them that I would like to know the challenges emerging from the interracial marriages and relationships in Timor-Leste. I wanted to find people who can tell me about Timorese culture and how they perceive relationships and marriages between foreigners and Timorese. Most importantly, I hoped to find people who are related to or are able to reach the women my research question targeted from this group. They are either middle-aged foreigners from Asia and Europe who married to local Timorese men and women, or local

Timorese women who had coworkers, boyfriends or husbands who are foreigners. I met them at local coffee shops or their homes.

Research Methods

I use two qualitative research methods to conduct my research: Semi-structured review and participant observation. In the following paragraphs, I will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of these two methods.

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Semi-structured Interview

I conduct open and semi-structured interviews because I want to know what women say about their everyday experiences of relationships, where women make sense, feel, and experience on a daily basis. I consider women as agents who can speak their own experiences, similar to Carol Cohn’s claim: “Women are also thinkers who make their own sense of the multiple social, cultural, economic, and political forces which structure their lives” (Cohn 2013,

2). Meanwhile, I also acknowledge that a reflexive feminist scholar has to be aware of the hermeneutic nature, bias, and epistemic violence of telling stories of women’s diverse experiences from the ground up. Wibben cautions us of the danger of reducing women’s complicated everyday experiences and practices to our theoretical framework, which then “need to be opened up for revisions” (2016, 10). Therefore, I focus on women’s experiences in concrete contexts which “allows a reflexive feminists scholar to differentiate and focus on complexities that traditional theory often overlooks” (Wibben 2016, 10). In order to know women’s experiences, we have to know what women have to say based on their experiences. There are a few advantages of using semi-structured interview: interlocutors-based, humanization of social interaction, delivery of authentic voice of interlocutors.

First, interview focuses on the feelings, memory, emotions of interlocutors and “the process of self-disclosure, painting interviews as powerful windows into a person’s experiences, memories, and feelings” (Briggs 2007, 554). In-depth interviews have the merits of seeing from individual's perspectives by providing their voice or insiders knowledge which has been silenced or marginalized, treating women as they are by taking time to build trust and connections, and understanding their own experiences and controversies in a broader web of narratives prevalent with gender in my research context. Moreover, it reveals identities of self.

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Second, it foregrounds social interaction and human interference between and of the interviewers and the interlocutors. Even though it has been criticized that it shapes such an encounter and related knowledge produced from it in a particular way, there have been many reflexive scholars highlighting the ideological constitution and narrative constraints of interlocutors’ responses emerging from such an interaction. Megan Daigle (2016) explained how academia may be too caught up on the idea of removing self from the research, even though she also admits that one cannot truly separate him or herself from writing. Researchers are embedded researchers, who are situated in cultural and social relations, affecting how interlocutors react to their positionalities. Instead of invisible or insignificant, researchers play important roles in determining how interlocutors perceive and react to researchers. “The ethnographer’s self becomes a conduit of research and a primary vehicle of knowledge production” (Shehata 2006,

211). Such a production of knowledge depends on both researchers and the researched through their interaction, which bring the experiences of the interlocutors as well as the interpretive role of researchers to the fore.

The positionality and identity of the ethnographer affects how (s)he finds, approaches, and gets information from the interlocutors since they are related to how the interlocutors perceive and interact with him or her. In Megan Daigle’s experiences of conducting fieldwork, she is a Canadian white woman speaking fluent Spanish. Her long stay and conducting research in Cuba as a researcher triggered the curiosity and some concerns of many locals. Her unique positionality gave her challenges and opportunities to find and talk to Cuban women and men who date tourists in Cuba’s tourist economy in local bars and restaurants. Some refused to talk to her, some were interested in her, some were open their personal stories to her, and some even introduced her to their friends for interview. She had to use snowballing to find people who

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might be willing to talk to her in this condition compounded by the sensitivity of this topic as well as the risk of exposing her interlocutors to the police.

However, her experiences conducting interviews for her project also let her become more aware of the contingent and complicated nature of interviews, “the impossibility of the perfect, by-the-book interview for which I had prepared myself” (Daigle 2016, 31). There are multiple challenges and unexpected ones through the encounters with interlocutors in the interview process, which could come from interlocutors, researchers themselves, or the fieldwork itself. To name a few, for Megan, they might be “endless interruptions, my own stumbling, disinterested or oppositional informants, and an agonising inability to connect across the space between us”

(Daigle 2016, 31), which demonstrates the uncontrollability of interviews from the interaction between the researchers and the researched. Moreover, those dynamics and obstacles emerging from the interactive process of interviews render presenting interview results as facts in the writing impossible. “Simply relaying the ‘results’ of this research in my writing would have concealed all of these complexities and unexpected experiences from the reader” (Daigle 2016,

31). In fact, she was aware of the human intervention in each stage of interviews: from designing the questions and projects, to present the results or data. “How to best present interviews that were unstructured, contingent, and sometimes quite difficult posed a real problem,” (Daigle

2016, 31) since it will be always subject to her choice of representation and interpretation.

Third, some scholars believe that through interviews which are less structured, authentic

“voice, true voices emerge only when they are minimally constrained by formal procedures and attempts to control interlocutors” (Briggs 2007, 554). Although it is possible that the interlocutors are represented in a particular way through interview questions and the style of writing and interviewing, by using open and semi-structured interview, interlocutors have more

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leverage to express themselves in the process of the interview compared to survey or other formal interviews. “Open-ended, in-depth interviewing suggests that authentic, true voices, emerge only when they are minimally constrained by formal procedures and attempts to control interviews” (Briggs 2007, 554).

Participant Observation

In addition to interview, I also use participant or ethnographic observation to provide broader cultural context and webs of meaning where women are situated. “Participation usually involves fieldwork, but not all fieldwork is participant observation” (Bernard 2011, 257). Having its origin from Anthropology, participant observation has been used by anthropologists to get information about a remote and mysterious place or community, and the information can be taken in the forms of transcriptions, audio recordings, video, photographs, field notes or journals, etc. It involves building rapport and developing trust with interlocutors (Briggs 1986). By spending time in a local community, a researcher learns how it feels like to be in a culture and gains life experiences by living in that culture. It requires a researcher to turn “fieldworkers into instruments of data collection and data analysis” (Bernard 2011, 258). In other words, a researcher can learn a culture by being present in it as both an outsider and an insider through everyday lives after a period of time.

Participant observation also has an advantage to make researchers more reflective about the impacts of their own identities on their researched subjects and how researchers can negotiate through those identities. Deborah Cummins mentioned that her presence as a “malae” meant he

“could never claim that my presence went unnoticed, and there is no doubt that people adjusted their behavior and many allowances for me that precluded full immersion into their community.

However, “I also attracted a certain amount of curiosity,” which gave her access to insights other locals cannot have (Cummins 2010, 39).

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A researcher who adopts participant observation does not mean that she does not have to interact or engage in local community. Moreover, time is a function of the impact of the presence of a researcher. The longer she stays in a community, the more likely she will change her identities or influence local people in the process of building rapport or trust with locals.

According to the degree a researcher engages in the local life, she can be complete participant, participant observer, or complete observer (Bernard 2011). Whatever role a researcher takes, the foundation of participant observation is to be aware of cultural norms and the web of social relations when she tries to build rapport and trust with the locals. She might enter the field like a child without knowing anything about the social webs or understanding in the local community, but her acquisition and willingness to learn about a culture and community will help her get data she needs by asking the right questions in appropriate ways.

While participant observation highlights the role of the researchers in describing and translating the culture she studies, the semi-structured interview tends to bring back the meanings, narratives, and women’s individual experiences produced by the interlocutors long silenced by the narrative and category of victimized women. In other words, both researchers and the researched are the co-producers of knowledge. The interpretive nature of knowledge production helps insert reflexivity to every stage of the research process where knowledge about women in war is produced. By centering on reflexivity, the black box of the research process is not merely dictated by the researchers, but is opened to see how the choices of methods, justifications, and the data interpretation of the researchers are made. More importantly, the reflexive attitude also requires researchers to look within in terms of how positionalities of the researchers affect how the data is accessed and the content of the data. Exposing the contingency and subjectivity of the research process helps me to interrogate the silence of women’s stories

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masked in or occluded from the story of victims or story of perpetrators, as well as re-including women and their understanding of their relationships with the UN peacekeepers who are neither powerless nor powerful actors.

Conduct of Interview

I began my interview by self-introduction and a brief introduction of my research and its purpose. I prepared some questions required by IRB but sometimes I will just let my interlocutors lead the interview without asking them to follow my questions. Most of my interlocutors are willing to share what they know about my research, and even introduce me to some other potential interlocutors. A few of them rejected to participate in the interview or recording, because their boyfriends would not allow them or they were afraid of exposing themselves to the public. My interlocutors perceive interview and research in very different ways: some interlocutors think interview with me is an opportunity to gain information about their estranged partner and connection with the UN and other resources, some interlocutors consider interview as a process of reflecting on their life experiences, some think interview is an opportunity of learning and practicing English with foreigners and researchers, some think research is objective which is good for their country and people, and some want to know what I know and what data I have on this topic.

Interlocutors were asked a few general questions introduced by the interviewer in the semi structured interview, which helps the interlocutors feel they can tell their stories or concerns based on their experiences without being restrained by the questions framed by the interviewer.

After explaining the purpose of the research, background of the interviewer, and their rights to stay anonymous and stop the interview, I asked the following questions to women who had sexual liaisons with the UN personnel either by myself or with the help of one or two Timorese friends who assisted me to translate or explain questions in the beginning: can you tell me

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something about yourself? Have you met any UN peacekeepers? What are your experiences and how do you think about peacekeepers? Does your life become better or worse after the UN came? Why? How did you support yourself and your children after your partner left? In general, my questions are about their relationship with the UN personnel, which are sensitive in nature.

Learning from Higate’s experience of interview with peacekeepers on sensitive topics like this, I framed my questions in a way “to avoid provocative phrases and words such as abuse or prostitute and to use somewhat prosaic phrase gender relations” (Higate 2007, 102–3), which did not make interlocutors feel too personal while asking them personal and private questions about their relationship, marriages, families or sex. Meanwhile, I also brought male and female

Timorese with me to interview in most of my interviews to ensure interlocutors understand questions and research purposes fully. Although from the survey experience of Beber et al.

(2016) with Liberian women who have transactional sex, it might be suggested to be accompanied by “all-female” translators, my experiences of bringing two Timorese male translators were positive, since women did not feel those male translators were liked “other

Timorese men,” and thus liked their presence.

There are three sections in my interview. First, I ask who these women are in order to know their social position and background. Second, I ask them what you think a good woman is and should be. I also ask them what your relationship and experiences of relationship mean to you. My purposes are two: to know what the dominant narrative is in constructing their life as a woman in Timorese society and to reveal possible inconsistencies between dominant discourse and individual ones, which opens the space for challenging the dominant discourse. Third, I also ask women their motivation and intention in the relationship, which intends to challenge the ideal femininity and victims within the narrative of victims in the FSS literature as well as post-

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colonial projects of humanitarian intervention, which is driven by the desire to “save brown women from brown men” (Baaz and Stern 2016, 123).

With the group of previous UN national staff, I asked them mainly about their job content, what their experiences working with the UN personal when they served the UN missions were, as well as how they thought about the UN missions in general.

With the group of NGOs, staff, I asked them about the projects and tasks of their organizations, as well as what they think about Timorese women and UN missions.

With the mixed group, I focused mainly on whether they knew or saw women who were involved in a sexual relationship with the UN peacekeepers, how they thought about the UN missions and UN personnel, Timorese culture and women among it vis-à-vis their own cultures

(if they are foreigners), and their experiences of interracial relationship in the Timorese context.

How to Deal with Data?

I use a narrative approach for my data analysis. Similar to Bina D’Costa, I see “narratives obtained as sources of data whose meaning I interpret” (D’Costa 2006, 104). I come up with some common themes and categories which repeatedly come up during the interviews. For example, during my preliminary research last year, Timorese used “malae nian” or “malae nia” to describe women who have intimate or working relationship with peacekeepers. In contrast, foreigners who married to Timorese or foreigners who do not understand Tetun do not understand its meaning at all. James Spradley says, “Meanings, in one form or another, permeates the experiences of most human beings in all societies (Spradley 2016, 95). I took notes on how Timorese generally understand the word, and how individuals interpret it in their experiences during the interview. I reviewed my field notes to find out how meanings of words attached to women are related to women’s fear of being an outlier of the society, and even loss of local culture and tradition.

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In particular, I adopt the feminist narrative approach proposed by Annick T. R. Wibben

(2011), which highlights the gendered and hermeneutic nature of narratives by seeing gender as a descriptive and normative tool. Narrative analysis shows the ways how human experiences are understood: “Through narratives we make sense of the world, produce meaning, articulate intentions, and legitimate actions” (Wibben 2016, 62). Narratives are also political. The framing of a particular narrative could highlight “particular elements, while obscuring other aspects of the same event” (Wibben 2016, 63-64). By problematizing the naturalization of construction of stories and subjects within the narratives, scholars open a space to reflect on the role of interviewers in dominating the interpretations and narratives, as well as the politicizing narratives beyond narratives formulated by interviewers. A feminist narrative approach also allows me to pay attention to the narratives of women and other local population whose stories are not heard by reorienting my focus from dominant narrative to the narrative of the disenfranchised and silenced based on their everyday experiences.

Analytical Tools Deployed to Read the Perceptions and Experiences of the Local Interlocutors

Feminists need tools to understand the perceptions and experiences of the local in the form of narratives. How the local perceive the international peacekeeping in their relationships with the peacekeepers affects how the local frames international peacekeeping, and even how peacekeeping is embodied in their life as well as implemented on the ground. Although many locals do not deny the positive impacts brought by the international, they also perceive the international negatively. Such perceptions of the local might be significant in determining who the peacekeepers are and what they are doing, what the pitfalls of peacekeeping missions are, as well as solutions in terms of how the missions should be practiced. Perception is a form of narratives. Here I use bounded rationality and sense making to explain how the local perceive

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and react to the international and their behavior in relation to their experiences and the performance of the missions. I argue that bounded rationality of individuals and sense making as a process explain how a particular narrative or narratives of peacekeeping is constructed among actors. Moreover, in a narrative, a frame or different frames might be used to decide how and what a story is told and interpreted, as well as how these frames inform the embodied behavior.

“Frames and narratives do not cause action. Instead, they make action possible: they authorize, enable, and justify specific practices and policies (such as regulation of the mineral trade) while precluding others (such as resolution of land conflicts)” (Autesserre 2012, 207).

Frames and their framing effects are often used by feminist security scholars to demonstrate how a particular narrative is formulated, yet they do not have proper tools to explain how a frame is formulated and how it connects with human mind and human behavior.

Therefore, I turn to political behavior literature to seek appropriate conceptual tools to explain framing: “A decision maker’s frame is his or her mental representation of the choice problem he or she faces” (Bendor et al. 2011, 5).

Bounded rationality

I use bounded rationality and sense making in the hope of illustrating how local actors translate their mental cognition of international peacekeeping mediated by frames into reality.

The idea of ‘bounded rationality’ is proposed by Herbert Simon, who claims that decision- making behavior is the consequence of interplay between complicated task environment and human mental activity, to clarify how gender thinking is embodied in human behavior, as well as the inconsistency of ideas and behavior. Moreover, the idea of ‘sense making,’ which means that actors make sense, is important to depict how actors make sense of a new event or a social norm through interaction among themselves and reference to institutions and environments where they are situated. Although such a narrative is not necessarily translated into reality, these methods are

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integrating a general account of the interplay between micro and macro level with an attention to political and social contexts where gender and its embodiments evolves.

Bounded rationality, which recognizes the actors’ psychological and emotional limitation in making decisions rationally, is proposed by Herbert Simon in opposition to the comprehensive rationality assumed in rational choice theory, which claims that actors behave under rationality following the principle of utility maximization. Simon contends that bounded rationality is “a relation between a decision maker’s mental abilities and the complexity of the problem s/he faces” (Bendor et al. 2011, 18). Bryan Jones defines it as “facets of human cognitive architecture,” which can explain the deviation of our behavior from utility-maximizing behavior

(Jones 1999, 298).

In addition to taking human psychological and biological factor influencing decision- making into account, Simon also recognizes the complexity of real situation where human beings interact, and how actors overcome it collectively. He develops a concept of “procedural rationality” to account for “how people conduct incomplete searches and make tradeoffs between values” (Jones 1999, 301). Such a kind of rationality ensures achieving a “satisfaction at some specified level of all of its needs” regarding a decision is made collectively under some structural restraints (Jones 1999, 301). Jones epitomized its elementary characteristics as follows: (a) limitation of organism’ ability to plan long behavior sequences; (b) the tendency to set aspiration levels for each of the multiple goals; (c) the tendency to operate on goals sequentially because of the bottleneck of short-term memory; and (d) satisfying search behavior (Jones 1999, 301). Even though each actor attempts to pursue rational behavior, the collective result will not be an optimal and objective choice. In addition, actors will search for or create alternatives out of their limited capabilities. Therefore, “search was incomplete, selective, and nonoptimal” (Jones 1999,

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302). Procedural rationality emphasizes the process, constraints, and ways in which decision is made, as incrementalism exemplifies.

When there is a mismatch between the incentives provided by the environmental constraint and decision-making behavior of actors, bounded rationality can powerfully explain the inconsistency between the expected behavior and the outcome, and the discontinuity between the previous and latter behavior within institutions by taking the changing environment and mentality of decision-makers into account.

Sense making

Sense making means “making of sense” (Weick 1995, 4). It is an activity of construction by actors in order to make sense of the world. Actors “structure the unknown” (Waterman 1990,

41). However, actors do not understand the world intuitively. They achieve it through interpretation, which refers to a framework of reference whenever new things or events come in.

This mental framework enables actors to “comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate, and predict” (Starbuck and Milliken 1988, 51). With such an interpretation of the world, actors not only assign meanings to things and events but also guide their behavior informed by sense making. As a result, sense making seems a “recurring cycle comprised of a sequence of events occurring over time” (Weick 1995, 4). While Starbuck, Milliken, Westley, and Louis focus on putting stimuli into framework, others think sense making is more than placement of stimuli. Tomas, Clark, and Gioia define sense making as “the reciprocal interaction of information seeking, meaning ascription, and action, which means that environmental scanning, interpretation, and associated responses are all included” (Weick 1995, 5). Sackman sees it as mechanisms through which actors perceive, interpret, believe, and act (Weick 1995, 5).

Feldman claims it as “an interpretative process that is necessary ‘for organizational members to understand and to share understandings about such features of the organizations as what it is

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about, what it does well and poorly, what the problem it faces are, and how it should resolve them’” (Weick 1995, 5). Sense making does not necessarily entail action but simply gathering more and different information, as Feldman argues (Weick 1995, 5).

Sense making differs from the activity of interpretation. Sense making seemingly includes merely interpretation with actors’ cognitive map to decide whether or how they should respond to stimuli, but it is more than the activity of interpretation. Interpretation can be made by actors, which is the product of actors’ mental activity. But the thing is that sense making induces the mindset to focus on process (Weick 1995, 13). In the process, something is produced and in turn reshapes the cognition of actors. In addition to this understanding of sense making as a series of mental activities, sense making also highlights the inventive part of the sense making process. Interpretation always refers to something which already exists, such as knowledge, experience, or normative framework. Sense making is different from interpretation in the sense that it creates what is to be interpreted. According to Morgan, Frost, and Pondy, individuals are not seen as living in, and acting out their lives in relation to, a wilder reality, so much as creating and sustaining images of a wilder reality, in part to rationalize what they are doing. They realize their reality by reading into their situation pattern of significant meaning (Weick 1995, 14). In this sense, sense making creates the reality actors act in. Under some circumstances, sense making can be viewed as defining problems to which they respond.

Sense making and bounded rationality matter in helping us figure out how we human beings live in and respond to an open and constantly changing social environment. While bounded rationality highlights the fact that human behavior is guided by mental perception, sense making is a series of mental activities, which consists of information processing, mediating, and simplifying. Whenever there are new stimuli entering the cognitive framework of actors, they

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tend to interpret them by referring to existing norms or experiences, and this understanding of new stimuli might shape or reinforce current behavior. With bounded rationality and sense making, researchers can figure out structures (or frames) actors’ perceptions and policy through clarifying the mechanism or the process where frameworks of reference are produced. Sense making and bounded rationality occur in many levels of human activities, including individual and organization in terms of how actors create a cognitive map and what they invent and how these inventions might affect current and future discourse and reality when those ideas and perceptions are embodied in and through human behavior. Although human behavior understood in this light may not be consistent or unchangeable, the interpretative framework suggested by sense making and bounded rationality highlights the constitutive part of human behavior with regards to ideas and frames: that something is produced by actors and actors produce something.

Applying this to the context of Timor-Leste, we can dig into the narratives of actors to see what problems of peacekeeping are framed with regards to the formation of identities of self and other in the ongoing peacekeeping process, which helps justify particular solutions to address those problems emerging in peacekeeping. Moreover, these concepts also help us understand why the peacekeeping missions are not effective, if particular ideas and assumptions are circulated and become enclosed among the local or the international per se.

Data Management

The interviews were conducted mostly in Tetun with the help of at least one or two

Timorese friends, since only a few women are capable of speaking fluent English. Most interviews were tape recorded with my cell phone and transcribed. A few interviews were not recorded because the interlocutors wanted to keep anonymous and unrecorded.

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Reflection

The research findings which do not fit my expectations of women as victims in the dominant narrative make me feel uneasy about my research and myself as a researcher. I count those feelings of discomfort and unease as part of my research findings, which lead me to further self-criticism and reflection.

My feelings of discomfort and unease result from my awareness of power hierarchy between the researchers and the researched. Since I am responsible for selecting research topics, framing of questions, and research methods from a particular research tradition with epistemological and methodological stance, am I reproducing similar dominant narrative of victims of women which perpetuates women’s victimized status? Moreover, limited by my research questions, I am concerned that other information I collected from the interview process might be undermined. For example, by asking questions about their experiences of relationship, am I losing sight of other sources of suffering and other forms of violence these women have experienced? By focusing on women in relation to peacekeepers, do I ignore their other selves in addition to lovers and mothers? By bringing sex to the fore, do I undermine their other concerns for survival in a post-conflict country and society where life is challenging and precarious due to different forms of violence? What did I not listen to or pay attention to? More importantly, did my visit and even friendship with these women during my short stay with an attempt to bring international and domestic awareness to these women’s stories help them or further stigmatize them? Will the exposure of my telling of their stories do justice to them without putting them in a more suffering and stigmatized position? Will my stories written in my dissertation affect other women’s NGOs which represent Timorese women in a particular way in order to speak to the audience of their donors and get funding? More worryingly, was I, a foreigner, woman, and researcher, complicit with the dominant narrative by seeing women as gendered and racialized

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others in my savior mission to Timor-Leste? By repeatedly telling their stories of relationships and suffering, did I help reproduce the image of women who are victims of sexual violence by peacekeepers?

Part of my discomfort comes from my constant contradictory feeling of being an insider and an outsider. I know as a malae, I am always an outsider from the perspective of the local community. As a foreigner, I see everything the local take for granted with a fresh eye. I ask questions all the time and I am always curious trying new things and visiting new places.

Meanwhile, with the acquisition of language ability and mingling with the local Timorese strengthened, my identities as a foreigner and researcher are shaken. My relationships with interlocutors change as the distance between us become shortened. I realized that I felt and became more compassionate to my interlocutors. I felt sad, angry, and irritated when hearing their stories during the interviews as if I were in their situations. Many of them reminded me of my early life growing up in a single-parent family. However, I had to calm down and remind myself that even though I am close to them I am not them. The intimacy I built during my stay in

Timor-Leste became a nightmare to me whenever I was aware that I needed to leave once my research was done. That intimacy also drove me to desire to do more for the local community. I volunteered on many occasions, not only because I wanted to become close to the local communities, but also because I wanted to give back to the communities whom I felt significant to me. Being an outsider prevented me from approaching some people, while being an insider impeded me from asking questions and doing merely what I should do-research. I experience this struggle of positionality on a daily basis, and I had to negotiate it to find a balance every day.

Language and cross-cultural translation issues are crucial to fieldwork in my case. I learned how to speak Tetun before I started interviewing women. Knowing how to speak Tetun

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also made it easier to approach and please the local by demonstrating that a malae is willing to learn and get to know their language, culture, and people in a more meaningful way. However, even though I was capable of talking to Timorese with simple and short sentences, to fully grasp without distorting their meanings and languages in contexts, I still depended a lot on my bilingual Timorese friends: Oki, Ximenes, and Profirio. The success of my fieldwork is impossible without their investment of time and efforts by helping me break down my interview questions into shorter and more understandable sentences in Tetun, as well as their tireless translation and explanation of words during and after the interviews. I am very aware of the risks of possible distortion, miscommunication, and misunderstanding due to translation and dependence on the third party. However, these challenges make me more sensitive to asking questions regarding the meanings of simple words constantly used by the local yet varying in different individuals, such as “malae nian.”

Conclusion

I explained how I conducted my fieldwork in Timor-Leste, although it is an ongoing process and does not stop at the time when I left the research site. From the beginning of choosing topics and the methods used to approach my research question, to data collection, analysis, interpretation, and writing up, I am aware of the main role and related responsibility of me as a researcher to collect and represent the narratives and stories of Timorese. This kind of research adopting interpretive approach is subject to subjective interpretation and individual choice along the way, and naturally raises the concern of objectivity and the power asymmetry between the researcher and the researched. To minimize the possible harm to the interlocutors and the distortion of narratives, I asked the consent of recording or taking pictures beforehand, and how my interlocutors felt afterwards, and forwarded the information of consultation of mental health after the interviews. I made some interlocutors anonymous to protect them. I also

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emailed some of my interlocutors if I citied their stories. In addition, I tried to make the conduct of research process as much as transparent as possible by including reflection of my positionality and interaction with my interlocutors. I cannot avoid the partial representation of these interlocutors in my writing, but my writings can provide insights and perspectives for future followers to pay attention to certain issues I tried to highlight when conducting an ethnographic

IR fieldwork on a sensitive topic in a different country.

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CHAPTER 4 INBETWEENNESS OF WOMEN

This chapter discusses the inbetweenness of women by highlighting mixed, multiple, overlapping, and changing identities of women based on tiny excerpts of everyday life of women which challenge the fixed and simplified categories of the dominant discourse. Women’s various lived experiences and life trajectories cannot be capsulated by certain categories and their assumptions. This chapter asks what these categories mean; how women are affected by these categories; how their identities change over time; how women navigate through them. It first asks whether women fit the categories of victim and non-victim in the UN zero tolerance/ SEA policy. In addition to victims/non-victims, this chapter also examines whether women fit the categories of women as home nurturers and caregivers. Women who have sexual relationships with the peacekeepers are affected significantly by a global and social ideal of femininity which defines women in terms of categories of victims/non-victims as well as nurturers and caregivers.

Categories do violence to real women by omitting women who do not conform to and embody the femininity assumed in these categories of the dominant discourse of peacekeeping as well as

Timorese society. Categories affect whether women are visible or not. In the SEA policy of the

UN, women who are not victims are invisible. In the community, women who are not good women are hidden.

This chapter finds that women exist between victim and non-victim. The UN policy defines women who have sex with peacekeepers as easily becoming victims of SEA, but it also excludes women who voluntarily have sex with peacekeepers as victims except women who have transactional sex or are under 18. In reality, not all women feel that they are victims.

Although they do not think that they are victims, these women may later suffer by being abandoned by peacekeepers or mothering babies with peacekeepers.

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In addition to victims/non-victims, this chapter also finds that women cannot easily fit the social ideal of women as caregivers and nurturers. The identities of women are constructed as mothers, wives, and daughters defined in patriarchal Timorese society. However, from women's stories, women tend to give different meanings to them or highlight one category from the other in different contexts. Women’s stories also show that traditional and new identities might not be necessarily compatible. Sometimes women construct new identities for themselves without abandoning traditional ones.

In terms of the structure, first I introduce the general condition of this group of women in

Timor-Leste with two stories of women followed. The selected stories of women demonstrate how individual women use the technologies of self to (re)identify and (re)construct themselves through narratives. Their stories provide different representation of women compared to the dominant discourse of women as victims through time. Then I show in general how women I interviewed perceive themselves as well as how others in the same society perceive these women by describing the complexity and diversity of their perceptions through the local narratives. The fluid and contingent nature of women's identities changing with factors of time and contexts challenge the fixed categories of women assumed in the dominant discourse in the UN policy as well as in the society. Women cannot be easily relegated to any of the fixed categories. The categories of victim/non-victim as well as mothers/wives/daughters are socially constructed and cannot fully capture women's complicated and changing life experiences. However, these categories make women invisible because not all women can fit those categories prescribed in the dominant discourse of women as victims. This chapter suggests going beyond the binary categories which separate women who have agency from women who have not by seeing the

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inbetweenness of women as a source of silence as well as a site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance of power.

The General Condition of Women in Timor-Leste

The group of women I interview are 17 women who agreed to have sexual relationships with the UN peacekeepers: 2 women are married to the UN personnel and still in married status,

2 women had boyfriends from the UN personnel, and 13 mother peacekeepers’ babies from their relationships. It is not clear how many Timorese women are involved in voluntary relationships with peacekeepers, especially women who mother peacekeepers’ babies and then get abandoned.

“Australia's The Age reported that United Nations peacekeepers had abandoned at least 20 babies fathered with Timorese women” (Ndulo 2009, 158) while Koyama and Myrttinen (2007) claim that 100 single mothers or widows were left behind by the UN mission personnel.

Numbers are not reliable because these cases tend to be underreported by women due to the sensitiveness of this issue, social stigmatization, ostracization, and abandonment by the fathers

(Ndulo 2009). Therefore, these 17 women could not represent all women who have sexual relationships with peacekeepers.

Although they are not representative of all women nor generalizable in different regions, stories of these women provide valuable insights about what happened to them and how they make sense of them in the context where peacekeeping missions are implemented. Feminists and the UN responses to SEA usually include the opinions of civil society, prostitute, peacekeepers, and women who are sexually exploited or abused by peacekeepers with clear evidence while excluding those who had voluntary sexual relationships with peacekeepers. Stories of these women reflect their points of view about the peacekeepers and the UN missions, as well as the long-term impacts of peacekeeping, but ironically, their views are seldom included or discussed in the evaluation of the consequences of the UN peace operations, especially SEA, which either

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categorizes these women as victims or non-victims according to their definition of SEA. My interview findings demonstrate that their stories do not totally reflect the dominant discourse of women as victims or non-victims (women who do not match the criteria of victims under SEA policies). Moreover, their stories bring the voice of women to life, which not only show how the agency, power, and structure are deeply intertwined, but also highlight why prosecuting and criminalizing sex is not effective under SEA.

Women I interviewed in Timor-Leste are categorized as women in voluntary relationships based on the UN zero tolerance policy. Instead of a homogenous group of women, these women come from different social and economic background. While some of women worked in the UN missions, most of them were only civilians. These women were all beyond 18 when they first met their partners. A few of them were married to the UN peacekeepers, although not all of them are able to continue their relationships with their partners when the missions finished. None of them conduct survival sex because of poverty or unemployment. Most of them work alone to support their children and family, even though most of them could get different forms of support from some family members, such as food, child care, and money. Some of them were promised monetary support or compensation by their partners, but only a few of them actually gain support for their children from their estranged partners. These women are not technically victims of SEA, but whether their conditions amount to SEA is unclear due to the persistent power hierarchy between peacekeepers and local women.

However, women are considered as victims in the zero tolerance policy as long as they have sex with peacekeepers, even though they choose to have relationships voluntarily.

Voluntary relationships over 18, are not assumed to be exploitative or abusive in the condition of

SEA by focusing on mutual consent. However, SEA seems to deny women’s capability in

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exercising consent in post-conflict society with its emphasis on strongly discouraging all sex in peacekeeping. Olivera Simić contends that the "SGB provisions on sexual relationships and prostitution do not distinguish between sexually exploitative and non-exploitative sex" (Simić

2012, 167). Zero tolerance policy highly discourages sex between peacekeepers and the local women because of the power asymmetry between women and peacekeepers. Women are often subjected to possibilities of SEA in the relationships due to the immunity of peacekeepers, low implementation of zero tolerance policy, and power of peacekeepers in terms of “economic privilege and wealth and can be exercised in the form of consumption and exit” (Henry 2013,

133). By focusing on sexual behavior conducted by peacekeepers, the policy of SEA isolates itself from broader social and economic structures. SEA policy is thus framed as something related to administrative issues which can be prevented and addressed. SEA signals harm to the reputation of the UN to the local in host countries and an attempt of the UN to “deal with the credibility crisis” (Westendorf and Searle 2017, 381). By punishing sex in peacekeeping through

SEA, the behavior of peacekeepers is framed as “one particular sort of misconduct,” which not only separates itself from the underlying causes enabling SEA, but also turns it into something which can be prevented or mitigated in the name of protection of women. Intriguingly enough, women demonstrated mixed feelings about peacekeepers as protectors or violators of women: some see peacekeepers violate their integrity because they bring disease and impregnate local women whereas others acknowledge that peacekeepers also bring peace and security to the country.

The dominant discourse of women as victims in SEA policy shapes women’s life in a significant way, but it only mentions then dilutes the importance of women in voluntary sexual relationships under the broad definition of SEA. The broadly defined SEA mixes different types

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of sexual violence in one single category of SEA, which conflates transactional sex with voluntary sex. Moreover, it makes the translation of SEA policy into practice prone to individualistic yet confusing interpretations of SEA among actors, which further impedes the implementation of SEA. Due to the conceptual ambiguity, the UN, NGOs, and other agencies still endorse the predominant representation of women as victims rather than women as agents.

Contrary to the initial purpose of SEA, “by focusing on the technocratic elements of responding to SEA,… the international community appears to be taking concrete steps to address SEA, while inadvertently reinforcing the image of local women and children as victims and undermining more nuanced responses to SEA” (Westendorf and Searle 2017, 384). By limiting

SEA to an administrative issue without challenging the gendered nature of the UN as well as the local gender norms which regulate and oppress the femininity of women, the practice of SEA does not eliminate the allegations of sexual violence by UN personnel, but further compounds the stigmatization in communities faced by women who fail to hold the purity of their femininity tarnish the integrity and survival of their nation and communities.

If women’s lived experiences and life trajectories are more than what we see through particular discourses and categories, we have to return to listen to women’s stories and get ready to question the categories and their underlying assumptions informed by particular perspectives and theories. In the next section, I would like to use two stories, those of Lily from Oecussi and

A8 from Dili, to show how women confirm or disconfirm the categories and assumed meanings of femininity in the dominant discourses within the UN policy and Timorese society. Lily from the rural area and A8 from the urban area do not occupy the same social and political positions in society, but they both use stories and narratives to make sense of their stories and self-identities.

Through narratives, women construct different meanings and categories to identify themselves as

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well as relate themselves to different forms of masculinity. One of the most important things mentioned yet often downplayed in the literature is the heterogeneity of women in terms of their positionality, power, and agency as well as the complexity of their life experiences. Women’s identities have to be understood horizontally and vertically in their contexts of stories, since their stories reveal the continuity and change of self-identities and social-political positions in time and narratives in linear and non-linear sense. This can only be recovered by women’s own narratives. Narrative, I argue, is not only a powerful tool used by women as the technologies of the self to exercise their agency and power, but also as a vehicle for women to negotiate and renegotiate the power positions and social relations between women and others in the sociolinguistic contexts. Only acknowledging the normative dimension of narrative that we can go beyond the tendency of using narrative as a descriptive tool to present women’s various experiences.

Story 1

Femininity shapes identities of women. These identities tend to be performed and naturalized by people who live in the society and represent women in particular ways. Identities reflect the sense of self and how people relate themselves to others. However, these identities and categories are socially constructed. They are not fixed nor stable. Women adopt these identities yet negotiate the meanings and even produce new identities to counteract the violence underling these stereotypes and categories of women defined by the dominant ideal of femininity. Women construct their self-identities, meanings of women, their power, and agency by navigating through their life challenges through story-telling.

Lily, a Chinese Timorese woman in her late 30s, officially married a Bosnian civilian police officer, Goran Susnja, in the Catholic Church of Oecussi in 2002. She has a 14-year-old kid with him. She went back to Bosnia with him after they were married, but one day he asked

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her to come back to Timor-Leste. She was pregnant at the time. After her return to Timor, he told her to never come back again. He did not give any compensation for them. In 2009, she reported her case to the UN along with the assistance of a lawyer from Kosovo, Carolyn Julie Graydon.

However, she heard nothing from the UN nor has she received any compensation since 2009.

She wanted to know the mechanism to get the compensation through the interview.

During the interview with Lily, she constructed her identities as a legal wife and a mother who cared and loved deeply for her son. As to the perception of others about her, according to

Lily, people say “malae nian (of foreigners)” to her. They mean that Lily belongs to foreigners.

She is not a woman by herself but belongings of someone from outside the society. They use a metaphor to describe the power difference between foreigners and Timorese, as well as the fate of abandonment for women like her: “Malae use the airplane to fly, and you just stay here”

(Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). This means that no matter how hard she tries, there is always a barrier between her and her foreigner counterpart. In her stories, nevertheless, instead of affirming the power difference from her foreign husband, she repeatedly emphasized her identity in relation to her husband with their bond: she is a legal wife of her husband because they marry in the church officially and they are recognized by all her family and community: “We were married in the Church and recognized by all, including the friends of my husband” (Nehu, Lily.

2017. July 14).

In addition to her emphasis of self-identities as a legal wife recognized by the Church and the community, she affirmed her identity as a mother who took the responsibility of taking care of her son. When her son was questioned by people about the absence of his father, he always asked his mom: “Why my father does not want me?” Lily told him: “I married to a man formally, I don’t know why he did not want you” (Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). She said that even

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though people understand their problem, she still felt sad when she thought of the fatherlesshood of her son. She burst into tears when she talked about her son. She is a proud and sad mother at the same time: she is proud because “my son is very smart at school” (Nehu, Lily. 2017. July

14); she is sad because she worries about the future of her son without any child support from his legal father. In her email correspondence with me, Lily told me: “Above all what I need is only for my kid not for me” (Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). By prioritizing her son above her, her identity as a legal wife is secondary to her identity as a mother.

Lily’s construction of self-identities as a legal wife and a caring and worrying mother in her stories might seem to confirm the traditional role of women as a housewife and a mother in a patriarchal society. However, Lily does not really fit the image of a passive and powerless woman who is helpless and powerless and can only depend on her partner. Economically, her identities shift from a housewife who has nothing to a working mom: “My parents don’t give anything to me. They opened a restaurant here. Before I had difficulties but now I work” (Nehu,

Lily. 2017. July 14). Even though she still has difficulties in paying for her son’s education, she is able to work to support him. Politically, she went beyond her identity as a wife and mother in the household by changing her identity to a legal beneficiary and a defender of her rights fighting against male peacekeepers and the UN through reporting her case to the UN. She requested the help from the UN to force the father to provide child support for her son by submitting the complaint about Goran to the UN. In her letter sent to the UN, she said,

“I took him to the court, I do not Goran to do this again in another UN mission impregnating a local woman then irresponsible running away, we shouldn’t make it so easy for him to abandon his legal legitimate wife and child, I have all the necessary to support my case…

I implore you to help me write an official letter to Goran requesting him to provide child support

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for my son which I am legally entitled to by law” (Nehu, Lily. 2009. Lily’s letter from the email correspondence of Edward Rees, April 27).

Lily’s stories demonstrate how women use stories to (re)negotiate their roles and identities and their meanings as an abandoned woman and single-mother in relation to others.

Story 2

Another example which demonstrates that Timorese women apply the technologies of the self to tell different stories of the self from stories told by other people and the UN is A8.

A8, who is a single-mother of three children and a career woman in her late forties, chose to have her informal relationship with a UN staff member in the communication unit in 2005 because she wanted a daughter. She had a daughter with him. They were not married because the guy already had his wife in another country. Even though her partner agreed to pay for child support and made a contract with her to reaffirm his promise to her and her daughter, he left and failed to keep his promises. Although A8 did not have full control over her partner and her relationship, she has been conscious about her behavior and she has reflected on her experiences of relationships for more than a decade. Her identities are constructed differently in different phases of her life in her stories, while her sense of power and her stances against her family, other Timorese women as well as the UN are reconstructed. By retelling her story, she redefines her relationships with other Timorese as well as (re)identifies herself with other women in society against the UN personnel who are (ir)responsible for these women.

In her story, A8 is aware that the peacekeepers play a vital role in determining whether a relationship with Timorese women is good or bad. She reflected on her and her friends’ experiences of relationships with the UN personnel. “One women was taken to other countries, and the other’s kid was brought to other countries.” In both positive cases of relationships, “they

(the UN personnel) are responsible.” By referring to a case she heard, she suggested that

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Timorese women might be the victims of the peacekeepers if peacekeepers do not behave well:

“I think they have to act in a good way, not bring problems to Timorese women, especially

AIDS. One woman (police woman) just died from UN people. UN has to screen those people, if not, other women will become victims.” In her narrative, the relationships between Timorese women and peacekeepers are power hierarchical, since women do not have control whether peacekeepers will behave well or not.

Similar to Lily, A8 reaffirms her role and identity as a mother and her major concern as her daughter in the relationship. “I don't care about myself but my daughter. I wanted her to study in international school.” Different from Lily, she constructs her identity as a victim of injustice in her relationship, even though it is a voluntary relationship based on mutual consent.

She said she felt she was treated unfairly by her partner, and she did not like people lying. “I didn't need him to marry or give money to me. But he said that he will take full responsibility for the kid or family name.” She went to the UN and tried to file the case against her partner.

Intriguingly, later on, she transformed herself from a victim of her relationship to a defendant of justice: “I sent my complaint to the UN and people asked me how much I need. I said $300. It can be increased." During the interview, she also asked me if there is any law dealing with this problem” (A8. 2017. August 2).

As a woman who has an informal relationship with a foreigner and mothers a child, she knew that she could not control how other Timorese might perceive her, including her parents and her other family members. She constructed her identities as a daughter and a family member yet defied the categories of a daughter and a family member who are required to follow the order and the will of her father and the whole family. “At the beginning when I was pregnant, my father could not accept. But we two had argued. I don't want to care about what my family

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thinks. God, my father, and my mother are the most important thing to me. I don't want to curse about how other family think. I decide only for myself” (A8. 2017. August 2). A8 related her self-identities to others and she did not totally abandon those social identities imposed on her.

However, she decided to what extent she needed to conform to these identities and responsibilities as a daughter and family member through retelling her motivation of having a relationship with him and her life story: “They gossiped, but I said, ‘I got married in my previous marriage. I got two kids, one daughter died after three days she was born. Because my daughter died, I asked the Jamaican guy to give me a daughter. I asked a baby from him” (A8. 2017.

August 2). A8 always felt the pain from the loss of her first daughter. As a result, to heal the pain, she decided to ask the guy to give her a daughter, and the guy agreed. Her arguments with her father and other family member she recalled in her interview do not just reflect their disagreement about her decisions, but also how she renegotiates her responsibilities as a daughter and a family member by justifying her decisions and redefining a new sense of responsibility to herself.

Although she does not have control over her partner and how others perceive her, A8 reinstitutes her identity, strength, and power as a single-mother by siding herself with other

Timorese women who have similar situations and problems like her in her story: “Casa Musica's owner is also married to a malae (foreigner). She is a strong woman. She asked her husband to support her every month. I think I have to be strong. I have no other ways. I have to be responsible. They (her kids) made me strong. They (kids) are my strength. That's what I am doing. I want to be confident” (A8. 2017. August 2). A different sense of power and agency is constructed in her story not simply because she has a responsibility to her children, but she draws her power from stories of other women in similar situations.

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There is also an element of time which plays a role affecting her identity change in her narrative when A8 restated her story to me. Her identities as a single-mother and working woman are not stable and fixed. Rather, they are subject to change with the flow of time, which further affects her sense of power and agency in terms of supporting her daughter in the future:

“I can still overcome challenge and still support my daughter. I am 46-year-old now. My daughter is 11-year-old. I don't know if I can still support her while I am aging. That's why it's not easy for me” (A8. 2017. August 2).

Discussion of Narratives

Women Are More Than Victims

In the narratives of Lily and A8, women do not describe themselves as victims, but their stories demonstrate that women are victimized by their relationships in their social contexts. It seems impossible to distinguish SEA and non-SEA cases in sexual relationships. All women are victims and non-victims. Moreover, the categories and assumptions of SEA might render different forms of violence invisible with its emphasis on sexual violence. In fact, Marsha Henry reminds us that SEA focuses on only one form of power relation, which is power asymmetry between local women and peacekeepers. It is built on a racialized understanding of post-conflict society where women are always victims lacking agency. Therefore, SEA isolates itself from broader social contexts, which shape the perceptions of others toward the women and the space of women to express themselves. Moreover, by focusing on the relationships without noticing the social contexts which enable or restrain women’s agency, the agency of women might be easily overemphasized or undervalued. The stories of Timorese women show that women’s agency is also determined by others and social values and norms in addition to power relations between women and peacekeepers. In the Timorese context, women who are not married to

Timorese men and follow traditions of marriage and berlake (bride price) are considered as bad

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women risking the continuity of local traditions and families at the exchange of their own happiness. Women who are married to foreigners officially and have a lasting marriage will be accepted and even praised by locals, while women who marry to, have kids, and then become abandoned by foreigners are often stigmatized and gossiped about. At worst, some of them are cut off by their families, become isolated, and lose all support. In sum, women’s victimized experiences are not just affected by their UN partners, but also are constructed in congruence with gender norms along with other social-economic factors in their social contexts.

Women Are Embedded in Different Gender Relations and Ideas of Femininity

The social embeddedness of women further complicates the picture of women who have sex with the peacekeepers, since there could be different forms of femininity for women to relate to, identify, and make sense of their relationships from different positions. However, women have been silent due to the simple representation of women as victims in peacekeeping discourse and the perpetuation of a single story about women’s suffering in peacekeeping in post-conflict

Timor-Leste. Silence of women can be a symptom of broader violence of peacekeeping in post- conflict Timor-Leste, even though such a violence is not always explicitly expressed and exhausted in the form of sexual violence by peacekeepers defined in SEA. Some feminists tend to use military masculinity to explain the occurrence of violence against women in post-conflict society. It makes sense in two ways: on the one hand, the perpetuation of violence in post- conflict society might be when “a state is dominated by the military and its norms” (Robinson

2011, 240–41). On the other hand, military masculinity tends to be used to explain the military violence against civilian. In the examples of peacekeeping, it explains the violence against local populations in host countries. However, focusing on military masculinity loses sight of different forms of masculinity constructed in society and individual soldiers (Higate and Henry 2004). Not

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to mention that there is no space for agency of women since they are always subordinate to the suppression of military masculinity.

Knowing the various construction of masculinity is important to understand how the femininity of women and the social positions of women are variously constructed yet represented selectively only if femininity conforms to the restraints of dominant masculine values and traits.

In Timor-Leste, women are mainly considered as caregivers and nurturers and hold a prominent place in society. Men are protectors of women, but when they fail to do so, their masculinity is shaken. It is on this point that sexual violence is a useful weapon to strike men’s masculine identities by targeting femininity. Sexual violence is “a way of reaffirming masculinity”

(Skjelsbaek 2001, 79). Sexual violence in SEA is “a necessary or desirable element of the performance of masculinity” (Westendorf and Searle 2017, 375). The emphasis on fulfilling the concept of masculinity through sexual violence suggests the continuum of violence until the end of war, which might be conducted by peacekeepers, police, or militias. In fact, in Timor-Leste,

“T-shirts were sold with the logo ‘Feel Safe Tonight: Sleep with a Peacekeeper’” (“La’o

Hamutuk in the News - T-Shirt” 2001). Masculinity shapes the space where women express their femininity as well as forms of their expression. Retrieving different forms of masculinities obscured by military masculinity allows some room for discussing femininity in different forms of gendered relationships. Different forms of femininity suggest the various construction of meanings of femininity embodied in identities of women. I identity different ideas of femininity in four kinds of discourses: the UN SEA policies, the engagement of peacekeeping discourses by feminist security scholars, the societal discourse of Timor-Leste, and women’s stories. In Ch. 2, I find that femininity means women as victims and prostitutes under SEA, while it means peacemakers, victims, and home nurturers and caregivers to feminist scholars. In this chapter, I

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discover that femininity means good women who are caregivers, nurturers, and partners of

Timorese men rather than of foreigners in societal dominant discourses, and women’s stories further complicate the ideas and meanings of femininity in individual contexts of women.

The Danger of Single Narrative and Representation of Women as Gendered and Racial Subjects

The dominant idea of masculinity and femininity frames women who have sex with peacekeepers as racialized and sexualized subjects while at the same time forbidding some women to access and embody the ideal femininity. Marsha Henry helps add a racial and colonial component to SEA and broader peacekeeping discourse based on Razack’s understanding of prostitute as colonial violence. This adds another layer of race and geopolitics in addition to gender in terms of sex to complicate our understanding of women who engage in voluntary sex situated in broader gender structure constitutive of gender relations. To summarize, Razack focuses on prostitute and military men. Razack argues that prostitute as “a form of colonial violence,” which “works to determine the power relations between and among men and women, but through the intersection of capitalism and colonialism” (Henry 2013, 129). Henry relates

Razack’s prostitute as a form of colonial violence to peacekeeping context and argues that local women in peacekeeping are “always viewed in a racially inferior and sexually suspect manner and cannot take up a position as agentic subjects” (Henry 2013, 129). Razack and Henry bring insights to the representation of women who have sexual relationships with peacekeepers in peacekeeping discourse. Women in voluntary relationships which is confused with transactional sex under SEA could be easily framed as prostitutes, which carries the meaning that women who are racialized subjects in white men’s imagination are always ready to take the space of prostitution. However, while Razack and Henry point out the role of colonial power which mediates local women who have sex with peacekeepers in perpetuating women’s victimized

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image, they underestimate the effects of discourse of peacekeeping: it not only circulates the colonial and racial representation of women globally through discursive function, but also indoctrinates men and women in the First and Third World to accept the idea that women in

Third World states are “prostitutes” who are racially inferior and sexually suspect. SEA discourse along with peacekeeping which only mentions gender difference and sexual subjects of women reaffirms the representation of women as victims who do not possess agency. What is worse, it leaves out “geopolitics and race” since it only focuses on one form of power relations: gender in terms of sex. Reading gender in sex does not help challenge but reaffirms the status of women as prostitutes of peacekeepers (Henry 2013, 133).

Different identities of women are constructed in discourses of the UN SEA policies, feminist scholars, society, and women’s own stories. In the dominant discourses of UN SEA policies and the discussions of women’s situations in relation to peacekeepers by feminist security scholars, women tend to be described as victims: the UN SEA policies portray women as exploited and abused victims regardless of the fact whether women are in voluntary or forced relationships, while feminist scholars present women as gendered, racialized and colonial victims. In contrast, women’s stories present different identities of women which are left out by the academic and the UN discourses. The societal dominant discourses categorize women as good women who are caregivers and nurturers whereas men as breadwinners, or bad women in terms of sluts and slaves of foreigners when women have relationships with peacekeepers. In other words, women have to be caregivers, nurturers, and have relationships with Timorese men in order to be good women from the societal perspective. Women’s own stories further demonstrate various identities women use to describe themselves, such as women, legal wives, mothers, daughters, working women, and litigants. Apparently, the dominant discourses and the

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representation of women as gendered or racialized victims are not enough to capture the social and economic roles of women in contexts, let alone the agency of women which tends to be denied by the dominant discourses in the first place.

Categories of victims/non-victims in SEA policy of the UN as well as categories of women as mothers and wives in traditional Timorese society tend to represent women as powerless, passive, and docile actors who lack agency compared to men. Moreover, women are stigmatized and silenced by these categories and their assumptions. Nevertheless, in women’s own life stories, women do not describe themselves as victims based on the definition of SEA policy. Moreover, women do not always identify themselves as wives and mothers. Women tend to give different meanings to them or highlight one category from the other in different contexts.

Sometimes women construct new identities for themselves without abandoning traditional ones.

However, traditional and new identities might not be necessarily compatible. The inconsistency between single story and its representation of women as victims as well as women’s life stories rings the alarm about the limitations of our perceptions informed by categories and theories in shaping our understandings of women’s lived experiences, and how women’s experiences help construct and reconstruct their and our perceptions.

The above narratives demonstrate that women use narratives to construct and reconstruct their identities and relations to others in the discourse of peacekeeping. Women can speak their truth by applying the technologies of the self, which helps foreground the agency of women in the stories. In reality, the meaning of agency is complicated, and it varies among women. To show the diversity and complexity among women of agency, I will further discuss how 17 women I interviewed perceive themselves and their relationships in the next section.

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Women’s Perceptions of Self and Relationships in Their Narratives

Now I would like to discuss how women I interviewed perceive themselves and their relationships. Women make sense of their relationships in different ways. Here I demonstrate how women understand their experiences of relationships differently under seven dimensions: meanings of (in)security in post-conflict society, how sexual relationships end, motivations of having a relationship, the impacts of relationships to women, the attitude and action of women tackling their relationships in urban and rural areas, the reasons of non-report or under-report, and the degree and strategies women utilize to resist those gender norms and cope with their impacts on women. Although I try to let their narratives lead the discussion, I am the one who interpret and present their stories to show how contexts and individual agency are mutually constructed.

Meanings of (In)security

Women’s (in)security is contingent with many different factors, such as social and cultural norms, political-economic structure, and military masculinity intersecting with gender, which codetermine how women perceive their relationships. Forbidding sex through SEA will not necessarily ensure women’s security in post-conflict societies if these contextual factors are not taken into account. Women’s insecurity and security are directly and indirectly affected by peacekeepers. Although a few women feel protected by peacekeepers in terms of making a difference in establishing order and peace, such as A1 and A6, many of them express their concerns about the capability and responsibility of peacekeepers in terms of protecting local women. A6 and A8 expressed their concerns about the connection between HIV/AIDS and peacekeepers. In addition to peacekeepers, women’s insecurity is affected by social and economic structures. Many women suffer from social stigmatization by labeled as “doll to be used” (A6. 2017. June 1), “a slut of malae” (A3. 2017. August 5), “hot girl” (A6. 2017. June 1),

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or “malae nian (of foreigners),” which further causes psychological downturn as well as loss of family support and health (A3. 2017. June 1). Women do not have consensual meaning of relationships in their accounts.

The stories of women show how the discourse determines the reality of women who live in. The way women and others who live in the same society make sense of the relationships between peacekeepers and women is gendered, which has its source and connection with the broader SEA and peacekeeping discourse. Gender functions on women’s body and femininity, local perceptions about peacekeeping, and global ideology of peacekeeping. Timorese women affirm the mutual construction of gender and (in)security in their stories of relationships integral to broader global discourse of SEA and peacekeeping. Although peacekeeping might be initially designed to protect women, in practice it seems to render women more insecure psychologically, emotionally, and physically, which is compounded by failing to implement SEA and lack of an awareness of gendered cultural, economic, and social structures where women are situated in

SEA policy.

Reasons of Ending Relationships

Second, most of their relationships, including official marriages, end because of one of the following reasons: death, family intervention, pursuit of short-term pleasure instead of long- term relationships, disappearance of male partners, religions, cheating.

While some cases are out of human control (death of women and retreat of peacekeepers from Timor), others are subjected to individual or social factors (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26;

A11. 2017. August 6). Individually, Timorese women have power to begin and finish a relationship because they know what they want and what they don’t want, such as A14 and A9.

Socially, family and the Catholic religion play an important role in affecting women’s decision whether to continue their relationships. Intriguingly, although each relationship is different, there

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seems to be some overlapping sectors in stories of A9 and A17, since both involve religious difference and family concerns. However, religious difference has totally different meanings in both women’s contexts. For A17, converting one’s religious belief signals abandonment of original religion and birth family. A17’s family did not support her relationship because they worried that family will not be able to stay together. In contrast, for A9, even though her then- boyfriend was willing to follow local traditions to ask for her family’s permission to marry her, her father rejected him not so much because of her separation from her family but more about the fact that her Nigerian boyfriend is a Muslim, an “other” who is not the same as most Catholic

Timorese. Stories of A9 and A17 also demonstrate that family, especially father figure, matters in intervening in decision-making of women on whether to continue their relationship with peacekeepers or not.

Another worthy point to be discussed is the embedded and changing agency of women in the precarious situation of relationship. In A11’s story, even though she already got married to her partner and got pregnant, she had no control over him to make him stay when he decided to leave her. She also got no child support from him. Her story highlights the power asymmetry between local women and peacekeepers, since her husband possessed more power in terms of physical mobility and financial capability to come and go. Her understanding of power is reaffirmed when she asked me to look for her missing husband because I “have more mobility to travel globally” (A11. 2017. August 6). In addition, her story indicates the embeddedness and changeability of agency of women in local contexts. In her relationship, A11 was the one who decided to have her relationship and she defended it against her family. In the beginning of her relationship, A11 was warned by her family: “When you get married with them (foreigners), after the mission finishes they go. That will be a problem. They will never come back” (A11.

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2017. August 6). Her brother even threatened to separate them. In spite of the tension with her family, she stood up for herself and continued her relationship with her husband. I read this part as evidence of her exercise of agency. However, agency is enabled or limited depending on the contexts. A11’s agency became limited when her relationship ended. After her husband left her without leaving her any money, she needed to take all the financial responsibility for herself and her daughter. She earned $50 a month and she found it very difficult to take care of her daughter with her limited income. During our interview, she mentioned that she used to like dressing up and putting on makeup, but now she did not have money nor time to do this.

Reasons of Women Entering the Voluntary Relationships with the Peacekeepers

The third difference of women lies in why women choose to have a relationship with peacekeepers are contingent on women. All women I interviewed did not begin the relationship for better material life but for other reasons other than survival concerns, although they mentioned some women did in the hope of a better life and future. None of these women were forced into the relationship.

The reasons behind women’s choices to have short-term or long-term relationships with peacekeepers could be: love and attraction, baby, fun, better life or future, work-related relationship. Women cope with and even rework their relations with peacekeepers against stigmatizations through their stories by describing their relationships as “a relationship based on love” (A11. 2017. August 6), “a legal relationship” (A17. 2017. August 5), “formal relationship”

(Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). In spite of recognizing women’s agency in telling their stories, we should not deny that women are subjected to risks of being victims of SEA due to power hierarchy and immunity of peacekeepers. A1 mentioned one disturbing case of SEA in the interview, “In Lautem (Lospalos) Municipality, there is a woman who had a baby with a peacekeeper. The peacekeepers use to come often to her place. However, the woman has mental

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illness, she is not normal like us, general people. So we do not know exactly whether the baby is a peacekeeper’s or somebody else’s baby…Yes, the baby looks like Korean. Because in our place, Lospalos, peacekeepers are from Korea” (A2. 2017. July 31). Similarly, Lily also told me that there is another Timorese woman who has been with a Russian peacekeeper, Nona Tome, who lives in Oebau, Oecussi. However, she has mental disease. Therefore, she is not sure if she can have interview with us. None of these two cases were reported because women do not have agency to report themselves. None of these peacekeepers involved in having sex with women who have mental illness were punished by SEA, although they seem to be a clear case of SEA.

Women’s various reasons for beginning and developing relationships with peacekeepers also expand our understanding of power asymmetry between peacekeepers and local people in host countries, mostly the Third World states, by connecting to broader colonialism, racism, and global economic structure. Power asymmetry does not only exist between local women and peacekeepers, but also between peacekeepers and other local women and men. Henry reminds us that “the colonizing gaze that peacekeeping institutions come with to postconflict countries has an especially powerful effect on the local populations, especially in relation to the stereotypes of different groups of peacekeepers and how they might be perceived to be more or less masculine”

(Henry 2013, 134). This suggests that other practices in peacekeeping operations might be exploitive and abusive, even though they do not gain enough attention from SEA policy.

Although some peacekeepers live in the UN compound, “peacekeepers with their own accommodation usually hire domestic workers to clean and/or cook” (Henry 2013, 134). This part is confirmed in some women’s stories, as stories of Jenny’s mother and A17 illustrate. It is not clear whether these women are exploited due to underpay or overwork, which is not sexually oriented but is not tackled in SEA. Moreover, it is possible that peacekeepers sexually and

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financially exploit local women in post-conflict society. In the case of A16, she mentioned that she had a short-term relationship with a Fijian peacekeeper because she “had to work” (A16

2017). Her need of this job which also involves her in this sexual relationship with a Fijian peacekeeper in the UN compound in 2005 where she worked indicates the possibility that women might have relationships with peacekeepers because they have to. She did not report him at all even though both of them worked in the UN compound, where SEA should be able to apply unconditionally. That Fijian peacekeeper left her when she was two-months pregnant in

December 2005. When I asked her whether she had contact with him, she said “I live in rural area and I have no contact with people from outside. How could I find my partner?” From my understanding, her words expressed clearly the power asymmetry between her and people from outside.

Unintended Consequences of Relationships on Women

The fourth difference among women comes from how the relationships with UN personnel affect women in which way and to to what degree after their relationships end.

Relationships did not really end with the retreat of their UN partners but continue to impact women. The impacts on women vary ranging significantly from elevating social and economic condition, no impact at all, to totally losing financial and familial support. Their post-relationship life largely depends on how well women and their children are perceived and accepted (or not) by other people in the society. Equally important is the financial status of women, which has a significant influence on rural and urban women. I find 5 forms of negative influences, 2 forms of positive influences, and no influence below according to women’s stories. These negative impacts include gossip by neighbors or family members (A6. 2017. August 5), stigmatization of women as a slut, whore, and slave (A3. 2017. August 5; A14. 2017. June 9; A13. 2017. August

5), emotional burdens (fear, anger, sadness, and shame) (A11. 2017. August 6; A8. 2017. August

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2; A3. 2017. August 5), loss of financial resources (A5. 2017. July 21), loss of family support or being in community (A3. 2017. August 5; A6. 2017. August 5). The positive impacts contain elevated social and economic status of women as well as better life in another country (A6. 2017.

August 5; A14. 2017. June 9). A12 is the only interviewee who felt that peacekeepers did not have any influence in her life at all.

In addition to confirming some negative consequences of peacekeepers/peacekeeping mentioned by the literature, such as stigmatization of women, women’s stories add more layers and dimensions to the post-relationship life of women. One is about the referent of stigmatization. For example, stigmatization is not limited to women but also refers to their children with peacekeepers. A13 met people who mocked the dark skin color of her daughter

“like a monkey” (A13. 2017. August 5). Not all women feel that themselves or their children are stigmatized even though their children possess different skin color compared to other Timorese.

A12’s daughter has dark skin but her siblings and other children at school are fine with it.

Another is fatherlesshood of peacekeepers babies. The questions these “peacekeeper babies” encounter indicate fatherlesshood of these children might be a source of stigmatization or curiosity of local people as well as source of pain of women. In Lily’s case, her son got questions like this from people at school, therefore he asked his mom, “why my father does not want me?”

(Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). Lily cried when she thought of her son’s fatherless situation because his father did not want him. In addition to stigmatization and fatherlesshood of peacekeepers babies, women’s stories challenge the dominant discourse where portrays women as powerless actors who can only benefit from having sex with peacekeepers in exchange of material goods or money. The fact that women might lose their financial and familial support due to their relationships in Timorese women’s experiences does not totally fit the dominant discourse of

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exchanging sex for food and other basic needs. On the contrary, women could risk losing their financial and familial support because of how local people and their families look down on women and their relationships, such as A3 and A6’s friend. However, stories also show that other forms of sexual exchange exist not in the form of sex for food as stories of friends of A6 and A14 demonstrate. Women could have better future by living abroad or getting compensation after the relationship ends.

Although women might not just be victims of peacekeepers, women’s stories highlight the disproportionate negative impacts of peacekeepers on women compared to positive ones in relationships. SEA tends to exclude women as victims who have voluntary relationships with peacekeepers from the group of victims due to the mutual consent of women and peacekeepers regardless of the contexts. However, my interviews show that although women are not obviously sexually exploited or abused by peacekeepers in voluntary relationships, they suffer and continue to suffer psychologically, physically, financially, and emotionally in their society during and after the relationships. This is especially true for women who are burdened with the care of children as single-mothers while not getting any support from their UN partners. Different forms of suffering coming from or after the relationships indicate the limitation of SEA in protecting women which focuses on sexual exploitation and abuse of women rather than other harms imposed on women in different forms. Feelings of deception, abandonment, unfairness, anger, sadness, shame, and pain cold be invoked from the relationships, which are compounded by other social and economic factors. These harms caused by peacekeepers might be perpetuated by women within themselves, since nowhere in SEA or organizations assist women to cope with their emotional pains and sufferings. What is more worrying is that these sufferings and pain

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might be passed down to their children and family and thus deepen the distrust between local people and peacekeepers in host countries.

Women’s experiences not only point out the murky line between exploitive and non- exploitive relationships under the vague and broad definition of SEA, but also highlight continuous impacts of the UN peacekeepers interacting with the gender after they left. Women do not directly suffer from peacekeepers per se, but they are also affected by how they are perceived by others in the society and how others react to them. Women’s stories of relationships indicate that SEA is not and will not be effective since it does not consider social and economic factors which are equally important in affecting women’s well-being and happiness. More worrying is that the underlying assumptions of SEA which frames women as racialized and sexualized subjects might be circulated, indoctrinating local people and people outside Timor-

Leste to the representation of local women as slaves or prostitutes of peacekeepers.

Difference between Women in Urban and Rural areas

The fifth difference within women is the attitude and action of women tackling their relationships in urban and rural areas. Women in urban and rural areas deal with their post- relationship life differently for different reasons.

Urban women do not report because they do not think it is necessary or they lack trust in the government, NGOs, or the UN. A12 can support herself therefore she did not report. A7 does not seek help from the government and she also felt tired of waiting on the government to take action.

In contrast, rural women are prone to report, but they mostly do not report because they lack information or do not know how they can access help or people who might possess the knowledge about their situation. Lily and A13 from Oecussi and Suai already reported but have

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still not received a reply from the UN or their ex-partners. A3 and A11 wanted to report to the

UN but they did not know how.

Reasons of Non-report or Under-report of Women

The sixth difference is demonstrated in their reasons of non-report or under-report, which explains why the cases of voluntary relationships are usually underreported as well as the why the numbers of allegations are unreliable. Many women were interviewed by foreign researchers for the first time, but they were open and overtly talk about love, sex, marriage and relationship with a researcher from outside individually. This is different from the image of docile, loyal, shy, and voiceless Timorese women as mothers and housewives. They have their own opinions toward peacekeepers/peacekeeping. They also take actions in reaction to their relationships.

However, collectively, most women do not want to or hesitate to publicize their situations by reporting their situations to the UN, the government, or other NGOs due to one or more of the following reasons: distrust of the UN, local NGOs, or the government (A8. 2017. August 2; A7.

2017. July 21; A15. 2016. July 25), choosing informal mechanism of reconciliation instead of formal one (A3. 2017. August 5), no need of doing so (A8. 2017. August 2), remarry or date man

(A2. 2017. July 31), fear of being exposed to the public (A2. 2017. July 31), no access to the UN

(A3. 2017. August 5; A16. 2017. August 5; A11. 2017. August 6).

The non-report or under-report of cases to the public should not be discounted as

Timorese women’s powerless or passive reaction to their situations in post-conflict societies.

Timorese women have their identities and their ways of living constructed through gender norms in their society, which shapes their femininity in relation to different forms of masculinity.

Women have to conform to masculine values and rules rather than confronting their problems or stigmatizations deriving from their relationships, such as following the wills of their male partners or family members to unreport their cases, or adopt traditional mechanism of dispute

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resolution to mediate and reconcile with all involved actors. Transgression of these values, rules, and norms always entails consequences by being labelled as unmarriable or datable material, or shame of the family, or whores. Women’s stories show that although they suspect the capability of formal institutions and rules in providing assistance or improve their situations, some of them still want to resort to these institutions to gain more information, knowledge, and assistance.

Women’s agency and power in such a context could be enabled by formal institutions and procedures.

Embedded Agency and Power of Women in Everyday Life

The agency and power of women are revealed in their everyday life. Sarah Spencer once argues that “in the context of the distorted power dynamics present in conflict, the expression of agency involved in exchanging sex for material goods and protection masks the fact that ‘these exploitive circumstances do not involve real choices’” (2005, 171). What she suggests is that women cannot make choices for themselves in the power relationships between peacekeepers and themselves in the context of conflict. I wonder if this is the case of women in Timor-Leste.

My interviews of women demonstrate that although gender norms are predicated on women’s body and identity, which makes women unable to transgress those norms and identity easily, women are not totally subject to gender norms. Instead, women constantly navigate their roles and spaces of agency of femininity in relation to masculinity with regards to social, economic, and political structures in their everyday life. Their navigation of power through everyday life is not embodied in the form of speaking up for themselves or confrontation in public but through the ways allowed and enabled in their cultures and traditions. Women who live in patriarchal societies dominated by masculine values and masculinities have to perform femininity to avoid consequences of failing to do so. Such an understanding and action based on knowledge from within can only be understood by centering women’s experiences shaped in particular social-

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economic-political contexts. Therefore, rather than victims or disempowered subjects of power, women do endorse agency to challenge the simple victimized representation in peacekeeping. I demonstrate the agency and power of Timorese women in the following three aspects: negotiation of their femininity with men, society, and institutions; post-conflict political economy, violence, and women’s security; and different strategies of resistance and contestation against power.

Negotiation of Their Femininity with Different Men, Society, and Institutions

First, my interviews with women show how Timorese women passively or actively negotiate their femininity with men, society, and institutions on a daily basis. With men, here I refer to their UN partners in particular, Timorese women have no control over when their partners come into their life, how long they stay, whether they will take care of them, and when the relationships end, but most of them consciously choose how to respond to their situations.

Women might seem passive in steering the direction of their life in their relationships. For example, A16, a 49-year-old single-mother originally from Suai, met her then-partner, a Fijian peacekeeper, and had a son in 2005. “It’s a short relationship and it’s human nature. It happens”

(A16. 2017. August 5). She also did not think that she could locate where he is and make him take the responsibility of a father; therefore, she did nothing but raise her son alone.

Women might have no control to make their UN partners stay and take the responsibility as a father or partner, but women do take preventive action to protect themselves, even earlier than the passing of the zero tolerance policy in the UN. A13 from Suai met a UNPOL from

Nigeria in 2001 and had a baby with him in 2002. When she told him she was pregnant, he told her to have an abortion, which really broke her heart. She did not want to do it. Since then she has developed some fear and sense of insecurity. When she was 3-6 months pregnant, she went

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to the police station and filed a complaint against him because she thought “the guy will escape”

(A13. 2017. August 5).

Not all women are shy from asking for what they want in a consensual relationship. A8, a

46-year-old single-mother currently living in Dili, mentioned that she and her then-partner, a UN officer working in the communication unit, agreed to have a child before they began the relationship. Before she met him, she had a marriage in Kupang, Indonesia. Her first daughter from that marriage died soon “three days after she was born” (A8. 2017. August 2). The pain of losing her beloved daughter was always inside of her, which caused her to make an unusual request to her UN partner. The guy was already married in his country at the time, but he promised to take care of A8 and her daughter. They did not get married officially. The guy left

Timor-Leste before the crisis started in 2006. They met a few times but then he disappeared.

Nevertheless, what should be noted is that the power asymmetry between the UN personnel and local women embedded in voluntary relationships is present in spite of women’s agency. A8’s story, which demonstrated her “sexual agency,” had a twist later on. A8 and her guy made a contract letter, which indicates that every month he will send $300/month. But at the end of the day he only paid her for 1.5 year and then he disappeared. A8 recalled his financial capability: “The guy earned $2500/month. He can do anything” (A8. 2017. August 2). She also pointed out the immunity of the peacekeepers: she reported her case to the UN office, and asked around but there seems no law making him take the responsibility as a father. Until now her partner has not paid for her daughter’s child support nor visited them.

In Lily’s case, power superiority of peacekeepers is shown in the form of immunity rather than disparate income or mobility compared to local women. After her Bosnian husband abandoned her and her son, she went to the UN and reported her case in the hope of getting her

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husband to pay for child support for her son. She mentioned that she did not understand why the

UN still “let him to get on to another mission” after her report. She also wondered how the UN can help her “because until now she did not receive any support” (Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14)

With society, where social norms and rules constrain and define the space of women to exercise their agency as well as the construction of identity, women usually conform to these norms and rules while resisting and renegotiating the meaning of femininity in subtle but different ways in their everyday life.

For instance, A8 is aware that her situation as an unmarried woman and a single-mother in Timorese society might bring her and her daughter some trouble, but she responded to them by following the religious rules and speaking up for herself. The femininity of women is relational to men who are father and husband. A father is crucial to document a child both in the

Catholic Church and the government. In the church, “After baptizing her, everything is accomplished. People did not talk much about the fatherless kid after the kid is baptized” (A8.

2017. August 2). In the family, A8 had some tensions with her father but she did not care about what other extended family members say.

Different from A8, who is able to negotiate her femininity and her role as a mother, a partner, a daughter, and a woman with her partner, family, and other people, A3 in the similar situation faced a lot of blaming, harassment, and denunciation from her ex-husband, her ex- husband’s family, and her own family members for not following the social norms. In 2001, A3 worked in Vulnerable Persons Unit (VPU) of PNTL, where she worked closely with Mamadu

Sila from Senegal who was posted to Timor-Leste during UNAMET to help socialize law to the local community. However, in 2001-2002 she was constantly harassed by her ex-husband who preferred her to “be with Timorese guys” and his family rather than having this relationship with

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this UN policeman. Her commander at the time helped initiate a mediation among A3, her ex- husband, and Mamadu Sila in order to reach a solution (A3. 2017. August 5). The solution indicated that she could not marry the guy from Senegal and she needed to end the relationship.

After the agreement was made, the guy left in 2002. She then requested her commander to transfer her from Dili to Suai. At the time she was already two-months pregnant with this police officer. Her ex-husband’s family kept blaming her by saying bad words about her: “Foreigners just want to give kids to you, not marry you.” Her family also denounced her for her behavior:

“You are so stupid to get the kid from the UN” and “You make our dignity dirty cause you live with the malae” (A3. 2017. August 5). Even though some Timorese guys wanted to marry her later on, she did not want to get married. Sometimes she feels that her “dignity does not exist anymore” (A3. 2017. August 5). A3’s case demonstrates that the identity and agency of women are deeply constructed and suppressed relational to masculinity.

With institutions, women demonstrate their mixed feelings in terms of the capability of the UN and NGOs to prevent SEA, address the negative consequences of peacekeeping operations, or protect Timorese women in general.

For A8, the UN is the source of problems but also the only institution she could seek help from for her problem. After her partner disappeared and stopped paying child support when her daughter was 2-years-old, A8 went to the UN and tried to file a case. Meanwhile, she is also concerned about the capability of the UN in protecting Timorese women. Some of her friends died because they got disease from the UN peacekeepers. Her perception of the UN comes from her or her friends’ experiences with the UN personnel. She wondered if there is any law within the UN dealing with her problem which can make him take care of her kid. The UN did not help her get child support but it helped her to solve her problem when some UN staff rented her house

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in 2009. “They bought some sports stuff, but I also paid for them. It means that they are my goods. But the end of the day they brought them with them when they moved out” (A8. 2017.

August 2). A8 brought this case to the UN office and the court. She won the case. In the end they paid the money and she kept one piece of equipment.

Similarly, A3 expressed her mixed feelings toward the UN. She said, “UN did many good and bad things. I began like this. We were poor at the time. The UN support the country economically. We expected the UN to help us, but they only brought kids to us” (A3. 2017.

August 5). She thinks that the UN has to “protect women to be respected” (A3. 2017. August 5).

She thinks “it is good” if I can advocate the case to the UN (A3. 2017. August 5). She also noticed the problem of immunity of the UN personnel and the incapability of the UN in preventing SEA. “This case should be based on Timorese law. Even though the guy does not work for the UN mission any more, he has to take the responsibility for his son” (A3. 2017.

August 5).

Post-conflict Political Economy, Violence, and Women’s Security

Second, women’s stories express their security concerns with regards to the political economy of a post-conflict society compounded by peacekeeping economy. On the one hand, peacekeepers interact with local population closely, though they show the characteristics of white colonizers, who have unequal pay and help prosper the sex economy. On the other hand, those stories show “bypassing” of peacekeepers in everyday life of local people, which not only helps sustain the presence of a peacekeeping operation in the host country but also isolate peacekeepers from understanding and interacting with the local a deeper level. Sex economy and daily bypassing render peacekeepers to be simultaneously “near and far” from the local, which ends up becoming one of the main security concerns of Timorese from the perspectives of local women.

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I draw on stories of A4 and A5 who worked as language assistants during UNMIT while having sexual relationships with UN staff and the UN personnel who came with the UN missions. They summarize the interrelatedness of post-conflict political economy and peacekeeping economy in their words. Such a post-conflict structure entangled with power relations brings peacekeepers closely to have sex with local women and the opportunity of consuming the service and goods provided by women in a peacekeeping economy, if not necessarily sex economy. A4 said, “In some part, they behaved good at office. On the other hand, they played with women. One negative side is that they played with women. Another negative thing is used UN cars to transport women who did not work at UN to bars and night clubs. In one case, one UN staff from Africa took a woman who was not UN staff. They got accident at Customs’ office, or front of Hotel Timor” (A4. 2017. July 21).

Adding on A4’s stories, A5 expressed her general thoughts about the physical and psychological distance between the UN personnel they work with and local staff: “They are good. We did not want to talk about something that we did not know. We only know what they are doing at work place. We do not know what they were doing outside of office” (A5. 2017.

July 21). However, she knew that the UN personnel might not always interact with local women for good purposes: “Some were good because they married the women who they impregnated.

Some did not take responsibility” (A5. 2017. July 21).

The feminization of post-conflict political economy indicates not only the increasing financial independence of women but also the possibility of increasing sexual violence against women. Although many women gain better education and salary, or replace the role of men as the breadwinner within the household in post-conflict society, women tend to be pushed back to follow pre-gender norms which defines “surviving women’s roles and rights as secondary to

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those of men” (Pankhurst 2003, 161). The presence of foreign military helps reinforce current gender norms and trigger the opportunity of sexual violence against women. A14 provided an example of a bar fight, which highlights the competition between different masculinities of local and foreign military personnel as well as the imposition of physical violence on femininity of women in the host country.

A Timorese guy likes a Timorese girl but she already has a boyfriend. One day he saw her in a bar (in Pentai Kelapa) next to Castway restaurant (mister quifer), he touched her butt. She was accompanied with some US military. The Timorese guy beat the girl and the US navy, then dragged her outside and forced her to be naked. Then the Timorese guy was punished by taking all his badges off (A14. 2017. June 9).

Peacekeeping in host countries tends to affirm the superiority of foreign masculinity compared to local ones, but not necessarily limited to the superiority of peacekeepers over women in sexual relationships. This example provided by A14 demonstrates the interconnectedness of capitalism, racism, and militarism in sites of peacekeeping operations. Not only local women are racialized, but also local men. In this story, the US navy is the protector of

Timorese women from the harassment of Timorese men. What is implicated is that local men have to be punished and civilized in peacekeeping. This resonates with Henry’s argument:

“Peacekeeping is not simply as an organic benevolent response to conflict but as a moral project and civilizing mission” (Henry 2013, 124). The incapability of local men to keep or protect their women in post-conflict societies might make men adopt sexual violence against women to validate the superiority of local masculinity to femininity. This tendency is further exacerbated by the militarization of the society. On the other hand, the sex economy along with peacekeeping economy reshapes not only material conditions of local populations but also how Timorese women perceive local and foreign men through comparison of both, since the local have more opportunities to be exposed to and access foreigners in peacekeeping missions, which indicates

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that femininity might be subjected to change in peacekeeping missions. But we should also bear in mind that the agency of women is mediated through gender in social contexts. The agency of women is often expressed in women’s behavior and perceptions in relation to features and values of masculinity and femininity. This renegotiation of femininity might suggest racialization of local men in relation to peacekeepers for being more or less masculine. According to A14,

Timorese guys are very rude, jealous, and no responsibility. Some don’t respect women. They fight with each other. When they are married, they have babies, they beat the girls. Some live here, they are stupid. But some of them work in another country. When they come back here, they don't make problems. But some of them not good. Small thinking. Foreigners bring money here. Foreigners are protective. But people don't fall in love easily with the girls. When they sleep, they just sleep. But for Timorese women, if they sleep, they say it's like husband and wife. They have to get married. For people from another country, they don’t see (things) like that. It's true they like each other and have sex. It's normal. But for Timorese, some understand, some don't understand. For Timorese, maybe they (foreigners) look different, more handsome, have more respect, like more romance, make the girls crazy. When the girls fall in love, they don't want. They say, we just enjoy. We don't go to marry. Some UN guys already get married, but they took off their rings. They say they are single, and they have the relationships with the girls (A14. 2017. June 9).

As a result, “Some Timorese girls don't like Timorese guys any more. They all run to malae. They say that Timorese guys are rubbish. We have lots of troubles because of girls and men” (A14. 2017. June 9).

This kind of access and closeness to the foreigners could be fatal to women by incorporating the racial component and racialized Timorese men to the simple power relations between local women and peacekeepers, which causes women to totally lose their agency through death under the competition of different masculinities. During my fieldwork, I heard a story from a former Peace Corp personnel which took place in Gleno, Ermera. The Peace Corp places volunteers in a host family and a “counterpart,” or a local NGO or other organization.

Hearing from his counterpart, my interlocutor told me:

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My counterpart, Carlito, apparently murdered his wife because she had (or was rumored to have) an affair with an Australian man in 2001/2. It was a very brutal murder, and he sat down and waiting for the Australian man to come. Instead, the police came. To this day when new people ask him why he’s single he says his wife got sick and died (anonymous).

Different Strategies of Everyday Resistance against Dominant Gender Norms and Ideal of Femininity

Women’s stories demonstrate that although Timorese women mostly follow gender norms in society and institutions to play the role and take the responsibility as a good Timorese woman, they use different strategies to contend with or challenge social stigmatization of their relationships and themselves as well as their relations to peacekeepers and others in the society.

Some resort to legal procedures or informal negotiation to solve their conflict with the UN personnel, while some accept what happened to them but react to the situation in subtle yet significant ways, which indicates the political agency of Timorese women expressed and negotiated on the daily basis.

Resort to legal and institutional appeals

Some women bring the case to the police or the UN office. A8, A13, and Lily are the only three women who tried to utilize legal and institutional tools to protect themselves and their kids. While A13 filed a complaint of her partner to the police in 2002, A8 appealed to the UN members to solve her conflict with her then partner who stopped paying child support and other

UN staff who took sport equipment she had paid for without her permission. The consequences of their self-help action along with the use of legal and institutional tools seem partially satisfying: in A13’s case, the guy brought her back from Dili to Suai and talked to her family.

“Maybe he felt intimidated,” he wanted her to drop the case (A13. 2017. August 5). They started mediation and they signed an agreement letter. However, he did not pay for the kid as he

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promised. On the contrary, A8 won the case with the UN staff and got her money back but did not hear anything back about the case with her Jamaican partner.

Lily was legally married to a Bosnian police officer, but she was left alone with her son by her partner. He did not give any compensation for them. In 2009, she reported her case to the

UN. Unfortunately, when I met Lily in Oecussi in 2017, she told me that she still “did not get any compensation” since 2009 (Neuh, Lily. 2017. July 14).

Story-telling

Women retell their stories where they cope with the stigmatizations of their relationships, identities of self, and their relations with the peacekeepers. They not only gain access to information about self-help and problem-solving, but also redefine their identity and reaffirm their “power” of navigating through their life challenges by story-telling. For example, A13 said that even though her father denied her due to her relationship with the police, she knows that

“one day others will come and bring up the case” (A13. 2017. August 5). She admitted that “she had many weaknesses in supporting her daughter and she needed help so much.” Moreover, she also shared with me the tension between her and her family: at first her family did not want to recognize her, but some supported her. She just told them: “If you want to be by my side, it’s ok.

If you don’t want to, it’s ok too” (A13. 2017. August 5). Although A13 faces many challenges as a single-mother and was in desperate need of help, she reaffirms her subjectivity and power against others who do not take sides with her as well as with those comers who are willing to listen to and take action for her.

Story-telling is also used to heal peoples’ feelings and emotions. In the end of the interview with Jenny’s mother’s auntie, she told us that she “was happy that we could come and talked to her.” Sometimes she “was angry so she expressed her anger to Jenny” (A7. 2017. July

21). But she also knew that Jenny is innocent. It's not her fault. Jenny is a 12-year-old black

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Timorese girl. Jenny’s birth mother used to work for a man from Kenya as UN staff as a cleaner and chef. She went to his house every day and then they developed a relationship. After Jenny’s mother was pregnant, she moved in and lived with the auntie, who promised to take care of her and her daughter.

Praying and crying

Women challenge the social expectations and restraints imposed on women in a non- obvious and subtle way, such as praying and crying alone, which can only be known to the public through story-telling.

Crying is an important way to channel strong pain and emotions contained in women when they cannot change their situations. A3 told us that “she cried alone sometimes” for her suffering, and she tended to “hold her son who looked into her eyes with his big eyes” (A3.

2017. August 5). A4 cried when she thought of her challenges to raise her daughter alone, although the guy who fathered her daughter sent money to her every month. “She needs not only the mother, but also needs the father. It is difficult because people like to gossip about us, like saying ‘this is malae nian’. Timorese look us down” (A4. 2017. July 21). A9, a single-mother of

7, a victim of domestic violence in her previous marriage of 14 years, and a former police woman and a current security in the American Embassy, cried in front of us when she saw the

YouTube video “Women find justice for domestic violence in Timor-Leste” she helped shoot for the UN. Crying, for A9, is a healing therapy to make peace with her painful past. She revealed her vulnerable side to us by showing her emotions, but she also expressed that she is capable of taking care of all her 7 kids by herself without needing any men. When her ex-partner, a military personnel who came to Timor-Leste along with the UN mission, asked her to return to Australia with him without bringing her children, she refused him because “I want to be there for my kids”

(A9. 2017. July 22).

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For A11, a 42-year-old woman from Suai, praying is crucial to bring herself together in difficult times. Mary's husband was a UNPOL from Vanuatu in the district of Suai. One day he told her he had to return to Vanuatu and he lost contact with her in 2010. He left her no money when she was pregnant. He called her from Vanuatu 5 months after she delivered. She told him they had a girl but he said he did not want a girl. At that time she was suffering because of the financial problem, and she prayed a lot. She prayed in the “cris joven,” a cross brought to a neighborhood where people go and pray. She always brought her daughter there and prayed. She went to Same and came back. Same is another district. A11 overcame the problem of travelling between the districts through praying in spite of the distance and bad road condition in the districts. Catholic faith seems to be crucial in putting her life together without letting her being broken. Praying also brings miracle to her life. “That's why the ‘result’ came out” (A11. 2017.

August 6). She suddenly got a job in a Timorese warun (restaurant). She worked there for three months for $50.

Blaming and laughing

A11 laughs a lot and she is also very talkative. However, her laughter might be a tool to cover her anger and her inclination to blame her then partner for her situation: “When I feel I am suffering, I would like to punch or kill her father right away” (A11. 2017. August 6). Her daughter is going to turn from 7 to 8, but her father gives no support at all. “This is life!

Hahaha!” (A11. 2017. August 6), she said with loud laughter in the end of her response, when she heard me sigh. Her cynical attitude toward her own problems is expressed in her talk to her daughter: “Sometimes I pondered on my situation and I started blaming the father (of her kid). I said to my daughter, ‘your father only knows how to make you, but doesn't take the responsibility’” (A11. 2017. August 6).

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Silence

Women keep silent to protect themselves or their children. One example is A1 who lives in Dili with a 6-year-old kid of a Timorese woman and Indian guy who is a UN personnel. He is

A1's sister's daughter's kid. (Technically the boy is her grandson. After she adopted him, he became her son). That woman met an Indian UN staff member when she had a marriage problem with her husband. After they had him, she decided to go back to her Timorese husband. He accepted her but not the boy. The Timorese guy threatened if he sees the boy again he will kill him. A1 expressed her worry about the possibility of publicizing this case in the interview. In fact, when I introduced myself to her before the interview, she rejected my request of interview and kept denying the existence of the boy because she was not sure whether I was sent by the husband of this boy’s birth mother.

When A1 and her adopted boy walk on the street, people compliment that this boy is white and beautiful, but they also wonder “why malae want to give kids to you?” When the boy is not around, she will explain to them. When he is around, she keeps silent. Because she “wants to protect his feeling,” A1 “tries her best to cover his identity” (A1. 2017. July 31). A1 said that he will find out (his identity) himself when he grows up. But before that, “she will love and protect him” (A1. 2017. July 31).

Selectively choosing friend pool

A14 owns a small second-hand clothes shop in Bideu Santana. She used to work in a local bar and had fun with UN peacekeepers. She speaks English well. She had a kid with her current boyfriend, who works for a Chinese sewing company to earn $300/month. She wants to have more money and move to England or somewhere where she thinks it's better for educating her kid. She understands that Timorese gossip a lot, especially about women who hang out with

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foreigners. Consequently, she controlled her friend pool by selectively pulling off herself from

Timorese society:

I have boyfriend who is also malae. I am mixed with malae. I don't have lots of Timorese friends. If I am here I just sit by my house and talking with some people I know. Don't mix too much with them (Timorese) because they like talk other people's life: ‘She is like this. She has a foreign husband. She has problems. She wears shorts. She is wearing this like this.’ They don't know tomorrow if they have money or not. I say, why you care about others? Why don’t you care about if tomorrow you have meat or not? Tomorrow you probably don't eat meat, you eat vegetable, you eat spinach water only. Why don't you care tomorrow if you have money or not? Why do you just care about other peoples’ life? Isn't it? It's not good” (A14. 2017. June 9).

The heterogeneity of women’s narratives and experiences challenges the simple representation of women as a homogenous and collective group. Women’s experiences are overlapping while distinct from each other. Moreover, the multiple motivations of women who choose to have relationships with peacekeepers as well as the ways women navigate gender norms embedded in social and political structures disconfirm the representation of women as victims by showing that women are more than passive and powerless actors. However, even though women are more complicated than they might seem in the representation of categories of victims/non-victims as well as mothers/wives, women who do not conform to the categories might be left excluded or invisible in the public realm. They can only be seen with more attention to the power dynamics underlying circumstances and contexts of women in particular societies situated in global peacekeeping contexts. I argue that the static categories themselves could not fully capture the contingent and fluid characters of identities and positionalities of women. The complex, contingent, and fluid lived experiences of women tend to leave women invisible within and outside the categories of the dominant discourse. The inbetweenness of women’s identities conveyed in their stories might render them invisible and silenced because they cannot be easily perceived as included in any category. As a result, the inbetweenness of

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women becomes a reason for women’s invisibility and silence. However, it is also an important site for these women to express different meanings and identities as well as to contest, negotiate, and renegotiate different power relations which shape their identities and agency.

In the next section, I use interviews with three groups of interlocutors to compare with women’s narratives in order to show that how limited and stereotyped their perceptions of women’s motivations are and how they differ from women’s own perceptions of their experiences. I focus on the perceptions of motivations of women in particular to show the inbetweenness of women in the eyes of themselves and others.

Others’ Perceptions of Women Who Have Sexual Relationships with Peacekeepers

From the perspective of Timorese national staff who worked in the previous UN missions, they perceive women’s motivations as the following: love/attraction, monetary and future concerns (Massinga, Oldegar. 2017. July 1; Boavida, Matias. 2016. July 26; Siefart, Lars.

2017. August 1), baby (Freitas, Nurcella. 2017. June 13), skin color (Fernandez, Sanio. 2017.

July 1), unequal power relations between women and peacekeepers (Secondinho, Salssinha.

2016. August 6), and language proximity between Timorese and peacekeepers from certain countries (Boavida, Matias. 2016. July 26).

To explain, power inequity is defined in terms of economic capability and educational degree between women and peacekeepers. Although in most cases, peacekeepers are economically more powerful compared to local women, there are some exceptions.

The majority of these women r vulnerable to sexual exploitation, between unequal power relations between these two ppl. As I mention to you, some are language assistants with the person worked with, as a police. Others are cleaners. The other girl, the girl just passing by girl, they met on the street, and the guy brought her back to his apartment, and they have this kind of relationship. But involved also some of their economic ability is poor. Because the guy is mestizo, and the guy is from Western Europe also, so the lady also wanted. That’s why we call this SEA because of unequal power between these two people. One is more economically powerful, and the other one is more economically vulnerable, they exploit the, they

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don’t have money and ability. But some are more because of the educational background, not well-informed, and these guys can just pretend they don’t have money put in them. “I will marry you, I will bring you back to my home country. I am single.” Most of the cases guys said, I am single, because I investigated some of the cases. The guy said, they fall in love with me, but the girl said, but he said he is single. And I said, look at his face, is he single? Why do you believe a stranger in your country, you believe he is single? But they (women) only realize that after they break up, and the guy ran away. (Secondinho, Salssinha. 2016. August 6)

Although not all interlocutors know the motives of women who had relationships with the peacekeepers, some of their stories are based on their experiences. Moreover, interlocutors also mix facts with their personal assumptions about these women. Interlocutors perceive the motives ranging from love and attraction to material concerns and needs. In contrary to women’s stories which demonstrate the motive of relationships out of love, friendship, and attractions, one story of the international staff revealed the potential of local women engaging in transactional sex in the form of voluntary sex.

Some narratives highlight the murky boundary between cases of SEA and voluntary sexual relationships, which indicates the impossibility of distinguishing women as victims from women as non-victims in the UN SEA policy.

I have never heard (any women exchange money by sex with the UN peacekeepers). But the guy promised to them, let’s have sex, I will marry you. Sometimes the promise is: I will give u a certain amount of money, and then I will take care of you. But those r just relationships for fun (Secondinho, Salssinha. 2016. August 6).

While most interlocutors feel comfortable telling their perceptions of motivations of women who choose to have relationships with peacekeepers, a few think it is not their business discussing people’s business, such as Toto and Elizabeth (Correira, Toto. 2017. July 12; Soares,

Elizabeth. 2017. July 5).

Similarly, Matias, who mentioned a case of SEA also said that it is hard to say whether a case of voluntary sexual relationships is SEA or not.

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It was a sexual abuse, but on the other side, it happens when u r working with the UN, you are working in the same compound. It could happen in love with each other. While the UN guy left after the mission, then people are left behind. It is there. But again I don’t want to say its sexual abuse, or sexual harassment, because in the beginning it happened because of love (Boavida, Matias. 2016. July 26).

From the perspective of local NGO staff, they perceive that women who choose to have relationships with peacekeepers are driven by lack of education, religious belief, and their financial needs (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26; Verdial, Teresa. 2016. July 25). Manuela thought educational background, religious belief, and the need of money might be reasons driving women to engage in the relationships. For example, region makes women “don’t know about the countraception” (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26).

From the perspective of local residents and foreigners, they perceive the motivations of women out of financial needs. I list excerpts from Sheila and Veronica to demonstrate how the locals think about the rationale behind the women.

Excerpt 1: Sheila

There are too many, especially with peacekeepers. Especially UNPOL in UNMIT. There is one unit conduct handling all the complaints. All the complaints are women with the peacekeepers. Usually they stay one year. They can extend it, but normally one year. Then they have to leave. They leave their kids here. They say, “this one is already married, what do u do?” They say we need international assistance cause the baby needs diapers. We will look into it until you become tired of following up cases. Then you have to rely on yourself. Before they call it hazard pay. They have extra allowance. Here they feel like tourists. They are not doing anything, right? Every Saturday and Sunday, you will see them naked running at the beach, riding bicycle. I am serious. It’s easy to have boyfriends before because there are a lot of peacekeepers. You can change one after another. It’s like Timorese girls swap boyfriends from the UN (Freitas, Sheila. 2017. June 12).

Excerpt 2: Veronica

A lot of Timorese women want to have relationships with white foreign people because they have money. They can pay for everything. People ask my husband, “How can Veronica want you? Back then you don’t have any money.” That’s why I was very worried. That’s your life. You want to be with him. There were many Portuguese generals and army. Some just come and sleep together. Then you get pregnant. Then they get away. They don’t care if you are pregnant or not. That

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happened a lot for Timorese. Before a lot of foreigners were here, army, police coming here. Some get pregnant, have kids, then men go away, go back to their country. They are lucky cause they find new men liking them. Their relationships are working. But if they are not working, they suffer until now (Almeida, Veronica 2017. June 16).

The difference of the perceptions of these three groups demonstrates that women’s motivations of relationships tend to be reduced to material and monetary reasons which have racial and gender connotations.

Discussion of the Comparison between Perceptions of Women and Others about the Relationships

My findings show that among three groups of others, ordinary Timorese and foreigners who have lived in Timor for a long time have the least knowledge and understanding of these women who also live in the same society compared to the national staff of the UN missions who have the most yet not the comprehensive knowledge about these women. The local NGO staff might see and know some women, but their understanding and knowledge of these women are also limited in capturing the real conditions of women.

Another finding shows the different awareness of power among groups. Women do not see themselves as victims by problematizing the power hierarchy between themselves and peacekeepers, while national staff and NGO workers tend to relate women’s motivations to power relations. In addition to gender, power which takes the form of race is also perceived by the national staff and NGO workers which drives women to pursue their relationships. By highlighting the power dimension of the relationships between women and peacekeepers, national staff and NGO workers are more likely to pay attention to the relevance between women’s relationships and SEA. In contrast, local Timorese did not relate these women to victims of SEA at all.

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However, power is not understood in the same way among groups. For national staff in the UN missions, power is defined in terms of economic capability, race, and educational degree between women and peacekeepers. For local NGO staff, power is defined as economy and education. For the local Timorese and foreigners in Timor, power is understood in economic terms.

The inconsistency among perceptions and meanings of categories among different groups demonstrates that complexity of experiences. However, it does provide opportunities for us to reflect on the power underpinning of categories people use to understand experiences of women.

Everyday is not just hybridity. It is also a site of contestation and negotiation of meanings and power relations.

Situated Understanding of Agency and Power of Women

Women’s narratives teach us to read power and agency embedded in social structures, which brings us to go beyond simple power asymmetry and sexual difference between men and women. Power is not evaluated on income and profession in technical terms but constructed in social and economic contexts as well as in women’s stories. Moreover, it reorients our attention to the contingency of power and agency. Simić (2012) once pays attention to the significance of contexts by arguing that women make different decisions in the context of post-conflict society, but she seems to focus on the sexual agency of women expressed in the form of an act at a particular moment without further explicating the dynamic and fluid meaning of agency in an ongoing process of relationship situated in social contexts. The narratives I collected from

Timorese women demonstrate that power and agency not only are contingent with social contexts but also change all the time as their life carries on. In some occasions, women’s exercise of sexual agency renders them to lose their agency through losing familial and financial support, sexual disease, and death. Agency and power are relational as well as changeable. What's

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implicated here is that voluntary sexual relationships might cause indirect harm to women, which is not necessarily driven by power superiority of peacekeepers but through interaction with institutional, economic, and social structures. Women’s stories indicate a different and more complicated sense of power and agency of women in relation to peacekeepers interacting with institutional, economic, and social factors, which tend to be excluded from SEA and feminist literature. Recovering these different forms and meanings of power and agency helps us not only challenge the simple understanding of agency and power in heterosexual relationships, but also retrieve the agency of women in resisting, contesting, and subverting the dominant discourse in their everyday life.

Women’s narratives challenge racialized and sexualized understanding of women’s power and agency in post-conflict society as well as the stereotype of victimized women as a whole by highlighting the heterogeneity among women in terms of their positionality, identity and everyday experience. In reality, women are situated in different social and power positions within the social milieu. By labelling women in one unified group of victims of SEA, the dominant discourse diverts our attention from the heterogeneity of women in reality. Their relationship experiences are shaped by their values and cultures, which can only be known in their contexts. Considering the complexity and divergence of the positions of women and how they might be affected differently by sexual relationships with peacekeepers, it is significant to listen to women and their experiences of sexual relationships which are not considered or included in SEA. Women are embedded individuals, who are mediated by gender in different ways based on where they are situated. As a result, not all women are able to embody the ideals of femininity in the discourse of peacekeeping and Timorese society. The dichotomous categories of women as victims or non-victims, as well as women as mothers and wives, only

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operate to simplify, essentialize, and homogenize women in certain ways. Timorese women’s stories suggest a bottom-up approach of challenging the dominant discourse and its assumptions of women from the everyday experiences of women.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Inbetweenness of Women as A Site of Contestation, Negotiation, and Resistance of Power

This chapter suggests going beyond the binary categories which separate women who have agency from women who have not by seeing the inbetweenness of women as a source of silence as well as a site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance of power where women apply different technologies of the self through narratives. In a world where people only see women who have agency or not through the filters of categories of victims/non-victims as well as traditional mothers and wives/independent career women and activists, women who are situated in the Global South, such as Timor-Leste, tend to be seen as women lack agency and are disempowered in their own society. Women in Global South are situated in multiple and complex gendered relations, where local practices and understandings of gender shape who these women are and how they should behave. Their situatedness requires us to read them from within instead of in sexual relations, since they have different perceptions of gender and gender relations which constitute their ideas of power and agency in their own terms. Their power and agency might not be expressed in public, but they can be known if we are willing to listen to their stories which reveal how women struggle and navigate through the world of complex and unequal power relations. Women’s inbetweenness not only demonstrates their reflection and negotiation of power, but also shows how women contest and resist it through reconstructing their own sense of agency and power in their stories.

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CHAPTER 5 THE RELATIONALITY OF THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE LOCAL

The dominant discourse of peacekeeping is formulated based on the separation between the international peacekeepers and the local population. The dichotomy of the international and the local indicates the different level of analysis, the interaction of international and local actors, and the power hierarchy between the international over the local (Heathershaw and Lambach

2008). However, the binary concepts also homogenize, essentialize, and simplify each group and the relations of both sides (Paffenholz 2015). Moreover, by presuming the top-down nature of peacekeeping missions which privilege the role of peacekeepers in transferring the knowledge as well as implementing the tasks of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, how the local perceive peacekeeping and are affected by it have been downplayed and rarely known to scholars and policy practitioners, though there might be unintended ramifications (Newby 2018).

The local turn of peacekeeping calls for reorienting our attention to “the local” in terms of how the local is affected by international peacekeeping, how the local perceives the international, and how the local interacts with the international. My chapter is not the first one which echoes with the local turn highlighting the importance of the local agency. In fact, some research has been done concerning how including local culture and practices can better peacekeeping missions, which complements the top-down liberal peacekeeping discourse and its practice (Ginty 2008). Other research shows how different local actors compete with each other

(Hughes and Hutchison 2012) and how the locals translate, coopt, or integrate the international peacekeeping in the local contexts, which consequently leads to peacekeeping embodied in hybrid and everyday forms as well as the emergence of particular political orders and authorities

(Ginty 2013; Ginty and Sanghera 2012; Heathershaw and Lambach 2008). However, they do not necessarily challenge the separation of the international and the local, as well as the statebuilding

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framework through which international peacekeeping is practiced. Their reproduction of the ontology of the international and the local fails to problematize the power underpinning of categories with their attempt of bringing back the more authentic experiences of the local, which worryingly romanticizes and essentializes the local (Paffenholz 2015). The politics of the local, which is constitutive of gendered relations creating marginalized and hidden narratives and the invisibility of some local actors becomes undertheorized and empirically explored (Ginty 2013;

Heathershaw and Lambach 2008). Without separating one from the other, I see the local are not only who are affected by peacekeeping and peacekeepers from outside, but also actors who do and embody the idea of international and peacekeeping everyday through their interaction with international. In other words, the local and the international are mutually constructed, and the boundaries of both are fluid and contingent (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008). They are relational, and such a relationality is changing in the processes and contexts.

In this chapter, I use individual narratives of the local, which comprises local NGOs,

Timorese who worked in the previous UN missions, ordinary Timorese, and foreigners who lived in Timor, to show who the international is and what the international means to the local population from the perspective of the local. Instead of seeing the local as a “unified phenomenon,” I concur with what Severine Autesserre claims, “‘The local’ is always highly fragmented” (2014, 495). Different locals perceive who the international is and what they do in different ways. Knowing how locals think is important because their perceptions affect how the local approach and interact with the international. If how the local approach and interact with the international is based on how they perceive the international, knowing how the peacekeeping missions are framed and understood on the ground becomes important.

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Difference within the group of the local is not enough to problematize the power of categories. Although the local narratives show that there are different referents, interpretations, and framings of the international, framing the international as problems of peacekeeping in contrast to the local easily ends up reducing the complex of the international as if it is a homogenous group compared to its opposite group, the local. One consequence of sustaining the dominant discourse enabled by the separation of the international from the local is that the international and the local become empty rhetoric simultaneously. This not only homogenizes diversity and complexity within the groups, but also highlights a group of victims with one specific focus on a form of violence, SEA, by obscuring the existence of other forms of violence and victims. What this suggests is that the idea of the local is too vague and all-inclusive, and it may not be representative of all Timorese population while also working to suppress some local actors and their agency.

My findings show that the local is a complicated collective entity. The idea of the local is not only descriptive portraying the facts of everyday life of the local populations, but also normative, since it cannot exist without incorporating the marginalized narratives. Locals are not just diverse in terms of their framings and solutions. They also straddle their life between citizens and peacekeeping professional. Some Timorese see the international characteristic of the profession and feel proud to work with them, while others see the international as problems to the local, and hope that the international can do better in future missions. I find that the dichotomy of the international and the local is not sustainable. The local is fragmented, contingent, and complicated. So is the international.

In this chapter, I first explain why I focus on the local perspective of how they perceive and frame peacekeeping, which separates myself from the literature of peacekeeping economy.

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Next, I list three narratives of how local NGOs, foreigners who have settled in Timor-Leste, and

Timorese national staff in previous UN missions perceive the peacekeepers and their impacts of the missions following a discussion in detail. I then introduce different local perceptions of the

“problems” of peacebuilding from my interviews with female and male national staff as well as international civilians. I also discuss what “solutions” are indicated in their narratives, which are mostly ignored or omitted by the dominant discourse. I conclude with the danger of a dominant discourse based on the binary categories of the international and the local, as well as the need to politicize the discourse and its normative underpinning to avoid oversimplifying the complex of life experiences as well as the presumption of the local as political actors lack or are limited in agency compared to the international who have that. I suggest that instead of keeping the separation of the categories, we need to look through the relationality between both as well as the interaction between the international and the local, in order to break the circular negative connotations of the international among the local as well as the illusion of separation of both sides, which could further help increase the effectiveness of the international peacekeeping missions.

How This Chapter Differs from the Literature of Peacekeeping Economy

Although there are many ways to theorize the encounters of the international and the local, this chapter focuses on how the local make sense of the peacekeeping/peacekeepers in interpersonal relationships, whose lives are affected by the presence or absence of the peacekeepers. The attempt of this chapter is different from the scholars of the peacekeeping economy whose eyes are set on “formal and informal economic activity that directly links the international presence with the local individual” (Jennings and Bøås 2015, 283). This chapter, then, concerns those whose lives are affected by the peacekeepers yet not directly related to the economic activities stimulated or enabled by the peacekeeping. Silke Olderburg (2015) once

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argues how the perceptions and the ideas of relationships of the local young men and women in

Goma are entangled with peacekeeping economy. Their “ideas and perceptions on gender relationships are not only (asymmetrically) exchanged, but integrally entangled” with the international actors coming with and through the peacekeeping (Jennings and Bøås 2015, 287). I claim that everyday life is not just about economic activities, but also about interpersonal relationships, which further shapes the emotional experiences as well as self-identities of the local. I oppose what Jennings and Bøås argue that a peacekeeping economy is “the only real contact that most peacekeepers have with the ‘locals’ and vice versa,” (Jennings and Bøås 2015,

283) which is made on the simple presumption of the local without further clarification of who these locals are and where they are located. Peacekeeping economy is significant in bringing back the importance of everyday life and micro-resistance and negotiation of people who are intervened, yet this is just one dimension of effects of peacebuilding and peacekeeping. It is based on transactional relationships and the preexisting categories and assumptions of the local and the international. I agree with their observation, the sparsity of the interaction between the international and the local in non-peacekeeping economic spheres, yet interaction between the local and the international in other spheres, such as intimate relationships which are non- transactional relationships, also influences how the international and the local perceive each other in the web of interpersonal relationships where intersubjective understanding matters in shaping how people think and behave. This shapes their reality. Moreover, such an encounter between the international and the local also affects the livelihood of some particular locals, such as women who have non-transactional and voluntary relationships with the peacekeepers. This, I argue, is not well captured in the discussion of peacekeeping economy which claims that only some people who are already privileged will benefit from the peacekeeping economy (Edu-Afful

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and Aning 2015). Although much of the local turn literature points out that the effectiveness of peacekeeping projects is affected by the power struggle among actors in the local contexts, it tends to locate and label the local vis-vis-vis the liberal peacekeeping framework as opportunists and idealists (Hughes and Hutchison 2012) or spoilers (Nadin et al. 2015), which largely obfuscates the agency of the local actors who are not necessarily privileged or engaged in the economic transactions within the peacekeeping missions. I claim that it is necessary to include non-peacekeeping economic spheres in addition to the peacekeeping economy in order to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the economic and non-economic spheres, as well as the power relation between the international and the local which are not easily observed in non- economic spheres. Focusing simply on peacekeeping economy might curtail our understanding of the ramifications of peacekeeping and fail the feminist promise to challenge the all-inclusive yet exclusive concept of the local, which renders some of locals invisible.

In the following section, I list three narratives portraying how local NGOs, foreigners who have settled in Timor-Leste, and Timorese national staff in previous UN missions perceive the peacekeepers and the impact of the missions. These stories reflect different perspectives, and they are framed in different discursive contexts where the difference of the international and local is made. I identity three narratives that show to what extent the local perceive the international as protectors or perpetrators, how peacekeepers are framed as the problem of peacekeeping, as well as the solutions from the local perspective. By showing the social construction of the local and the international, as well as the different understandings of sexual violence based on the lived experiences of different actors, my findings show that only some forms of local agency are visible while others are invisible. Different constructions and uses of two categories of the local and the international further blurs the difference between two

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categories, and they challenge the dominant views of the local that the UN peacekeepers are either the protectors or problems of the local Timorese women in the narrative of sexual violence.

Local Perceptions of the Peacekeepers/UN Peacekeeping Missions and Their Effects: Three Stories

I select three narratives: the narrative of Francisco, who was a translator working with the

UNPOL; the narrative of Manuela, who worked with the UN peacekeepers and staff as an NGOs staff; and the narrative of A9, who worked with the UNPOL as a police woman. All of them show mixed feelings towards the UN peacekeepers and the UN, as well as mixed impacts of the peacekeeping missions.

Francisco from Suai

Francisco used to work with the UN police officers as a translator in Oecussi from 2000-

2005. He helped investigate the crimes, serious crimes in 1999 in the community and translation of the documents. He generally thought that the UN brought positive impacts to the Timorese.

From his perspective, he thinks that the UN has brought some positive influences to

Timorese in terms of national and human security, human development, and better economic situations, if not economic development extensively.

Nevertheless, not all peacekeepers are that positive. The police came from Portugal,

Australia, Canada, Nepal, and New Zealand. Only Portuguese don’t want to be respectful. He thinks the different treatment between national and international is because of their cultural difference.

Francisco’s framing of peacekeeping. Francisco’s narrative frames peacekeepers as helpers of Timorese. However, peacekeepers play more important roles in providing security than improving local economy which can benefit many Timorese. He frames the problem of

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peacekeeping as lacking respect of locals. Their attitudinal problem comes from the cultural difference between the international and the local.

Manuela

Manuela is the current director of a local women’s NGO, ACbit. She started working in the NGOs since 1999. She started as a treasurer and program manager, then became the director of FOKUPERS in 2000 until 2006.

Manuela thinks that the UN has caused mixed effects in Timor-Leste. In terms of its negative effects, although the UN peacekeepers hired some locals to work for them, their presence also increased opportunities to interact with local women intimately, then left them with their children. “Some of our survivors from Suai, have children from this man, because they work as helpers, and they get pregnant, and then they have children from this man.” When peacekeepers left, they did not give monetary compensation for the mothers and their children.

Manuela heard from these women in Suai tell here, “they (peacekeepers) just leave us some cushion, pillow, they use they just leave this” (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26)

There are also some positive effects of the UN, such as change of the attitude and introduction of an international standard of gender, as well as the provision of security. After the arrival of the UN, the UN helped the Timorese set up VPU “at the police station (national police force)” (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26). In addition, they also helped train the local police with an awareness of gender. “To supervise them to share the experience with the police. We can compare after they left, we had many problems how the police treat those women, but they improve because they have training they have another supervisor to help them” (Leong,

Manuela. 2016. July 26). They also helped tackle women who suffer from domestic violence

(DV). “When we work with women’s suffer from DV, they help us, at the time how to accompany to treat women, to facilitate women’s safe house, sometimes with the family or the

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husbands, sometimes they help us to go to women’s house to get clothes, because they need to move to shelter, at the time many people they don’t understand that women should be helped when they got DV cases” (Leong, Manuela. 2016. July 26).

In addition to the changing attitude of gender and women, the UN also makes Timorese safer.

“UN peacekeepers when they come, we feel that it will stop our suffering and fear at the time. Important thing or good experience might be based on how you will see. Because at the time insecure situation I think that we see international peace like miracle” (Leong, Manuela.

2016. July 26).

Manuela’s framing of peacekeeping. Manuela seems to portray peacekeepers as both perpetrators and the protectors of the local women. The problem of peacekeeping is male peacekeepers who make local women pregnant and abandon them and their babies.

A9 was a Timorese police woman who used to work with the UNPOL. She also had some boyfriends when the UN was present. Different from Francisco’s opinion, A9 thinks that the UN contributed to Timorese economic situation a lot. The UN not only increased more employment opportunities to the unskilled and skilled Timorese, but also stimulated economic growth by consuming “local food and shop locals’ handcrafts” (A9. 2017. July 22). A9 also thinks that the presence of the UN might be out of a self-interested reason. “They use the situation to keep the UN mission in place. If we go there, we could intervene in the conflict”

(A9. 2017. July 22). The way the peacekeepers keep peace is done in a way which excludes the local staff. “When situation (conflict) happens, international staff did not allow national staff to go. They went by themselves. They did not intervene but just sit in their cars. Then report that everything is controlled. They stay far away from locals” (A9. 2017. July 22).

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Different from Manuela and Francisco, A9 had other opinions about female peacekeepers and peacekeepers of nationalities. This could provide some insights for the behavior of peacekeepers, since in the statistical data, allegations in different missions are not broken down in nationalities (A9. 2017. July 22).

Peacekeepers of nationalities

1. Bangladesh: they are greedy, they don't share with others. Their English is not very well. They don't know how to drive. We are zero, they are zero. We learn nothing from them.

2. Portuguese: they are arrogant, they are clean, they are not close to people and only talk to people who can speak Portuguese. If Timorese speak Portuguese to them, they will speak Portuguese back. Even though it's an English mission, Portuguese will blame Timorese "why don't you speak Portuguese since it's your official language?"

3. Africa: they love shopping, like buying blanket and pillowcases and sent them home. They love playing with women. They ate a lot and eat everything. I have a friend from Nigeria only ate himself. When I was in Nigeria for training for two weeks, he treated me to a poor restaurant "warung", like Tibesi market. I was upset and asked him "you invited me to this restaurant?" The guy did not contact me until I left. I also thought that they love spending money.

Conflict with the female UNPOL

African ladies get jealous of had a fight with girls from Zimbawae in soccer games. I told them: ‘I know you come here to make more money, but this is my country, and you are guest. Don't sit on boss's head’. They hated me. It's like direct insult to them. They are ugly, but they are jealous. Guys approached us. Maybe guys think it's easy to get us. Jelia, Soja, and I went to happy hour. We have big ass, and we wear short skirts. Some people think that I am from Africa because I have big ass (A9. 2017. July 22).

When A9 worked as a police woman, she helped the UNPOL investigate cases of domestic violence, rape, incest. She did not find serious crime conducted by the UNPOL. She only knew some cases of pedophilia conducted by foreigners. One was by a German, and one is

Australian. These cases happened around 2009 and 2010. Both were imprisoned for six months then sent home. They also paid fines to the court. One case happened in Hotel Timor and one happened in Hotel Tourisma. Kids were selling oranges on the street, and foreigners gave money

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to them. They asked the kids to come back the next time. They made friends with them, then they took them to their hotel rooms.

A9’s framing of peacekeeping. A9’s story frames peacekeepers as entrepreneurs who improve the local economy, bystanders who take no action to stop local violence, as well as opportunists who take advantage of the local conflicts to sustain their stay in the Timor-Leste.

The problem of peacekeeping is that lack of interaction between the local and the international, as well as the lack of inclusion of the local in the operations aiming to stop local violence.

The stories of Francisco, Manuela, and A9 challenge the simplified discourse of peacekeeping which identifies the international, that is, peacekeepers, as perpetrators rather than the protectors of the local. The international not only refers to the peacekeepers but also foreigners who are civilians, as A9’s story demonstrates. Moreover, the peacekeepers could play different roles beyond the binary category of peacekeepers as perpetrators and peacekeepers as protectors of the local, such as entrepreneurs, bystanders, and opportunists. Local narratives of peacekeeping certainly provide more perspectives of peacekeeping and more roles of peacekeepers which are not included or reflected in the idea of the international.

How Locals Perceive Peacekeepers: a Discussion of Three Stories

Francisco, Manuela, and A9 share their views regarding how the peacekeeping affects the local. This challenges the idea of peacekeeping as either a success or a failure by shifting the focus to the everyday lived experiences of the local. One person might have mixed perspectives about peacekeeping missions, which is affected by herself, or others who have different experiences and views with the peacekeepers. Even though two locals perceive that peacekeeping missions are successful in terms of bringing positive impacts to Timorese, they do not necessarily use the same criteria. While Paulo attributes successful peacekeeping to the profession of peacekeepers in terms of improving security, training, and local economy, Manuela

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highlights the positive impacts of the UN peacekeeping in terms of security and respect toward women, in spite of the negative side of peacekeeping when peacekeepers are not following their profession after work. The positionality of different locals including a UN national staff member working with the police, an NGO staff who worked along with the UN, and a Timorese police woman who mingled with and had some relationships with the UNPOL, see different dimensions of peacekeepers in the missions from different angles. Therefore, the impacts of peacekeeping cannot just be categorized simply as success or failure. It needs to be assessed by individuals who perceive peacekeepers in different ways.

A9 presents the unprofessional side of the peacekeepers from her experiences. It shows that how she thought that female peacekeepers, especially police women, are money-driven, jealous, irrespectful, and ugly, which contradicts the image of the female peacekeepers who help bring closer the international to the local for their better capability in communication and soft attitude to the local. Her story also used the analogy of guest and host to describe the relation between the peacekeepers and the local. Her message indicated that the guest needs.to follow the rule of the local. Her story challenges the presentation of the profession of peacekeepers by calling out peacekeepers who do not respect local people and rules when peacekeepers are not at work and absolve themselves from the constraint of the military or the UN. Profession does not excuse peacekeepers from respecting local people and local culture.

Manuela's story confirmed the discourse which portrays peacekeepers as perpetrators of

SEA against local women, yet confirmed the image of the UN peacekeepers as protectors of the women by mentioning that they brought in the international standard and helped teach local

NGOs how to treat women professionally.

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Moreover, those stories further challenge the homogenous idea of the international who are labeled as helpers or perpetrators of the local in relation to the idea of the local as whole. The international does not just refer to the UN peacekeepers, which include military and civilian personnel and police, but also foreigners who came when the UN was present. Different narratives highlight different perceptions and interaction experiences of the local with the international. Their local views of peacekeepers help construct who peacekeeper is and what peacekeepers do from different locals. This is different from Henry Marsha's article (2015) focusing on the everyday experiences of peacekeepers. Her focus is peacekeepers' everyday lived experiences contradicting how peacekeepers present themselves and how they do their jobs professionally. She argues that how they perceive themselves and what they do every day not only constitute their identities, but also shape the impacts of peacekeeping. However, she does not further challenge the binary concept of the international and the local, although she agrees that peacekeepers might not be what they represent. The heterogeneity of the peacekeepers is not constructed merely by their everyday lives, but also constructed in relation to how the local perceives them. I focus on the local perception of the international. This is not saying their perceptions are the same as reality or more objective than the perspectives of the peacekeepers, but highlight the complex experiences and formation of subjectivities constructed in the local discourse. The concept of the international not only refers to people who come from outside, but also is attached different meanings based on how different locals perceive and interact with the international.

Local Perceptions of the “Problems” of Peacekeeping

The dominant discourse of peacekeeping tends to oversimplify the idea of the male international as perpetrators of protectors as well as their influences on the local. Moreover, it helps highlights some violence experienced by some local actors, that is, SEA against local

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women, while undermining the existence of others. Such a general representation of the international might obscure how different the local perceive and interact with the international, although most of them perceive the international as the problem of or as constitutive of the peacekeeping. The local and the international staff do not necessarily have the same understanding and experiences of dealing with SEA. Moreover, focusing on the relation between international male and local women on the case of SEA obscures the tensions existing within other relationships between the international and the local, as well as those among the international. These narratives further influence their views of what went wrong in the UN peacekeeping missions and the peacekeeping experiences of the local embodied in their everyday life, which are integral to the success or failure of the missions yet downplayed or little known by the interveners. I organize the following narratives to demonstrate that different locals have different understanding of SEA, broader and complicated views about violence, as well as other problems innate in the peacekeeping missions, which are invisible and unimportant under the dominance of the peacekeeping narrative and its binary categories.

Problems of the International: Different Reading of SEA between the International Male Staff and the Local Female Staff

Even though Timorese and international staff work in the UN missions, it does not mean that they perceive the problems of peacebuilding in the same way, such as sexual violence. For

Lars Siefart, a UN international staff member, who has been “working with UN Peacekeepers on and off since 1995 in various countries (i.e. ex-Yugoslavia and Timor-Leste) and was mostly serving as a Military Police Officer (Peacekeeper) and in Timor as a UN Security Officer,” the problem of peacebuilding is that peacekeepers came to help build peace and stability for Timor-

Leste (Siefert, Lars. 2017. August 1). After the peace and stability are made, peacekeepers have no role to play, though they still need to stay and eventually become bored and start to interact

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with local Timorese women. “With thousands of troops in the small underdeveloped and isolated country (culture) Timor also had its scandals and unfortunate incidents involving UN employees” (Siefert, Lars. 2017. August 1).

On the contrary, from the perspective of Nurcella Freitas, a local UN national staff member, who joined the UN mission as an interpreter, the problem of peacebuilding comes from the unregulated and gender-discriminated behavior of the peacekeepers and their ignorance of local culture and people. “How the UN affected Timorese is that they gave children to them and left without any news, any funding, or money given to the single parents. Single parents are difficult in Timor-Leste” (Freitas, Nurcella. 2017. June 13). In addition, male peacekeepers also sexually harassed female national staff before 2000. “Before 2000, there were a lot of harassment. If they know you are single, they just come, hit your buns. It happened to me also. I was making copy and the international passes. They use their hands to push my butt. They are not respectful to you…Also if they like you, they wait for you. They come to your house. This is my experience” (Freitas, Nurcella. 2017. June 13).

Moreover, Freitas tells me that international female staff make her feel more comfortable than men, because international male staff are arrogant and do not respect culture and local

Timorese, despite they all work together in the same mission. “I feel more comfortable working with women because they can understand us. Their communication is better than men.

Sometimes men are new. They do not respect us. They think they are clever. They know everything. They do not respect Timorese staff. Sometimes they call the Timorese using their fingers…For us, we think he is not respecting us” (Freitas, Nurcella. 2017. June 13).

Although Lars and Freitas perceive sexual violence by the peacekeepers similarly, they do not frame the source of the problems in the same way. While Lars attributes the undisciplined

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behavior of peacekeepers in the development process to the inconsistency between the military personnel and the civilian tasks in the development time characteristic of peace and stability,

Freitas relegates the behavior of peacekeepers to gender difference, power relations, and lack of respect of local people and culture.

Note that Lars seems to keep the boundary between military and civilian field in place, and seems to view that SEA occurs when peacekeepers are not doing military. He seems to think that when peacekeepers are doing civilian work, they have no chance to perform their profession and it will cause problems. Freitas’s experiences definitely challenge this view and the distinction of civilian and military with her notion of unprofessional behavior of sexual harassment conducted by male international staff at work, as well as their after-work behavior of following local women home and dating local women without taking the embeddedness of women in culture as well as the welfare of women seriously. In short, peacekeepers do not perform profession at work by respecting female staff, they are not disciplined, and they interrupt in everyday life of the local women after work. The line between the civilian and the military, as well as peacekeepers and the peace-kept, is never clearly sustained.

Furthermore, from Freitas’s story, three factors might explain the negative impacts of peacekeeping as well as the cases of SEA experienced by herself and other local women: gender, power, and lack of respect and understanding of culture and women. Gender refers to sexual difference between men and women. For Freitas, female peacekeepers are more communicative and understanding compared to male ones. In terms of power, Freitas seems to refer to knowledge, professional experiences, or educational degree, of the male peacekeepers compared to the national staff. It is not clear in her narrative what she meant exactly in terms of power among these three possible interpretations. The last reason for their behavior is the lack of

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respect and understanding of local culture and women. Although culture is a fuzzy concept, it denotes the differences between the lifestyles, meanings, and the status of women, which requires a more nuanced and innovative way and sensitivity for outsiders to make sense of and act within the culture, especially when their behavior might affect local women permanently in the long run. As Freitas implies, women as single-parents might suffer from stigmatization in local society in addition to the financial difficulty, because women who are abandoned and left with their children by foreigners might be attached with negative meanings.

Lars’s experience on the UN international staff also demonstrates the change of the perceptions of the local toward the international intersecting with gender through the interaction between the local and the international. In his story, the privilege of the male international staff depends on their capabilities in attracting attention and forming relationships with local Timorese women. However, their privileged position as male peacekeepers draws them closer to Timorese women yet further from Timorese men by stealing their women away. The international does not always affect the local in the same way, and it changes through time.

Within the first 12-18 months the relationship with the locals was almost based on admiration. Both men and women were showing clear appreciation for the UN’s effort and force; however after around two years I noticed the first signs of “jealousy” towards the privileged UN people, especially from the male population (after all UN people were fooling around/showing off and often taking advantages with local girls... ). In my own case and especially in Lospalos where I lived, I was treated with utmost respect from everyone – even church and community leaders, possibly because I dealt with my Timorese relations in a most decent and respectful manner, whereas many others did not (Siefert, Lars. 2017. August 1).

Problems of the International: How the International Male Staff Are Viewed by National Male Staff

There are many kinds of encounters between the international and the local. In addition to the above encounter between international men and local women, another kind of encounter is between local men and international men. Here I will present stories between local and

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international male staff who worked in the same UN mission yet had tensions. While some locals think that it is not worth mentioning and taking actions to deal with it, others consider it as a sign of lacking enough professionalism from the side of the international, which ends up burdening the local with responsibilities the international fail to take.

Blame the local for personal valuables loss

Medicino was from Suai. He worked with military of New Zealand and Fiji as an interpreter from 2000 to 2002. He helped police engage in the community to investigate cases of violence reported to the police stations. He also joined UNMIT from 2007-12. He was once accused by his international coworker for stealing his cigarette. Although Medicino felt that it is not serious to report, this experience made him feel bad: “It’s a small problem. We were in one room. Something was gone. They accused me. He lost a case of cigarette. His found out that his friend took it 2 weeks later. I felt terrible” (do Mundo, Medicinho. 2017. August 6).

Force to make national staff violate the regulation and unable to speak English

Another example mentioned by Domingos tells the unprofessional aspect of the international, which contradicts the privileged and professional presentation of the international in the dominant discourse where the international could manipulate their position and status to take advantage of the local.

Domingos worked in the UN from 2001-2012 as a move control assistant in heliport

(helicopter and airport), then he went to Congo (2012-14) where he joined peacekeeping mission as a UN volunteer.

Some people don’t know but carry dangerous stuff in the pocket. Locals have to find good solutions. Sometimes they have to call their commanders (of the international) or the one who are in charge with the rules. Sometimes conflicts happen between international and national staff. On the busy days, we work 11 hours a day. People complain overwork and no extra pay.

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People from Pakistan and Thailand are difficult to communicate with Timorese because they don’t speak English. Only the commander can speak. Before they send people to the mission they should know how to speak English in the mission. The rotation is difficult, because they have to bring what they bring back to the compound. Sometimes they were forcing us to put more staff in spite of the limited capacity in the helicopter (Domingos. 2017. August 6).

Lack of professionalism of the international and increasing burdens on the local

Conflict between professional international and local not only signals lack of understanding and communication, but also suggests the gap between groups which possess different professional skills and knowledge required to facilitate or implement the tasks and related responsibilities in an integrated peacekeeping mission.

Oldegar worked for the UN as an interpreter from 2001 to 2005. He worked in serious crime investigation unit to help translate the documents and partial results of the investigations.

He now works in Blue Ventures Timor-Leste. He thought that not all the international possess the required skills and knowledge for the missions, but they came to Timor-Leste to better their material needs. He also felt the salary gap between the international and the national does not reflect the professionalism Timorese or the international staff have.

They fulfill the requirement to come to the country cause here uses US dollars. Even they come from developing, low-income country, I have to teach you how to use the computer. You earn salaries three times higher than me. When you are in the field I have to teach you how to use the computer, but not all of them. It’s totally unfair. When I can do things like what they can do, they get more than what I get (Massinga, Oldegar. 2017. July 1).

However, not all Timorese perceive the international in the same way. Some Timorese staff think that only certain international staff from particular countries are not professional. For example, Alberico had different impressions about the peacekeepers of different nationality,

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“Some Portuguese guys are arrogant. That’s why I left. Australians and Americans are also arrogant. Australian is very professional. The Portuguese think that they know everything… Not all internationals are bad. But I don’t like Portuguese” (da Costa, Alberico. 2017. July 8). Similar to Alberico, Oldegar also described his perception of Portuguese with negative connotations but in a more straight-forward way: “GNR do whatever they want. They are the pain in the ass”

(Massinga, Oldegar. 2017. July 1).

Sanio confirmed the professional aspect of the Australian army, while disagreeing with

Alberico on the attitude of the Australian toward the local:

Australian army is very disciplined. They are very strict, and only a few of them are naughty. They are told not to have serous relationship with Timorese women. They are also strict in alcohol drinks.” During the weekend, they have rules allowing them to drink small amount of beer. 2 or 3 cans only per person. Not all of them. Just for people who finish patrolling. They are very professional. Only one or two of them accidentally had an affair with Timorese women and they have babies. No killing, torturing, beating in the case of Timorese. Even earlier they capture pro-Indonesian militia, they respect them based on the human rights (Fernandez, Sanio. 2017.

July 1).

The above narratives of Sanio, Alberico, and Oldegar show that different locals perceive peacekeepers from different countries in different ways. Moreover, their definition of the profession and their judgements also vary among individuals. While stories of Sanio and Oldegar show different perceptions of the local staff toward the Australians, Alberico’s narrative shows that the arrogance of the international perceived by the local national staff could affect the mission as a whole, because their attitudes are the main reason why he decided to leave the mission.

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Problems of the International: How Peacekeepers Are Viewed by International Civilians

Robert and Kym are Australians who have lived in Timor-Leste since 1999. Their stories show their perceptional change toward the international peacekeepers vis-à-vis the UN from peacekeeping to peacebuilding period. “UN was good in the beginning, but in the development time the people changed” (Trott, Robert. 2017. June 2). They both thought that the UN created many problems, like prostitutes, fake economy, and AIDS/HIV, which were not seen in Timor-

Leste prior to the UN presence. Robert’s narrative of peacekeepers does not present the professional part of the peacekeepers. From his experiences, they are not helpers but trouble- makers to the local. For example, he observed the increasing sex economy under the influence of peacekeeping economy. “The brothels and hotels are prevalent with Timorese girls who sold them short for money. The UN personnel pay them $5 or $10 for sex. Then the price rockets

($5000). Now you don’t see them because there is no money” (Trott, Robert. 2017. June 2). The rising sex economy is also related to the increasing concerns of public health. “Babies were just born with HIV. Before the UN came, AIDS were not prevalent in Timor. UN personnel was not screened” (Trott, Robert. 2017. June 2). The presence of the UN also contributes to the fake economy. “They built houses standard higher than they should and the rent is high to others”

(Trott, Robert. 2017. June 2).

Kym’s story adds another dimension of the tension between the international and the local, by highlighting the difference and the tension between the international peacekeepers and the international civilians. Kym said that “she accidentally brushed an African lady’s butt. Then she was asked by a police officer to get in the car with him. She saw three cans of beer in his car, and he was already drunk, so she refused to follow his order” (Miller, Kym. 2017. June 2).

Sheila is a Philippine woman married to a Timorese guy. She provides her story which points out that the profession of the international might not only perpetuate the difference

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between the local and the international, but also impede empowering the local in the development process. Sheila worked in the development unit before, and worked with experts from the UN. She thought the expert international have a kind of mentality, always “look down on national counterpart rather than wanting to empower them” (Freitas, Sheila. 2017. June 12).

Therefore, they easily miss the problem happening in Timor-Leste. It ends up “nationals doing all the work. They just transfer the knowledge of international to national counterpart without teaching them in order to extend their own contracts to stay in Timor-Leste. So the national believe that they are stupid because they cannot do what you tell them to do” (Freitas, Sheila.

2017. June 12).

Furthermore, Sheila mentioned the negative impacts of peacekeepers on Timorese, especially SEA.

There are too many, especially with peacekeepers. Especially UNPOL in UNMIT. There is one unit conduct handling all the complaints. All the complaints are women with the peacekeepers. Usually they stay one year. They can extend it, but normally one year. Then they have to leave. They leave their kids here. People say, “this one is already married, what do you do?” Women say, we need international assistance cause the baby needs diapers. They will look into it until you become tired of following up cases. Then you have to rely on yourself. Before they (peacekeepers) call it hazard pay. They have extra allowance. Here they feel like tourists. They are not doing anything, right? Every Saturday and Sunday, you will see them naked running at the beach, riding bicycle. I am serious. It’s easy to have boyfriends before cause there are a lot of peacekeepers. You can change one after another. It’s like Timorese girls swap boyfriends from the UN (Freitas, Sheila. 2017. June 12).

Overall, Robert, Kym, and Sheila present stories of SEA in peacekeeping from the perspective of foreigners who seem to belong to the category of the international yet not necessarily so after taking a close look at their stories and experiences. Interestingly enough, they draw themselves closer to the local Timorese while separating themselves from the international peacekeepers by speaking from the perspective of the local. This blurs the difference between the

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international and the local, when these three foreign narrators perform as if they are locals when telling their stories of peacekeeping drawing on their own experiences.

SEA comes across in the narratives of Robert, Kym, and Sheila, which do not just include the case of transactional sex and abuse with the local Timorese women, but also extend to possible sexual abuse of the international women who live locally, and the case of non- transactional sex. By examining the intimate and interpersonal realm, peacekeeping might seem peaceful in public but causing unintended consequences in peoples’ everyday life. In public, peacekeepers keep distance from the local to keep local peace professionally. In private, they could be too intimate and interrupt the peace of the local. However, according to the above narratives, what is represented in public and private might refer to the same thing: the privilege and power of the peacekeepers.

In addition to SEA, these narrators also mention other negative effects of peacekeepers.

While Robert mentions that the local die from drunk driving of the peacekeepers, Sheila notions the lack of willingness of the international to educate the local counterpart in the development sectors and end up disempowering the local with their presence. Furthermore, Sheila also mentioned the existence and threats of other violence she experienced in 2006, even though the conflict in 2006 was between local police and military, which might be implicitly related to the complicit UN in post-intervention Timor-Leste.

Our house was attacked and we were attacked as well. Xanana drove them to the airport but people from the east thought that we are Xanana’s family, so they attacked the car. The car glasses were shattered. Xanana was afraid to stop the car. My back was pierced by a small piece of glass and left scarred. She was afraid and nervous due to her son. I believed that the crisis was instigated by the UN because they wanted to stay longer. I have to put my son under the seat because of glasses. I am afraid that the glass will hurt his eyes. It’s like a movie. I was very surprised. How come they can run across the Comoro bridge? It’s too many. I was not afraid. I was more afraid of my son because he is young and I am old. I told them I am malae, I am foreigner. They didn’t notice. They thought we are his family. In fact

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he (Xanana) was just helping drive us to the airport. He still drove the car to the airport. We can’t open the door because they broke it (Freitas, Sheila. 2017. June 12).

Solutions to the Problems

Even though there are more kinds of violence experienced by the local than SEA, the dominant discourse only highlights a particular form of violence, SEA, and its solutions in the intervened Timor-Leste, which undercuts the relation between the international and the local. In contrast to the international discourse of peacekeeping, local understanding of peacekeeping problems come from the perceptions of the local. By highlighting only one form of violence between the international and the local, what are considered as problematic by different local actors are rendered relatively unimportant and even become invisible, even though the international shape the emotional and physical experiences of the local. These concerns emerging from the local narratives are: lack of respect of the local culture and people, peacekeepers who have non-transactional relationships and don't take responsibility, arrogance, lack of inclusion of the local staff in responding to local violence, lack of knowledge and English skills of peacekeepers, lack of screening of peacekeepers, peacekeepers who have knowledge yet don't want to teach and empower the local, etc.

Compared to the solution developed by the UN, that is, increasing the regulation of the peacekeepers in order to protect local population, especially women, what are suggested in the local narratives as solutions might look very different: respect of the local culture and the people, including the local to deal with local violence, increasing the professional skills and communicative skills of peacekeepers, screening peacekeepers for sexually-transmitted-disease and AIDS/HIV, and the willingness of the international to empower the local.

Instead of regulating the behavior of peacekeepers, local Timorese and local foreigners suggest that peacekeepers might not seem professional and humanitarian as they seem in the

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dominant narrative. Nor are they all perpetrators of local population. The local narrative of the peacekeepers and their problems add a human dimension to the dominant narrative: peacekeepers might just be ego-driven or interests-driven individuals who came to Timor-Leste to make money for bettering their life. They are not necessarily bad people. They are just people, who do not necessarily feel superior or more privileged than the local in building peace. They might even be considered as stupid people from the local perspective. Such a portrayal of peacekeepers is obvious in the narrative of A9 when she used “zero-zero relationship” to describe the relationship between the local and the international, as well as the stupidity of some international police women who became jealous at her when she got most of the attentions from the international policemen.

Moreover, the local actors could also offer alternative solutions to improve or correct the ineffectiveness of peacekeeping missions, if we are willing to listen to and learn from them.

Their perceptions of the problems of peacekeeping do not totally coincide with the presumed problems inherent in the dominant discourse denoting the UN SEA policy. Similarly, the suggested solutions to the distorted behavior of the peacekeepers might fail to better the lives of the local, if many local actually need more respect and sensitivity to the local culture than protection from the international. The lack of understanding the local concerns and lack of being willing to be close to the local to maintain the profession of the mission could perpetuate the tensions and conflicts between the local and the international, and even further impede the implementation of the missions. This implies that the success of a peacekeeping mission might not totally depend on the profession of the international which is performed by their physical separation from and their bypassing attitude toward the local. Rather, the profession needs to be strengthened by including local knowledge and communication between the local and the

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international. This cannot be achieved without breaking down the wall between the international and the local, as well as crossing the boundaries in-between.

By failing to include the local to reformulate the problems and the solutions, the dominant discourse which prioritizes the international than the local remains unchallenged, which worryingly marginalizes or downplays the knowledge, conflict solution mechanism, and actors of the local. The dominant discourse tends to frame the problem of peacekeeping as an administrative problem, as the case of SEA indicates. Therefore, they can be improved or addressed by proper management and discipline. Simplifying the behavior of peacekeepers as an administrative problem which can be addressed or managed through the peacebuilding scheme might not only put too many the responsibilities to the international staff in the UN missions, but offer too less opportunities for these local actors and their knowledge to enrich and complicated our understanding of any localized peacekeeping.

We should also keep in mind that not all the local think that the international are trouble- makers or problems. Some think that they are part of them and the international is symbolic of discipline and profession. For example, Domingos from Suai worked in the UN missions from

2001-2012 as a move control assistant, then he left for Congo until 2014. He was proud that he could work in the UN mission. Moreover, his narrative about how he thinks of the SEA reflects his adoption of the identity of the international by using “we,” which blurs the dichotomy between the local and the international: “Relationship is an issue of self-control for the sake of security. We are far away from home. We need assistance. You have to control yourself not to get into trouble. Had to protect ourselves. We are very strict. It’s dangerous for the UN people not to make trouble by ourselves” (Domingos. 2017. August 6). Similarly, Paulo from Oecussi worked from 1999 to 2009 as a move control assistant, then he went to Congo as a UNV and

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worked there for 6 years. Paulo thinks that the international are “respectful and professional.” As a national staff member working in the UN, he “feel very proud. It was my first time working with the UN” (Domingos. 2017. August 6). While Domingos’s identity is affected by the UN, which mixes the international and the local, Paulo’s identity is positively related to his interaction with and impression of the international.

Conclusion: the Complex Construction of the International and the Local

By examining the narratives of different Timorese narrators who work with, along, and near the UN peacekeepers, I found that different framings of the international within and beyond the simplified dominant discourse and binary categories undercut by the assumed power hierarchy between the international and the local in the discourse of peacekeeping. The dominant discourse risks eclipsing the alternative framings and understandings of the problems of peacekeeping. Furthermore, it leads to reducing the complex experiences and multiple encounters between the local population and the peacekeepers to a simple narrative containing a cause, consequence, and solution in the dominant discourse. I argue that perpetuating the dominant discourse and the use of binary categories without problematizing its political underpinning and consequences functioning along with the politics of exclusion and inclusion, different forms of violence and other sources of problems of peacekeeping might be undermined.

Furthermore, the discourse might curtail abilities of policy makers and scholars in coming up with alternative solutions based on the perspectives and everyday experiences of the local actors with a more contextualized understanding of peacekeeping in Timor-Leste.

The binary construction of the local and the international in the dominant discourse merely highlights some experiences of the local, such as sexual exploitation and abuse.

Moreover, with the illusion of scant interaction between both sides, some ideas and narratives might circulate and recirculate within the group and become dominant as if they are true while

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undermining other possibilities. The interactions between the international and the local occur in many forms, and they shape different experiences of the local. SEA merely captures some forms of interactions where violence and power hierarchy are innate in the behavior of internationals, as well as the unintended consequences of such behavior on certain local actors. I argue that by highlighting some perspectives of the local helps omit others who consider peacekeepers as helpers and solutions to the problems of Timorese. Moreover, focusing on the violence imposed by the international helps distract our attention from other forms of violence as well as their deep-rooted sources in different contexts. Criminalizing SEA might not work to better peacekeeping missions because it does not include other forms of violence and address them.

Seeing that the international and the local are socially constructed and noting that their boundary is blurry could help us break down the physical, language, and cultural barriers which separate the local from interacting with the international. Breaking the circular negative connotations of the international among the local as well as the false separation of both could help increase the socialization of an alternative behavior away from SEA based on a gender-sensitive attitude and the acknowledgement the selective representation and valorization of the narratives as locals or internationals. Learning the relationality of the local and the international might further help increase the effectiveness of the international peacekeeping missions.

The dominant discourse portrays peacekeepers as a powerful and privileged group of internationals. Moreover, it portrays the interaction between both sides as scant except in economic activities. This is an illusion, an illusion abstracting away from the complex realities fabricated by multiple human encounters and interactions, as well as enabled by the simple categories of the international and the local. The international is never a unified group, and does not just refer to peacekeepers. They are partially from where they stand, but they are also

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partially constructed by the local who have interacted with them or not. They also affect the lives of many locals on the daily basis. Moreover, such a distinction does not capture the fluid and contingent nature of positionalities and identities, which are hard to demarcate with simple categories.

Reexamining the categories and the dominant discourse of peacekeeping help feminist security scholars rewrite the stories we tell about peacekeeping, the international, and the local by highlighting the relationality and the interconnectedness between the international and the local, since one does exist or be understood without mentioning the other. The conceptual utility of the assumed categories of the international and the local highlights the problem, consequence, and solution in a straight-forward fashion, which makes the policy-making and implementation more feasible. But it is also limited because it either represents the international as problems or solutions in relation to the local, and the vice versa. We need to know that human beings are not only interrelated in the mind of people, but also manifested in each other in reality. Discovering how the local perceive and make sense of the international with an eye on gender is vital to reorient the focus from focusing on the international or the local, to the relationality of both, in order to increase the interaction and better communication between both sides. This not only has significant implications in recovering alternative framings from different perspectives, which might be obscured by the label of the local, but also suggesting different solutions to the problems for better improving the effectiveness of future missions. Most importantly, this bottom-up way of listening to and understanding peacekeeping from the local actors while disturbing the uncritical production of the binary categories helps politicize and subvert the power underlying of the dominant discourse.

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CHAPTER 6 WOMEN AS OTHERS IN THE LOCAL GAZE: MALAE NIAN

In Ch.4 I discussed that women who have relationships with peacekeepers cannot be easily categorized as victims/ non-victims or mothers/ wives. As a result, they become invisible in the dominant discourses which represent women through particular categories and stereotypes.

In this chapter, I will further explore what underlies the invisibility of these women by problematizing how these women are othered as “malae nian” against the moral standards in terms of what good women should be in the local gaze, as well as its political consequences and political implications in relation to the nation-building project of post-intervention Timor-Leste.

From my interviews, I found that though there are some agreed upon meanings on the concept of malae nian, its referents, meanings, and entailed moral judgements vary among individuals, which does not always refer to women who have relationships with peacekeepers or carry negative meanings. Moreover, I found that malae nian are constructed against an ideal femininity which portrays women as mothers and wives, which no longer exists in post- intervention Timor-Leste where local social-economic-political structures as well as the lifestyles of Timorese experience great changes with the presence of peacekeepers since 2002. The romanticization of good women as mothers and wives against the bad women malae nian is not only moral but political. It signals that sexual practices conducted by malae nian are not moral nor patriotic. Therefore, a particular group of women, malae nian, are stigmatized and silenced as others by the local in order to sustain the ideal image of good women who are the building blocks of the family, community, and the nation. I further argue that although such a unifying nation has its origin based on the common interests of resistance of Timorese political elites in

Indonesian occupation time, the unified idea of nation is constructed on different nationalisms endorsed among the elites but also is predicated on the control of women’s body and sexuality.

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In this chapter, I first introduce the narrative of A3, who used to be a police woman and lead the VPU of PNTL in 2001 and then had a son with her Senegalese coworker in UNPOL. A3 was labeled as a malae nian, who later got blamed, harassed, and disowned by her ex-husband and her own family. Then I compare her narrative with another two other women who worked with the UN peacekeepers and also got labeled as malae nian by locals. I show how these two women tried to separate themselves from women like A3 in their stories. Next, I show how the local men and women make sense of malae nian in various ways. Moreover, its meanings, referents, and judgments vary among locals, and some locals deem malae nian as a matter of choice, which challenges the vague and abstract category of malae nian representing a particular group of women. I argue that although malae nian tends to be used to refer to women who are close to malae at work or in relationships, there is no fine line between who are malae nian and who are not.

In my second section, I will review what locals discuss as the ideal of good women in

Timorese society as opposed to the representation of bad women portrayed by malae nian. I will also use stories of some women who worked in the UN units and NGOs to demonstrate that how their everyday lived experiences as career women, mothers, and wives in post-intervention

Timorese society challenge this ideal image of good women, even though they do not have intimacy with peacekeepers or other foreigners. I argue that such an erection of ideal good women does not reflect real lived experiences of women in post-intervention Timorese society.

Moreover, it helps silence women who are labeled as malae nian in public.

Lastly, I will discuss the dynamics between gender, women, state, militarism, and nation- building, as well as the political implications of malae nian in relation to nation-building in post- intervention Timor-Leste. I argue that stigmatizing malae nian signals that pursuing practices of

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sexuality and desire is not moral nor patriotic. In other words, malae nian is the symbol of the opposite of the nationalism coinciding with militarism. I reread the stories of the local who share their understanding of malae nian. They understand women who are malae nian yet perceive the

UN as perpetrators of suffering of these women. I found that many local seem to see malae nian as victims of the UN as well as sources of stains toward their family, community, and nation. I argue that by naming and shaming these women as malae nian who sell themselves to the foreigners, the local construct these malae nian as others compared to an ideal self of Timorese women, and exclude them in the local population. The self is not just an ideal image of women who are perfect mothers and chaste wives but also an ideal self of the whole nation free from the touch of foreigners. I then argue that malae nian underlies a political process where nation- building of Timor-Leste is fabricated with militarism after the intervention. It defines and embodies itself through women’s bodies and in their everyday life. I will also use a story of a bar fight between American and Timorese soldiers over Timorese women in 2010 to demonstrate the power competition between military masculinities, the power of American military masculinity over Timorese one, as well as the violence against malae nian. The violence against Timorese women in this context suggests that militarism along with nationalism has dominated and penetrated the society and civil lives, as well as the desire of local elites to take back control of the leadership from the hands of the occupying military.

In this section, I will use three stories to illustrate the social construction of malae nian, as well as how the naming and shaming of malae nian makes up the everyday experiences of women. First, I will introduce the narrative of A3, who used to be a police woman and led the

VPU of PNTL in 2001 and then had a son with her Senegalese coworker in UNPOL. A3 was

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labeled as a malae nian by local Timorese, and later got blamed, harassed, and disowned by her ex-husband and her own family based in Dili.

Three Narratives

In 2001, I worked as a police woman in VPU of PNTL in Dili. Then I had a close relationship with a UN police Mamadu Sila from Senegal from 2001 to 2002. I had one son from Mamadu. Mamadu left in 2002, when I was two months pregnant his son. My son is now 16 years old now. I got no support from this guy after I gave birth to my son. I was still married but separating from my husband when I started my relationship with Mamadu. He could not accept the fact that I was with foreigners. He came to my workplace to make complaints about this and told me: ‘I prefer you to be with Timorese people.’ Under the mediation of my commander, Gorge Monteiro, in PNTL, we reached an agreement. I cannot marry to Mamadu and had to end the relationship immediately. I felt too afraid to stay in Dili. My ex- husband’s family also kept blaming and harassing me in my workplace: ‘Foreigners just want to give kids to you, not marrying you.’ I asked my commander to transfer me from Dili to Suai. I suffered a lot from my own family too. They told me: you are so stupid to get the kid from the UN. They also told me: you make our dignity dirty cause you live with the malae. There are nuns and priests in my family. They rejected to accept my son and did not visit her at all since she moved to Suai with my son in 2002. People also told me, “You are a slut of malae.” Some Timorese men wanted to marry me, but I did not want to get married again. Sometimes I felt that my dignity did not exist anymore. Sometimes I cried alone. I would hold my son, who usually looked at me with big eyes. I would tell him: bad words are bad words. Your mom had you without any regret. He will cry and hold me back. I also told him: you have to accept those words. You have to be strong and fight for me (A3. 2017. August 5).

In her narrative, A3 was considered a “bad” example by violating local moral norms at many levels: first, A3 was married to a Timorese man when she met Mamadu and mothered a boy with him. She was not a chaste wife of her Timorese husband from this regard. She was also not a good wife according to the Catholic Church, which asked women to obey their husbands.

Second, the fact that she had an affair with a UN police officer and mothered a boy with a man from Senegal in an informal relationship shamed not just her own dignity but also her family’s from which her sisters and relatives are nuns and priests. In local communities, nuns and priests are highly respected and endorse high moral standards. Third, what is noteworthy from the

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accusations from her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s family is that she should not be with is a foreign man as opposed to other Timorese men. Her behavior which tarnished her ex-husband, her ex-husband’s family, and her own family caused her to be harassed, blamed, and eventually disowned by her ex-husband’s family and her family. A3’s narrative demonstrated that her behavior was immoral and was not accepted. As a result, she was punished by her family and the others in the same community (her ex-husband and his family) to reinforce the values and virtues which are and acceptable-chastity of wife and the loyalty to her Timorese husband, community, and family. By naming and shaming A3 as malae nian, a slut of malae, a woman who has no dignity, she is othered as a morally degraded woman and a traitor of her community and family, and thus got excluded from her family and the whole community. A3’s narrative demonstrates how the label of malae nian works to transform her identity from a good Timorese woman to a bad woman through social and discursive practices, which leads to her everyday experiences of shame and suffering.

Malae nian, in Timorese context, could also refer to other women who are seen present with foreigners but do not have relationships with them. When these women talk about those women they know or hear who have relationships with peacekeepers, like A3, they also try to distinguish themselves from those malae nian. Here I use the stories of Andreza and Marilia to show how both construct administrative staff in the UN missions as well as police women as

“malae nian” compared to themselves, women who worked closely with the UN without forming relationships with the UN peacekeepers.

Andreza

Andreza worked in the human rights and security sector in UNMIT (2011-12), where she was responsible for police and military training. She now works in the United Nations Children's

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Fund (UNICEF) in Dili. When Andreza was training police, police often asked her if she needs to have special relationships to work with the UN. She replied to them,

There are 2 kinds of UN staff within the mission: one is administrative staff while the other required more skills and experiences. Administrative staff only need to have some English skills, and some of them are from bars/disco (Guterres, Andreza. 2017. July 24).

The “other”, administrative staff, working in the same mission is constructed in

Andreza’s narrative in relation to other local female staff working in the same UN mission in terms of the levels of professional skills and experiences.

Similarly, Marilia also mentioned a story of malae nian she knew during the interview.

Marilia has been working in FOKUPERS, starting as a fulltime staff member since 2002. Now she is the current director of FOKUPERS. She mentioned a police woman who has three children with her husband but the last one is obviously different from other siblings:

Marilia

I have one case in my neighbor. Maybe before she has the relationship with the peacekeeping force. Because she is a police woman, maybe she met someone from Africa. She has a husband, already has three children, then the last one the last child is different from others. Because she has curly hair, black, so African. When this baby was born, her husband was not happy because it’s totally different from the others, other children. Maybe she isn’t aware that she can be pregnant from this, because she has a husband. But then the neighbors become curious, the neighbors start to ask. This is a police woman, before she had to work together with the African police when they came here with the peacekeeping force after 2006.This woman has 4 children but this one is very different. If she is married to African man, then people may not have problem with this. Because she has a husband, and this kid is totally different from theirs. Here in Timor we also have a lot of people in Portuguese time, they marry to Angola, Mozambique, they also have the same color like African, but people don’t have problem with this. Because they know they marry to. Because this is her fault, her problem, people will give stigma to women working together with peacekeeping force (Alves, Marilia. 2016. July 25).

To explain, in Marilia’s narrative, we can see that there is an attempt to separate of identities between women who work with the peacekeepers but don’t have relationships with them, and women who have intimate relationships with peacekeepers. This is shown in her last

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two sentences of comments by attributing social stigmatization to her and other women alike who work with peacekeepers. Often locals tend to perceive both in the same way, even though the former do not necessarily have intimacy with peacekeepers. However, Marilia tried to distinguish one from the other, and attributed the general negative perception of malae nian to women who have affairs with peacekeepers. The other, her neighbor who was a police woman and had an affair with someone from Africa, is constructed compared to women who work with the peacekeepers in her narrative to show the moral difference between women who are close to peacekeepers by framing this police woman as the troublemaker who had an affair with foreigners other than her husband.

From the stories of Andreza and Marilia, we learn that malae nian might refer to women who have real relationships with the UN peacekeepers, or women who work closely with the UN peacekeepers, like police women or administrative staff in the UN missions. What is intriguing is that the stigmatizations of these two kinds of malae nian, administrative staff and police women who had an affair with peacekeepers, are not directly related to foreigners in stories of Andreza and Marilia. This is different from the narrative of A3, which highlights her intimacy with foreigners as well as the intolerance of her ex-husband, her family and community. What makes these women “malae nian” is that they lack the profession in terms of skills and experiences and the behavior of failing to abide by their marriage instead of their closeness with foreign peacekeepers. It is apparent when Marilia mentioned, “Here in Timor we also have a lot of people in Portuguese time, they marry to Angola, Mozambique, they also have the same color like African, but people don’t have problem with this. Because they know they marry to.”

Andreza and Marilia describe malae nian in a way that women who work with the peacekeepers are not the same compared to other women who have real relationships with the

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peacekeepers. By constructing those women as “others” compared to themselves, Andreza and

Marilia separate themselves from these malae nian, although they are also considered as malae nian from the local perspective.

Malae nian is socially constructed. The meanings attached to it as well as the boundary between malae nian and non-malae nian are not stable. To further explore this idea, next I will show how the local men and women make sense of malae nian in various ways. I argue that although malae nian tends to be used to refer to women who are close to malae at work or in relationships, there is no fine line between who are malae nian and who are not. Moreover, its meanings, referents, and judgments vary among locals, and some locals deem malae nian as a matter of choice, which challenges the vague and abstract category of malae nian representing a particular group of women.

In terms of referents, malae nian might refer to women who have special relationships with peacekeepers (A2. 2017. July 31), women who have relationships with foreigners in general

(Soares 2017), or women who work closely with the UN peacekeepers (Alves, Marilia. 2016.

July 25; Guterres, Andreza. 2017. July 24; A5. 2017. July 21; Reis, Alzira. 2016. July 28).

In terms of meanings, malae nian is different to different individuals. From my interviews, it could mean: whores, prostitutes, slaves, and sluts (A13. 2017. August 5; A3. 2017.

August 5; A14. 2017. June 9; Nehu, Lily. 2017. July 14). Oldegar used one phrase to refer to women who have relationships with the UN peacekeepers: letra1 2 (UN) ho letra 3 (GNR) nia letra 4 (women). In translation, this phrase means: the whore of UN and GNR (Massinga,

Oldegar. 2017. July 1).

1 Letter in Tetun

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In addition, malae nian also means leftover of the UN (Secondinho, Salssinha. 2016.

August 6), possession or property owned by or sold to malae (Soares, Bill. 2017. June 20), and peacekeepers’ babies without fathers (da Costa, Alberico. 2017. July 8),

From above narratives, I found that malae nian refers to women who have intimate or working relationships with peacekeepers, their children, or women who are seen with foreigners in general depending on the linguistic contexts. The concept of malae nian does not necessarily represent particular referents. Douglas Dow (2014, 65-66) claims that “the meanings and functions of political concepts through which political actors describe, evaluate, anticipate, and enact politics never remain static, but instead change and develop constantly.” What he means is that conceptual meanings can be constructed in different and complex ways, but they do not necessarily confirm the empirical referents. In the case of malae nian, the conceptual referent is women. However, which women is referred to is never certain. In other words, malae nian is never able to be reduced to some agreed meanings, or observable facts. Meanings of malae nian vary across the groups of informants, but different meanings of malae nian might coexist or overlap, and are used by people in different ways. For example, A17 used “malae nian” to refer to her son as well as the perception of others about her. Different meanings of malae nian can only be found in the ordinary language used by locals in their everyday life.

Everyday experiences of the local are constitutive of multiple realities and knowledges.

The social realities and knowledges are produced and reproduced from actions, interactions, intersubjectivities of human beings. They require an interpretive understanding of researchers.

“Interpretive philosophies reject that the human possibility of such social science mirroring. In their view, social realities and human knowledge of them are created by human actors through our actions and interactions, intersubjectivity (Yanow 2014, 105). Different meanings of malae

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nian demonstrate the contingent and fluid nature of language couched on complex life worlds and everyday experiences, which constantly shape and reshape our perceptions. I put myself in the web of meanings of the local society to listen to how locals think and behave surrounding the concept of malae nian. I found that the locals tend to perceive malae nian as the enemy who go astray from the values and virtues of Timorese family and culture, as narratives of Nina and

Alberico suggested. Nina mentioned the concerns of families when women are with foreigners, while Alberico described the status of malae nian as something “against our culture” in the communal contexts (da Costa, Nina. 2017. June 3; da Costa, Alberico. 2017. July 8). In other words, malae nian are othered, excluded, and recast as the enemy of the home front. The following interviews show how the locals perceive malae nian diverting from feminine virtues and values in local family, culture, tradition, and community, in spite of the unclear and vague meanings of what these virtues or values are.

The meanings, referents, and judgments of malae nian vary among local individuals.

Many of them still perceive malae nian negatively. However, some local informants deem malae nian as a matter of choice of individuals and claim that they would not be judged by people who are better-educated in urban area, like Dili, as opposed to those who are less-educated in rural areas.

Sanio’s narrative highlighted another possible way of interpreting malae nian as a gendered concept, which attaches particular meanings to the body of women. When women do not embody those meanings in accordance with the social expectations and roles for women, that is, marrying Timorese men, the locals will question and even blame women for not following the collective norms. On the contrary, Timorese men are not bound by these norms when they marry or date foreign women. Malae nian do not apply to Timorese men in relationship with foreign

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women but only to Timorese women. Sanio’s description of difference between men and women demonstrates how gender plays into women in the context of Timor-Leste as well as how gender confines women to the power hierarchy between sex. Seeing gender in sexual difference and their related treatments makes the concept of malae nian not just a descriptive concept but also a normative one.

By recovering its normative possibility intersecting with gender, malae nian can be seen as a site where multiple narratives about women contest and intersect with each other. According to Wibben, “The narrative does not speak for itself but has to be articulated through our reading/engagement with it” (Wibben 2011, 27). This quote implies not only the multiple forms of narratives and meanings, but also the conceptualization of narratives as an ongoing process which is open to all kinds of actors to participate in sense-making. Meanwhile, its political nature also makes it salient that some meanings and related narratives are hidden or obscured while others are highlighted. Although malae nian could be a sign or a source of gender oppression, it is also a valid concept problematizing the political and social construction of narratives underlying the meanings of malae nian. Since the meanings of malae nian are not fixed not stable, they can always be redefined and reconstructed. On the contrary, if people repetitively perform the same meanings without challenging them, some meanings will become crystallized and normalized, which in turn restrains the identities and activities of women who are defined as malae nian. The violence of the dominant narratives functions to obscure the possibilities of multiple construction of meanings and narratives while naturalizing and normalizing particular ones as if they are true.

Furthermore, I argue that malae nian is not just a moral construction established by local culture or tradition. It is also integral to the implementation of modern projects of nation states

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through repackaging and reproducing culture where women are represented in particular ways.

Malae nian is constructed against particular ideas of tradition and culture that local society and community endorse in the narratives of the local. Nevertheless, tradition and culture are not the same thing. In the discursive realm, the concepts of tradition and culture are not fixed. The meanings of tradition evolve throughout history and the definition of culture changes with contexts. Moreover, local and culture do not necessarily share the same meaning, despite that they are used interchangeably or semantically related. “Not everyone from, or living in the same place (be it a village, a town or a country) shares the same culture, the same classificatory system or moral values, nor are certain cultural institutions or values just local” (Silva and Simao 2016,

196). Silva and Simao point out that the local might define culture based on the logic of selectivity, that is, “valorizing some practices and overlooking others” (2016, 201). If the local make sense of malae nian against culture based on their selective identifying and labelling some local practices as culture, malae nian should not be understood simply as someone whose behavior is degrading or tarnishing the whole society and community. Silva and Simao demonstrate that culture can be used as vehicle to state and nation-building: in the case of state- building, culture could be considered as uncivilized local practices which need to be purged for building nation states (Elias 1982). In the case of Timor-Leste, culture is both a challenge to be overcome for more efficient administration and other policies as well as a vehicle for “more efficient education policies and for tourism promotion” (Zhiming 2014). Silva and Simao found that culture, local practices, and nation-building in Timor-Leste are interweaving with each other: “The national construction of Timor-Leste has implied the reinvention and management of local practices, including their use for government purposes” (Silva and Simao 2016, 202). This means that in contrast to Elias’s description of something from the past which needs to be

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purged, culture, in Timorese contexts, contains different local practices which are selected, represented, and packaged in the language of culture to be reproduced in the modern nation-state projects of Timor-Leste. Although there are no governmental policies or NGOs’ projects related to or managing these malae nian, such a total omission of malae nian from the state to the community-based NGOs needs to be problematized. It indicates that malae nian are excluded from culture or tradition for the fact that they are posing the opposite. Silence of malae nian signals governmental control through discursive violence working through bodies of women.

Such an exclusion, I further argue, is crucial to nation-building of post-colonial and post- intervention Timor-Leste. The social stigmatization of malae nian in Timorese society signals the political attempt of post-colonial and post-intervention Timor-Leste to bring their culture back while purging unwanted practices of colonialism by controlling women’s body for national development.

“Malae nian” are socially constructed against the general ideal of good Timorese women who have self-dignity and moral purity in the local culture. While the content of culture is vague and abstract, what the local mean by good women is also undetermined and negotiable. Although many informants tend to perceive the idea of good women as wives and mothers in a patriarchal society, some of their understanding of good women is mixed with a more modern sense of womenhood suggesting that women should be independent from men. The selected narrative of

Marilia show how local understand good women according to their culture, as well as their own perception of good women in modern society against their culture:

Sometimes the society wants women to live or act based on their expectation, like women should be like this, women can cook, women is loyal to the husband, and family, even here sometimes good women also wear long skirt. If a woman should be free, it’s based on her. Because of the patriarchal system when women get married, her husband and family bring the berlake, so the family wants this women cook, and also serves the big family. My husband’s family, like his father or

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mother, doubt that. I should be there to cook. But sometimes I don’t have time. I just send my family members to go to help them. Even you work in public, you also work in the family. It’s like a double job. I am lucky cause my husband he also helps a bit before here in FOKUPERS. He knows and he always helps with the domestic works. But when my mother-in-law came, he showed her some cook. She said, “why you are cooking? Where is your wife? She always asks. And he said, “she also working too. Now she is busy with her work. I have to cook too.” And sometimes my mother-in-law goes to others, “when I went to Dili, I was very sad. Because I saw my son he works hard he also cooks. Why they don’t pay someone to do this thing?” This always happens (Alves, Marilia. 2016. July 25).

Matias, a local Timorese man, provides a typical view of good women in relation to their husbands as well as the gender difference in marital relationships in a more straight-forward way.

If you are a woman, you doing domestic issue, right? Your task in terms of domestic. You have to work everything for your husband, and women will be very well-respected. If the guy, your husband, marries more than 1 female, it doesn’t matter if you are the first human he marries to. Even you are the second wife he marries to, as long as you marry in the Church, you will be respected even you are the second (Boavida, Matias. 2016. July 26).

The above narratives demonstrate that patriarchy is constitutive of femininity of women in Timorese culture. In patriarchal society, the activity realm of women is household. Women have to play the roles of wives and mothers taking care of the household. In addition, they also have to keep quiet and obey their husbands and family members. However, we should not forget that post-intervention Timor-Leste has experienced a huge political-economic structural change, which accordingly affects the reform of gender norms and roles. Women are still bound by gender norms which define women as mothers and wives, but the changing circumstances and structures allow women to take up the responsibilities of breadwinners of households. Women engage in informal economy by opening coffee shops, housekeeping and cleaning, cooking, working in local bars or restaurants, doing small business, selling vegetables, fruits, and crafts on the street, gambling, etc. Structural change opens the public sphere to women to participate in politics alone with other male elites. Women can step in to the public realm through working and

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participating in politics. Local women are not just wives and mothers but are also career women, who enjoy more economic independence and political freedom. The structural change affects how people think about what good women should be. Some women expressed their own perceptions of good women which are different from their understanding of good women in the cultural term. From their perspectives, good women should be independent women (Leong,

Manuela. 2016. July 26), equal partner (Reis, Alziria. 2016. July 28), and women who know

“what she wants and what she wants to do” (Alves, Marilia. 2016. July 25).

Although these women present a more modern sense of womanhood in terms of independence from men and the equality of men, they do not abandon their cultural roles as good women. Culture which defines ideal good women is not just a discursive construct but also integral to their everyday life where women try to fulfill culture-defined roles of women while struggling to negotiate their tasks and roles in the workplace and household on a daily basis. This struggle is highlighted when Marilia discussed the visit of her mother-in-law, who felt sad when seeing her son help cook and then complained about it to others. In post-intervention Timor-

Leste, women have to do double jobs: one at home while the other at work. Quoting from

Marilia, “Even you work in public, you also work in the family” (Alves, Marilia. 2016. July 25).

Treatments and Experiences Faced by Malae Nian

Language is powerful because it not only shapes the way we perceive women but also how we interact with them. When we act on and embody those ideas and perspectives, they become reality. How women are perceived by the locals is related to how these women are treated in the family, society, and community, as well as the lived experiences of these women.

Women tend to be stigmatized and gossiped about by the locals due to these negative perceptions of these women. What is worse, they might be ostracized from the community and family and thus lose financial and familial support. A6 mentioned that in Timor-Leste, People

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gossip a lot, especially to women with foreigners, because people think that “you are just a doll to be used” (A6. 2017. June 1). Gossip does more than expressing or exchanging opinions about certain people, events, or topics. It shapes the ideas about women intersubjectively as slut, slave and whore between women and other locals.

Therefore, the perceptions of women shape women’s individual experiences ranging from emotional downturns to the loss of material supports from the family or community. For example, A3 cried because her family thought “You make our dignity dirty cause you live with the malae” (A3. 2017. August 5). while A8 felt hurt and cried because she felt she was deceived by her partner. In addition to invocation of many emotions and feelings, how people perceive these women causes the loss of financial resources and family support, and thus become isolated in the community. For instance, A3 was disowned by her family members after she had a son with a UNPOL. They rejected her son and did not visit her after she left Dili for Suai. Similarly,

A6’s friend who had sex with the UN personnel and got AIDS was ostracized by her family and died alone.

In addition to the individual level, negative perceptions of malae nian by the local also help silence malae nian in public. While Micato highlighted the factors of family and culture,

Teresa mentioned the role of Church which tends to ignore cases like this (Fernandes Alves,

Micato. 2017. June 14; Verdial, Teresa. 2016. July 25).

Alzira shared her experience of dealing with cases of women who have relationships and children with the peacekeepers. Her narrative highlighted some reasons why women did not report cases to the NGOs or other institutions.

The thing is that they are still private, so they didn’t share, because some challenges women are facing in this country is the relationship with the UN peacekeepers in person, maybe with the other partners, they were divorced or. They didn’t have the confidence to share. It’s happening here, so sometimes women

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themselves want to share, but in society some community members say that’s what you like, how can you complain that? So this is no support from the community member itself and the family. So sometimes it makes women don’t have the courage to claim the cases. One of my friends also she has the relationship with this person. She has a baby, but she said because she has a position so she doesn’t want to report. Some friends I know they are in the relationship with the peacekeepers, but they are really good, like they work in the UN, they have really good skills, so they didn’t claim about their kids. The moms still have money, can sustain their family and the kids (Reis, Alziria. 2016. July 28).

What is noted is that the treatments and lived experiences these malae nian experience in the local society are based on an ideal self of Timorese women constructed in Timorese culture far away from current reality. Nevertheless, the construction of an ideal self of Timorese women as a whole among the informants, cannot explain why only particular forms of performance of femininity are permitted in a post-intervention Timor-Leste where women start to gain independent economic and political power in both the public and private sphere. I argue that such a representation of Timorese women as a unified whole is helping create a myth of a self of

Timorese women as if there is no tension within and among women. Moreover, such a categorization and representation of women do coincide with the changing political and economic structures of Timor-Leste after the UN intervention. When the locals talk about women who have sexual relationships with the peacekeepers, they consciously or unconsciously downplay and inferiorize these women as others in the society according to the criteria of an ideal of good women. Through the othering process operating along with the logic of exclusion and inclusion, a superior, pure and perfect self of Timorese women is constructed in relation to other women in the same society. The category of the self essentializes and homogenizes women as obedient and domesticated actors in relation to their husbands, families, and communities.

However, bearing the power and violence of gendered discourse in mind, the self cannot be understood without the existence and exclusion of the other, which tends to be shamed and

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stigmatized against an ideal femininity of good and pure Timorese women. Nevertheless, such an ideal is isolated from reality of post-intervention Timor-Leste. No women can and will be able to fulfill such an ideal based on the imaginary self of Timorese good women packaged in the language of culture. The vagueness and abstractness of constructed self of Timorese women help create an illusionary solidarity of women by rendering its inner tension and contestation within and among women invisible, as well as allow selective naming, stigmatization, and exclusion of some particular women who do or do not necessarily have sex with peacekeepers.

Malae Nian, Peacekeeping, and Nation-building in Post-intervention Timor-Leste

Life stories and everyday experiences of women surrounding the concept of malae nian help problematize the continuous process of categorizing and representing women in post- intervention Timor-Leste according to the logic of selectivity. In this section, I show that malae nian highlights how global discourse of peacekeeping affects women in the nation-building projects of post-intervention and post-colonial Timor-Leste. The discourse of peacekeeping assumes that malae nian belong to, are protected by, and benefit from the peacekeepers. As a result, they are not victims. But women are affected by peacekeeping discourse. The concept of malae nian is vague and abstract, and appears to include all women with foreigners while only selectively highlighting and excluding women with the peacekeepers in post-intervention Timor-

Leste. I claim that such a labelling and stigmatizing of particular women against an ambiguous sense of culture is not moral but political, and needs to be situated in the ongoing progress of nation-building along with global peacekeeping. If certain meanings of concepts of malae nian are selected and performed through people’s behavior which shape not only how the local perceive these women but also how they treat these women, we need to further question the logic behind it and how such a process shapes women’s lived reality by asking why and for what purpose.

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To understand the connection among these three, first we need to know the relation between postcolonial and post-intervention states like Timor-Leste and peacekeeping. Although peacekeeping is repackaged itself in the form of peacebuilding in post-intervention states, militarism, which is defined by James Eastwood “as an ideological phenomenon” (Eastwood

2018, 44), still exists through assigning military to do the civilian work in peace-building missions. Therefore, in opposition to the militarism perpetuated and expanded in the civil society, which is constituted on the insecurity of some people, postcolonial feminist scholars criticize that peacekeeping is a colonial project in the form of neoliberalism as well as its unintended consequences (Angathangelou and Ling 2003). Another group of literature comes from critical security studies, which charges that militarism emphasizes much on military power through the dichotomy of civil/military aspects, as well as its universal and inclusive yet mostly

Western concept. Although both groups of literature push back against peacekeeping as a universal discursive practice, they highlight different aspects: postcolonial feminist scholars focus on the hierarchy and effects of power relations between colonial and the colonized countries, while the critical security studies scholars emphasize different ways militarism is understood and practiced in different countries as well as its effects, such as the constitution of the idea of Africa (Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2018, 65).

Although peacekeeping in terms of militarism sheds lights on its effects on civil society, seeing peacekeeping in terms of militarism might reinforce the binary concept of civil and military aspects. Moreover, such a definition might not be useful in problematizing the connection between militarism and society by seeing peacekeeping as an ideology which shapes some social facts. Eastwood points out that understanding militarism as ideology is too narrow.

Instead, he borrows from Althusser and defines it as “a structural relationship between social

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practices and the individuals who participate in it, which works by producing those individuals as subjects” (2018, 48). In my opinion, I think that such a definition not only connects the structure and the individual, but also reframes militarism central to peacekeeping as a performative act rather than merely ideology in the level of mind. Applying such an understanding of militarism to peacekeeping can tell us how individuals are transformed into subjects in society through engaging in “desiring war and military activity” (Eastwood 2018, 48).

How can such a definition of peacekeeping help us to understand the relation between peacekeeping, women and nation-building, as well as the effects on malae nian in post-colonial and post-intervention Timor-Leste? The above definition of peacekeeping highlights the transformative power of peacekeeping on citizens, which is omitted from the literature of postcolonial feminism and critical security studies literature. If citizens act through peacekeeping which is a form of ideology and peacekeeping as ideology has the power to transform citizens into subjects through performative acts, peacekeeping will shape the reality in particular ways.

Putting it in the context of postcolonial states, Swati Parashar argues that “postcolonial anxiety” of the Third World states “enables militarism at various levels of governance and state interventions in the everyday lives of the citizenry” (2018, 123). Parashar draws on the example of manifestation of excessive militarism domestically and internationally in India, which demonstrates how militarism is practiced in post-colonial India after the Cold War. Although we should not generalize her findings to Timor-Leste, her case study of India suggests that militarism might be practiced similarly or differently in other post-colonial and post-intervention states like Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste, which adopts state-building model in the peacebuilding projects, could possibly revive militarism by mobilizing its citizens to perform national identity constructed and promoted by elites in some way. If militarism persists and continues to shape

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how the citizens perceive and act in particular ways in Timorese context, we need to know the how women, state, militarism, and national identities are related to each other.

Women and the State

Women have always been integral to larger political entities, such as state and nation.

Feminists have engaged in theorizing the linkage between gender, women and the construction of state, nation, and nationalism. However, the discourses and categories in association with the construction of the state and nation have been insensitive to the invisibility of women and gender by centering on the state (Peterson 1992). According to Hobbes's theory of social contract, individuals fight with each other in the state of nature because of the human need to survive.

Because there is no guarantee of their security and property in the state of nature, people give up part of their rights in exchange for protection from the state to ensure that they can escape the state of nature, where each one preys on the other (Walker 1992, 187). The sovereign, a person or a body of persons, gaining rights from the people, turns individuals into citizens endowed with rights and responsibilities (1968, 44). At the same time, women are invisible and excluded from the citizenship with the erection of the dichotomy of public and private sphere. The origin of the state is constructed on women's insecurity (Peterson 1992, 32).

Feminists highlight the exclusion and integration of women form the public sphere.

Carole Pateman provocatively argues that the theory of social contract which has been considered is a theory of sex contract, for the original theory did not recognize the fact that the original pact is based on men’s access to women’s body and domination over women through conjugal contract (Pateman 1988). Through marriage, women become dependent on their husbands, who are heads of the household. After entering the civil society through contract- making, only men become citizens, while women are relegated to the private sphere. The fact that men dominate women and the household becomes apolitical and naturalized. Furthermore, it

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is reified by consolidating the status of state as protector of people. For Pateman, all contracts, marriage or citizenship, are inevitably patriarchal and thus destructive to equal and free rights by sustaining the dominance and oppression of men over women in the language of rights.

Ironically, despite the fact that women are subordinate to men in the construction of states, they are necessary and integral to the existence of the state. Even though women are denied full citizenship in terms of rights, access to resources, and participation compared to men, they are still protected by state, since they are fundamental to sustain the system of state physically and symbolically. For example, the idea of motherhood highlights women's contribution and significance to state as mothers in the homelands during the war times

(Kaufman and Williams 2007, 27). Motherhood is also used to justify the legitimacy of war and sacrifice of lives of soldiers. Some feminists, for example, Ruth Lister, also argue that the full citizenship of women comes from their role as mothers (Kaufman and Williams 2007, 28).

Additionally, women, who usually have no place in the battlefield or political leadership, are fundamental in supporting the war system and family while men are away.

Women, Body, and Gendered Identity

Gender and its relation to body are equally highlighted by feminists. Feminists pay attention to the difference between sexed body and gendered subjects. The concept of gender

“represents a questioning of correspondence between sexed bodies of men and women and ideational constructs of women and men in representational practices” (Wilcox 2011, 596).

Gender is “an identity tenuously constituted through time - an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts,” which determines subjects by designating particular roles and values to subjects to maintain the difference among subjects (Butler 1988). Gender, in other words, is the symbolic and cultural construction of identity and meanings predicated on unequal power relations, which does not necessarily conform to bodies. The socially constructed nature of

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gender thus distinguishes itself from biological sex, the sexual essentialization of men and women.

The sex-and-gender distinction is a powerful move which allows feminists to question not only the practices of security, but also the naturalization of bodies. Lauren Wilcox mentioned that security study “has implicitly theorized body as natural, biological entities only relevant insofar as they live, suffer, or die by the various practices of violence of interests to security scholars” (Wilcox 2011, 596–97). Moreover, by relating bodies to security practices, feminists are able to theorize how bodies and security practices help shape each other: “A body that can be killed or tortured is a body that is the product of discursive practices in international security, for example, the gendered and racialized discourses of ‘terrorist’” as a subject” (2011, 597).

Nevertheless, Wilcox also warns us of the danger that such a distinction and emphasis on the constitutive nature of gender might be limited in the sense that bodies only exist to be inscribed gender identity through discourses and practices of security. She contends that gender and body “are mutually implicated, but not reducible to one another” (Wilcox 2011, 598). To explain, the bodies of men might possess masculine traits or values, such as aggressiveness, courage, and rationality, which are favorable and desirable compared to feminine ones within a society. Although masculinity is often related to men, women also have and could have masculinity to make themselves able to access the status and power men enjoy. Men also have and could have feminine values and characteristics. However, rather than assuming that there is a universal masculinity and femininity, there are multiple masculinities and they might have hierarchical relations compared to hegemonic masculinity, according to R. W. Connell and J. W.

Messerschmidt (2005). “Gender orders construct multiple masculinities” (Connell and

Messerschmidt 2005, 835). Moreover, even men could be deprived of their masculinity through

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feminization, which make them torturable or killable. As an example, “The feminization of the victims at Abu Ghraib, who were described as robbed of their masculinity in the most humiliating possible way by women” (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 231). Feminist security scholars question the gendered nature of the state by contending that state justifies its legitimacy on hegemonic masculinities, “which are the ideal of citizenship and serve to ‘support male power and female subordination’” (Tickner 2001, 15). “Ideal types of masculinity almost always rely on a feminized, enemy other” (Huston 1983, cited from Sjoberg, 2007, 209). What gender can shed light on the dynamics of gender, state, and body is that the protective masculine role of the state is justified on the feminine or feminized bodies.

The socially constructed nature of gender does not fully consume the material existence of bodies, which allows bodies to be able to challenge gender norms and categories which define bodies. For instance, if bodies can only be represented in and through discourses and practices of security, usually women and femininity are relegated to bodies and other less favorable characteristics, such as passivity, irrationality, or emotion.

The introduction of gender and body by feminists highlights the potential of feminist security studies scholars in formulating counter-hegemonic discourses through challenging dominant masculine security discourses and practices where identities and subjectivities of bodies are implicated, constructed, and positioned. The dynamics of gender-and-body shed light to the fact that a body is killable not just because it is a vulnerable body, but because it is constructed as a particular body discursively in the first place. Gender is a signifier of power relations, which indicates its operation and effects at a broader social and political context.

According to conventional international relations theory, states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other states are charged with protecting. While it sees the

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perpetrators of violence as rational actors, it views those who are either protected or killed by this violence as mere bodies: ahistorical humans who breathe, suffer and die but have no particular political agency. In its rationalist variants, IR theory only sees bodies as inert objects.

Constructivist theory argues that subjects are formed through social relations, but leaves the bodies of subjects outside of politics, as “brute facts.” According to Wilcox, such limited thinking about bodies and violence is not just wrong, but also limits the capacity of IR to theorize the meaning of political violence. By contrast to rationalist and constructivist theory, feminist theory sees subjectivity and the body as inextricably linked. Bodies of Violence argues that IR needs to rethink its approach to bodies as having particular political meaning in their own right.

For example, bodies both direct violent acts (violence in drone warfare, for example) and are constituted by practices that manage violence (for example, scrutiny of persons as bodies through biometric technologies and body scanners). The book also argues that violence is more than a strategic action of rational actors (as in rationalist theories) or a destructive violation of community laws and norms (as in liberal and constructivist theories). Because IR theorizes bodies as outside of politics, it cannot see how violence can be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our political communities. By engaging with feminist theories of embodiment and violence, Bodies of Violence provides a more nuanced treatment of the nexus of bodies, subjects and violence than currently exists in the field of international relations. What gender constitutes and how gender operates in the sites of bodies are political questions. In other words, body is political instead of biological/natural. Although there are many possibilities of formulation of gendered identities of the same body, no identity or body is possibly recognized or visible beyond the social process. However, this does not mean that bodies do not exist outside

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discourses, since gender determines the visibility and invisibility of certain bodies and subjects simultaneously. By using gender as a category of analysis, what seems to be natural and unquestioned could be problematized by foregrounding the power relations and political construction among sexed bodies and gendered subjects.

Women and Militarism

Women are not just integral to state but also crucial in militarism. The influence of militarism continues to exist in the post-Cold War era through the co-constitution of security and militarism, even in peaceful times. The emphasis on human security does not mean demilitarization but the opposite, since human security tends to reaffirm the status of the state to protect its people with strong militarism. According to Parashar, even though militarism is characteristic of colonial project in many post-colonial states, it does not cease to exist in postcolonial states due to “post-colonial anxiety”: “‘Postcolonial anxiety’ among states enables them to imagine their legitimacy and territorial control through militarism, overriding other modes of social and cultural existence” (Swati 2018, 127). This means that militarism might expand and gradually slips in society. It indicates the continual existence of gendered ideology in peace times based on exclusion and invisibility of women, which could be an impediment to peace. If we put this anxiety which drives militarism in Timor-Leste in the context of peace-building, even though the military approach is no longer the foremost approach to protect the citizens against its enemy in the development process, its ideology and values could still affect non-military aspects and citizens. Since militarism usually is constructed on the control of women as well as violence against women, the restoration of security and order does not guarantee women's immunity from violence, as long as women or gender are still excluded from the reconstruction process with patriarchal limits of women to domesticity. The process of demobilization, disarmament and reconstruction (DDR) and on security sector reform (SSR) has been highly male-dominated,

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since female combatants have been excluded from participating. DDR as part of international peacekeeping aims to “bring wartime violence to an end” and “lay the groundwork for a sustainable peace” (Enloe 2007, 126). However, it tends to adopt a gender perspective that

“DDR is about that men and boys,” which is related to the naturalization of manliness (Enloe

2007, 127). Megan MacKenzie (2009) examines the causal relation between gendered construction of women and desecuritization. She demonstrates that category which defines women as war victims has undervalued the role of former female soldiers in post-conflict programs in Sierra Leone. While men are securitized as a key element of transforming war to peace, women are desecuritized and considered as a social issue. She argues that because the

DDR programs failed to include female soldiers, they might not be able to recognize the agency of women in making wars and peace. This further renders the DDR process ineffective. Sandra

McEvoy (2009) holds a similar argument to MaKenzie’s. McEvoy challenges the traditional views of peace negotiations and their tendencies in excluding the voices of female combatants.

She argues that the inclusion of female combatants in a peace process will make conflict resolution more likely to succeed.

The security-militarism dynamics also points to security sectors reform after the war.

Erin Mobekik (2010) argues that security sector reform is broader than the traditional security sector, which "incorporates non-state security and justice sectors and mechanisms and critically seeks to guarantee not only state security but also human security (Mobekk 2010, 279). Mobekik suggests that a gender-sensitive approach to SSR should be pursued in the security sector without simply emphasizing representation and retention of women (2010, 285). If the gender inequality assumed in the SSR is not recognized, then the policy of gender mainstreaming will just reinforce the gender hierarchy without transforming the existing institutions and structures. The

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exclusion of women and the emphasis of men in the peace process also renders the issues of gender injustice, such as sexual violence, unresolved.

Militarism is also built on the insecurity of women after war. Kent and Kinsella (2015) also argue that although Timorese women have contributed significantly to the resistance against

Indonesian occupation, they are not recognized as veterans in the veteran’s scheme, which could have identified women’s contribution to the resistance campaign and empowered women with pensions. The biggest beneficiaries of the scheme are men (Kinsella and Kent 2015, 483).

Women who receive pensions are considered as “on behalf of a deceased male family member rather than in recognition of their own contributions” (Kinsella and Kent 2015, 476).

Furthermore, they argue that the veteran’s scheme is used by political leaders as a political means to buy political stability through incorporating male ex-combatants to the governance scheme (Kinsella and Kent 2015, 482).

Militarism and Women’s Agency

Ironically, despite the fact that militarism strengthens the subordinate role of women or threatens women more than men, it creates spaces for mothers and wives to engage in both formal and informal politics. On the one hand, militarism shakes previous gender order which suppresses women (Kinsella and Kent 2015, 474). While men go the battle-field, women are left home taking care of the families. Women find themselves needing to take the economic and social responsibility, which allows women to have more opportunities to empower themselves

(Grayzel 2002). On the other hand, militarism might highlight particular agency of civilians.

Militarism has been embodied in people's life by excluding civilians and their needs. However, by understanding militarism in the broader social basis, the boundary between civilian and military is blurred, which shapes the survival tactics and strategies of civilians facing the restraint of militarism. For example, Amina Mama and Margo Okazawa-Rey have shown that

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women in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia have been involved in the combat economy as

“fighters, commanders, heads of Small Girls Units, as well as the more conventional subordinate roles as porters, intelligence gathers, food providers, spies and ‘wives’” (Mama and Okazawa-

Rey 2012, 116). This article develops a feminist perspective on militarism in Africa, drawing examples from the Nigerian, Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars spanning several decades to examine women's participation in the conflict, their survival and livelihood strategies, and their activism.

We argue that postcolonial conflicts epitomize some of the worst excesses of militarism in the era of neoliberal globalization, and that the economic, organizational and ideological features of militarism undermine the prospects for democratization, social justice and genuine security, especially for women, in post- war societies. Theorizations of ‘new wars’ and the war economy are taken as entry points to a discussion of the conceptual and policy challenges posed by the enduring and systemic cultural and material aspects of militarism. These include the contradictory ways in which women are affected by the complex relationship between gendered capitalist processes and militarism, and the manner in which women negotiate their lives through both. Finally, we highlight the potential of transnational feminist theorizing and activism for strengthening intellectual and political solidarities and argue that the globalized military security system can be our “common context for struggle” as contemporary feminist activist scholars (Mama and Okazawa-Rey 2012, 116).

In Argentina, in fighting against the junta for disappearing their children, some women gathered together at the Plaza de Mayo. The Mothers of The Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the

Disappeared) gathered to express their dissatisfaction toward the violence of the junta, which eventually lead to the collapse of the military government (Kurtz 2010). In Northern Ireland, although women are restrained by patriarchal structures as mothers and wives, they connect to other communities to protect themselves and children (Kaufman and Williams 2007, 171).

Women from different communities formed Northern Ireland Women's Coalitions (NIWC) and helped the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, which indicates not only the existing vibrant activism of women in that area at the communal level but also women's determination to

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participate in decision-making process, which often excludes women from mainstream politics in

Northern Ireland (Kaufman and Williams 2007, 183).

The above examples in West Africa, Argentina, and Northern Ireland demonstrate the agency and different forms of activism of women as mothers and wives in traditional patriarchal societies by supporting or protesting the ruling power within militarized societies. However, it is not easy to tell whether women's activism embodied in motherhood or maternal status is an embodiment of patriarchy or demonstration of women's agency, which might be perceived as evidences of women’s oppressive and powerless experiences by feminists.

Uneasy Relationship between Motherhood, Maternity, and Feminism

Understanding women’s agency based on motherhood and maternal care in militarism raises important concerns about whether such an activism is only reflective of militarism, which reinforces the gendered ideology rather than disrupting it. In fact, feminism has had an uneasy relationship with motherhood, because many feminists consider that motherhood is the product of patriarchy (Taylor 1997, 349). Good and pure women refined in the private sphere serve the interests of the patriarchal system, which make women end up being trapped in asymmetrical power relations. Moreover, motherhood tends to be defined as proxy of states and nations.

Feminists argue that with such a symbolism, women are protected and attacked by states and nations at the same time. Kohn uses the example of the Serbian military’s mass violation of

Muslim women in Serbia to illustrate Serbian’s attempt to wipe out the Muslin population through mass rape (Kohn 1994, 201–3). However, motherhood and feminism are not necessarily irreconcilable. Taylor argues that mothers need feminism just as feminism needs to recognize many political and social problems mothers face (Taylor 1997, 350). Moreover, motherhood can be redefined to unite women's sisterhood against the atrocities and violence conducted by the government or militias. For example, women in Argentina manipulated the image of their

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motherhood not only to ensure their security but also re-erect motherhood to organize political movements. Motherhood can be political. Understanding the political nature of motherhood can help us to differentiate motherhood as a construct of patriarchy as well as a source of peace- inclined feminist theory and movement, when we try to navigate the feminist strategies and movements through the gendered ideology and restraints posed by militarism.

Motherhood, Nation-building, and Nationalist Movements

We should not forget that motherhood can be used as a powerful political tool or strategy for nation-building or nationalist movements. As an ideological construct, it can be manipulated to support a nationalist movement. As a strategy, it can be mobilized to support women's movement, if not a feminist one. Carol Bardenstein (1997) argues that maternal image of women is a mode of Palestine resistance and the nationalist movement. In the poetry, Palestine has been portrayed as a raped bride in the wedding, which signals the disassociation of Palestinian people from land and impregnation of Israel in the previous occupied land by Palestinians (Bardenstein

1997, 171). Meanwhile, discourses of mothers and sons are also reinforced through mobilizing mothers to protect or sacrifice their sons in armed struggles. In other words, women who were limited to homes are able to participate in political life as the meaning of motherhood expands to communities and nations along the gender lines. On the other hand, women's identity given in patriarchal societies also helps organize women's movement beyond the diversity of women's organizations. In post-conflict societies, domestic violence levels can rise even when peace has been re-established (Bardenstein 1997, 94). However, existing political and legal systems cannot ensure that women can represent themselves as well as gain enough remedy (Bardenstein 1997,

98). By incorporating motherhood with domestic violence, the discourse of protecting women can take new forms and embodiments in post-conflict societies. In fact, an umbrella organization of women's organizations, Rede Feto Timor Loro Sa’e (Timor- Leste Women’s Network) was

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formed, which was the first post-conflict gathering of representatives of women’s organizations

(Roynestad 2003, 4).

Seeing malae nian from a gender perspective does not only directs our attention to the mutual constructions between women, militarism, state-building, but also helps problematize the politics of representation and categorization: who are representative of Timorese or Timorese women? Failing to include some women in the process of representation and categorization invites questions about in which ways women are included and coproducing through social and discursive practices. Why are some women excluded?

Women who are malae nian, are not limited to women who are with peacekeepers. The concept of malae nian also refers to women who have no husband, women who have to work, women who are not victims but possessions of peacekeepers, and women who are not victims of domestic violence conducted by Timorese men. In other words, malae nian is a constructed ideal-type of Timorese women against an ideal of femininity that crystallizes and essentializes the self of Timorese women who are obedient and submissive mothers and wives yet become invisible in the post-intervention Timorese society. Moreover, such a construction helps erect a masculine self of Timorese identity. By degrading women who are malae nian, the purity of self can be sustained, though the content of the self is a vague and an empty rhetoric, which does not refer to real women but selected representation of women.

By problematizing the political nature of malae nian, the concept itself is not just descriptive but normative. Situating malae nian in the crux of women, state, nation, and militarism intersecting with gender requires us to ask who is represented and who is not. The fact that women who are morally corrupted or under-educated are excluded from the representation of Timorese women. The question about the absence and exclusion of these women cannot be

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addressed without digging into the dynamics of militarism, nation-building, and gender embodied through the semiotic and physical violence against women who are malae nian in the post-intervention Timor-Leste.

Malae Nian, Women, and Nation-building in Timor-Leste

How does malae nian, women, and nation-building connect to each other in the Timorese context? Nation-building, is “the processes of forming a cohesive national political community”

(Leach 2017, 4) while nationalism is a kind of ideology. Michael Leach (2017) claims that even though there is divergence among political parties which fight to resist colonialism, they are unified under the agreed idea of nation. Such a unified nation is militaristic in nature, since it is characteristic of anti-nationalism and realized through resistance. Though the purpose of resistance against colonial power does not exist anymore after independence, nationalism still exists and operates as an ideology to hold the elites together yet it changes its purpose from resistance to development. Since 2012, Timorese elites have started to orient the official values from “a core narrative of resistance, to one emphasizing the values of national development, and moving on from a past of conflict” (Leach 2017, 3). In fact, knowing that different parties have different ideas of nationalism, Timorese elites have been trying to unite their inner contested nationalism under a unified nation when they took over from the UN after 2002. According to

Leach, after losing a common goal of resistance, the ideological divergence among anti- colonialism of elites emerged after Timor-Leste became independent. A national identity is required to be built to consolidate the whole nation where citizenships are diverse.

Although Leach conducts an extensive survey on the evolution of nationalism in history, he focuses on the ideology of nationalism formed among political elites. However, nationalism coupled with militarism is not only constructed but also performative, which requires military as well as civilians to perform it to sustain the idea of a unified nation. In this regard, Leach not

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only loses sight of the power of nationalism in mobilizing and constituting everyday experiences of ordinary civilians, but also how it is predicated on the body and sexuality of women. Leach misses that women are the cohesive of the divided elites and nationalisms in the process of nation-building. Women, who are half of the nation, are the building blocks of the family, community, and the whole nation. Therefore, the image of good women whose values and virtues equated to be cultural values and the identity of Timorese women became integral to the nationalistic discourse. Such a gendered identity constructed in the nation-building projects is not new. In post-colonial India, the Hindu nationalists construct the image of traditional Indian women who stay home and protect home from “from colonial intrusions” by using their virtues of ‘chastity, self-sacrifice, submission, devotion, kindness, patience, and the labours of love’

(Kapur 2007, 547; Chatterjee 1990, 287). Such an image is different from “that of the Western women, as well as the ‘street women’ or ‘prostitute,’ who could undermine the nationalist project as well as disrupt the social order” (Kapur 2007, 547). Similarly, Katherine Moon demonstrates that Korean women who are fallen, kijich’on women, are constitutive of yet are represented as detrimental to the home front as well as the whole nation, “the prostitute was cast as the enemy of the home front,… War propaganda presented prostitute as someone predatory and diseased, who ‘could do more harm than any German fleet of German airplanes’ to the men fighting the war”’ (Moon 1997, 37). Women have to be good women with virtues in order to support and protect the nation. Within this context, malae nian is posed as an outcast of good Timorese women for this nation to be reborn by reaffirming the cultural and feminine values. By labelling, stigmatizing, and purging the corrupted bodies of malae nian, an image of authentic traditional women and a sense of new nation can be constructed from the situation where no modern nation exists or nation is weak.

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Understanding malae nian and its role in sustaining state, militarism, and nation-building suggests that the nation-building goal in post-intervention Timor-Leste cannot occur without mobilizing citizens and military to co-construct and perform national identity central to nationalism. According to Enloe, “The militarization of any nationalist movement occurs through the gendered workings of power” (Enloe 1993, 246). Note that even though feminists tend to interchangeably use militarism and militarization, they do not mean the same thing but are mutually related: ‘In mili-tarization, militarism is extended, in demilitarization, it contracts’

(Shaw 2013, 20). Swati Parashar (2018, 125) further points out that militarism does not mean that a society will heavily militarized but denoted by militarism in terms of its constitution. “Not only are many countries in the Third World heavily militarized and ruled by military regimes, but also militarism is deeply entrenched in nominal and established democracies” (Parashar

2018, 125; Visweswaran 2013). In other words, even though citizens in a democratic society are not directly engaged in war activities or war preparations, they will also practice the masculine identities by internalizing the values, beliefs, and performing practices of citizenships.

During my fieldwork in Timor-Leste in summer 2017, I observed many forms of militarism embodied in everyday life of civilians. They existed and are performed by civilians in universities, streets, and households. In the universities, I attended a seminar organized by Annie

Feith from Victoria University and UNTL on 5 July 2017. Dr. Feith asked us to sit in a circle and took turns sharing who our role model in life is. Many students who went to UNTL attended along with a few expats and governmental officials. While some answered their fathers, many said “Xanana” inspired them most and remained their most respected figure. On the street, I saw many people still supported Fretlin wholeheartedly, which was the leading resistance force against the Indonesian army emerging from the Indonesian occupation times and now the biggest

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political party in the parliament. Right before the parliament election, many political parties mobilized their supporters extensively whenever they had political campaigns. I got to participate in a political campaign of Fretlin in Tasi Tolu, Dili. Fretlin supporters organized campaigns in different forms: by painting their bodies in red, wearing the national flag and red shits printed “vota: hamutuk ita bele (vote: together we can),” marching on the main streets in groups by motorbikes, trucks, taxi, and mini bus. The party flag of Fretlin shares the same color with the national flag: red, yellow, and black. It seemed to me that Fretlin was the founding father of Timor-Leste. Without Fretlin there will be no Timor-Leste as a state. While our motorbike moved slowly with other on our way to Tasi Tolu, the place where Dr. Mari Arkatiri would give a speech, I also saw heavily armed police and military personnel standing on the street and watching Fretlin supporters closely. In addition to schools and streets, militarism also encroaches in the private sphere. When I travelled to Oecussi I lived in mana Inacia’s house. One night, her little sister was folding laundry on the floor while I was watching TV. She grabbed a red Fretlin T-shirt and covered herself, saying to me, “isin Fretlin (Fretlin body).” Her behavior suddenly got my attention because she was performing the identity of a then-military organization yet now political party. Militarism creeps into civil affairs and dictates civil life in all aspects.

Militarism not only requires civilians and militaries to perform altogether in a peaceful way, but also imposes violence on civilians who do not perform militarism accordingly.

Veronica provided a story of a bar fight where her Timorese girl friend who hung out with

American soldiers but then was violently punished by men serving in the Timor-Leste defense force. In her story, her friend is considered as a malae nian, who works with foreigners yet has no relationships with them. However, her rejection of Timorese men as well as the intervention

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of American soldiers to protect her from Timorese men’s harassment resulted in the backfire of

Timorese men as well as further physical violence against her. This bar fight ended up punishing not only this woman but also Timorese men, which also caused further hatred of Timorese men against foreign men. This story shows how women are negatively affected by militarism which shapes not only the gender identities of subjects but also their everyday experiences of women.

The Tragedy of Malae Nian

It happened in the beginning of 2010. It was very scary. We have a very bad night. A lot of Timorese go to Disco, dance with malae cause they don’t touch you. Only dance. But not Timorese guys. When they are drunk, they don’t respect you. They start touching you. One night East Timor Defence Force (FDTL) go there. They dance and they see my friend. She has a Timorese husband. They separate. She does not want to have Timorese boyfriend anymore. She only works with the foreign people, like army and police. She went out with three American army, three boys. After I finish work, I go dancing too. Four Timorese also go in. They see my Timorese friend dance on the table. They go in there, want to touch and dance. She tries to protect herself. She does not want to. The (Timorese) guy just kept pulling her to dance. He slapped her on the face. She turned around with a big Bingtang bottle and smashed him on the head. They guy turned around wanting to strangle her on the neck. The American army guy doesn’t like see girls get hurt like this. The Timorese guy started first. He (American guy) tried to get out. The FDTL come and start a big fighting. They fight with the army guys until they have a broken neck, something like this. They have to take him (American guy) to Australia. Timorese guys are very dangerous when they go out at night time. When they fight with someone. They all know you. They are together with their friends. My friend ran outside. They hit her really bad. They ran to the street. They pulled her and she fell down. After that (bar fight) they (FDTL) really hate Timorese who want to have relationships with foreign people. Bad luck for me. One night me and my husband want to drink at mall with his friends. When we come back home we start feeling hungry. We stop at a restaurant. They start pulling him (my husband) out. Luckily my husband had a Kiwi sticker on the back of the car. One (Timorese) guy walked to the back and saw the sticker. He said, “kiwi kiwi, peace kiwi.” They said, “ok ok, we think that you are American.” When I walk, they think I just want to sleep with malae. My husband wants to answer. I say “Don’t. Timorese if they have problems with you, they put their hands on two.” In 2009-10, I don’t like going out shopping. I go alone. A lot of men don’t have work. Now it’s better (Almeida, Veronica. 2017. June 16).

This story demonstrates the power struggle between American and Timorese military masculinities over women, as well as the violence against Timorese women. In the fight,

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American masculinity has the upper hand compared to Timorese military masculinity. American soldiers are portrayed as protectors while Timorese soldiers as perpetrators of violence of women. Such a representation coincides with the narratives of war and the colonialism: because

Timorese men are unable to protect their own women, foreigners have to intervene to help them.

However, such a practice of this protector’s narrative becomes problematic when foreign men challenge the protector’s role of local men in their society. Military masculinity in the face of changing gender roles and identities has to reaffirm itself through subordinating women.

This story illustrates militarism in the intervened countries in two ways: on the one hand, such a narrative indicates the penetration of militarism in the society, which consequently reinforces the role of good women who should stay and protect her home/nation. On the other hand, it highlights the role of gender in constructing the hierarchy of military masculinities and the continuity of violence through interpersonal relations in post-conflict societies. In this story, there are different military masculinities. The fact that the Timorese military masculinity is challenged and loses to American military masculinity shakes the gender identities and status of

Timorese masculinity. Failing to assert its gender role of Timorese men, they have to reconstruct the norms which limit the roles and identities of women at home. The bar is not only a site penetrated by militarism where different military masculinities compete in the same nation, but also a platform where the masculine identity of the Timorese nation is constructed by including and purging women who fail to live up to their gender roles and perform their identities.

Conclusion

The political underpinning and its consequences of malae nian need to be problematized from a gender perspective. Instead of a cultural or traditional interpretation, I argue that it has to be understood in the ongoing process of nation-building after the intervention, where particular groups of women related to competing foreign masculinities are incorporated yet excluded from

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this process for tarnishing the purity and integrity of the nation. The violence of naming and shaming these women as others demonstrates the anxiety and eagerness of a post-intervention nation failing to control its own nation from the hands of intervenors. I argue by depoliticizing women who are malae nian in the process of nation-building along with the logic of inclusion and exclusion, the masculinity of Timorese can be restored to support the central national identity constructed in the process of nation-building. This suggests that malae nian are not merely anti-colonial sentiments, but racialized and gendered subjects required to erect a masculine citizenship central to nation-building in post-intervention Timor-Leste.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

I started writing my dissertation driven by the main research question: whether the representation of women as victims in the dominant discourse of peacekeeping is justified. I argue that endorsing a single dominant discourse is dangerous because it: perpetuates the unreflective representation of women and their agency through binary categories; reducing different framings of problems and solutions of the locals to single framing one discourse; and normalization of women as racialized and gendered others integral to the localized discourse of peacekeeping in many post-colonial states. Such an oversimplified representation not only diverts our attention from the complex and contingency of everyday life of local women, but also helps us reproduce gendered subjects and subjectivities as well as their embodiment in peoples’ experiences without paying any critical attention to them. I challenge this dominant discourse and its unreflective use of categories which represent women as powerless and passive actors by reading women as contingent with sex. By redirecting our focus to the everyday life of local women and other local population, I suggest that feminist security scholars should not stop politicizing the stagnant and fixed discourse of victims as well as related categories since there are multiple forms of agency practiced in subtle ways in the everyday life of local women. I develop my arguments in three empirical chapters.

In Ch. 4, I problematize the representation of women as victims as a whole in post- intervention countries. Not all the women are victimized by their relationships and they do not share the same experiences. I claim that women are not only political actors, but also survivors of their situations, but their agency tends to be denied, omitted, and downplayed by the dominant discourse when women struggle to negotiate in between the categories in order to carry on their lives. Their identities are difficult to identify along with the binary categories. These identities

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also constantly change when their life proceeds. I find that women do not easily fit the categories of victims/non-victims as well as mothers and wives. Categories affect whether women are visible or not by valorizing a particular representation of women. I suggest that feminist security scholars should go beyond the binary categories which separate women who have agency from women who have not by centralizing the inbetweenness of women as a source of silence as well as a site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance of power where women exercise their agency through a bottom-up approach.

In Ch. 5, I challenge the binary categories of the international and the local in the discourse of peacekeeping and the literature of political economy in response to the peacekeeping by highlighting the social relations and relationality between both sides. The heterogeneity of the local expands our focus from the intimate relations to other forms of relations. I conceptualize the local as those who are not only affected by peacekeeping and peacekeepers from outside, but are also actors who are productive of peacekeeping everyday. I argue although the locals might be alternative to the dominant discourse of liberal peacekeeping in terms of providing more authentic view of peacekeeping by adopting a bottom-up approach, they cannot produce knowledge without incorporating and constructing who and what the international is, which risks reproducing the binary concepts and selective representation of the local narratives which are also criticized in the dominant discourse. I demonstrate the relationality of the international and the local from the narratives of the local interlocutors. I also show that different understanding of the meanings of the international leads to different framings of the problems and solutions. I argue that perpetuating the dominant discourse and the use of binary categories might result in the reduction of multiple local perceptions of peacekeeping as well as marginalization of different forms of violence and other sources of problems of

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peacekeeping, which further affects the success or failure of the peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions.

In Ch. 6, I question the general meaning and representation of “malae nian” in the local narratives because it helps normalize the women as gendered and racialized subjects contingent with the global peacekeeping and state-building where nation matters to many post-colonial and post-intervention states. What the concept of “malae nian” means and how it impacts women’s lived experiences vary among different people, but it tends to be used to name and shame women who have relationships with the UN peacekeepers or foreigners. I demonstrate how local people perceive “malae nian” and how local women are treated discriminatively based on the perceptions of the local with regards to these women. I argue that the narrative of “malae nian” is formulated in congruence with patriarchy, militarism, and nationalism, which frames that the practices of sexuality are not morally good. However, such a moral underpinning is political and helps construct women who are labeled as “malae nian” as gendered and racialized others against the ideal of good women in the Timorese society. I argue that the concept of “malae nian” has to be understood by situating it in the ongoing process of nation-building along with peacekeeping after the UN intervened. In such a process, particular groups of women who are related to competing foreign masculinities are incorporated yet excluded from this process because they tarnish the purity and integrity of the new-born nation.

Implications

Feminist security scholars promote a discourse of SEA aiming to protect women from peacekeepers that relies unreflectively on the representation of women as victims in relation to the UN peacekeepers as perpetrators in SEA policy and in practice. Such a suggestion might fail to promote the feminist goal of liberating women from different forms of oppression and discrimination and instead perpetuate them, since feminists who suggest this might be coopted

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and thus affirm and reaffirm what is considered as true claim in the regime of truth, which helps stabilize and normalize the contentious meanings and identities of women. Feminists do not problematize the power of gender in different levels when they limit their focus on the gender hierarchy between individuals. However, gender functions at discursive, structural, and institutional levels: Ch. 4 shows that in post-conflict peacekeeping process where particular presentation of women is constructed and valorized; Ch. 5 brings our focus from intimate relationships between women and peacekeepers to socialization of other relationships; Ch. 6 highlights the gendered construction of bodies and identities in relation to militarism, nation- building, and peacekeeping. By endorsing the straightforward relationship between gender violence and the suppression of women through the narrative of victims, feminists might deny women’s different expressions of agency in their contexts. I argue that feminists end up reaffirming and revictimizing women as victims of male peacekeepers by prioritizing gender violence in the individual level while undermining the violence innate in the discourses, structures constitutive of relationships, and political institutions. By criticizing peacekeeping by using a biased and misunderstood Foucauldian approach, I argue that feminists tend to see SEA as a performative act which is done once and for all rather than putting it in the longer and broader process. Moreover, by focusing on the discourse as a performative act, feminists are limited to grasp the idea that discourses are not only produced but also productive: producing the subjects as well as the reality of subjects.

The naïve and simple theoretical construction of women in the discourse of SEA helps to set up the agenda and policy of protecting women through undoing the gendered practices of peacekeeping, but it is done without challenging the framework and the embodying effects of peacekeeping. By putting more leverage on the simple category of SEA rather than on women

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who have voluntary or non-voluntary experiences with the peacekeepers, the experiences of some women and their stories are subsided and excluded. It is counterproductive in terms of feminist goals of recovering voices of women and empowering women because it helps silencing women in voluntary relationships with its general yet depoliticized ideas of SEA. Such a representation of women as victims limits the complex consequences of peacekeeping to be visible in a more comprehensive way by highlighting merely the distorted sexual behavior of peacekeepers with women as the only problem derivative of peacekeeping to be addressed. Any discourse can be inevitably driven by certain assumptions and ideas, but they will change peoples’ life when people start to practice those assumptions and ideas by staying the course of current peacekeeping. Ideas become experiences, then reality, when they are practiced by actors over and over again. Although SEA does not exclude the possibility of voluntary sex, its assumption which portrays women as victims helps deny the agency of women, and thus makes women who are involved in voluntary relationships to be included though their agency is invisible under the label of victims presumed in the discourse of SEA.

The advocacy of protecting women from peacekeepers by abandoning sex by feminists, I argue, is a sign that feminists are coopted in powerful discourses. Such a cooption indicates an unreflective endorsement of feminist scholars in reading gender in sex in with an ontology of heterosexual sex, as well as the binary distinction between the local and the international. It demonstrates the tendency of feminists who engage in examining peacekeeping and how it affects women from moral and legal ground, while not paying close attention to the political nature of the discourse as well as its penetration and embodiment in peoples’ life in different levels. It seems that feminists rely on a limited understanding of the complex politics, societies, and histories of the intervened countries. Such a reduction or simplification can easily lead to the

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totalization of experiences of the local in peacekeeping, the curtailment of different narratives and perspectives of the locals, revictimization and depoliticization of women whose lives are affected by peacekeepers, and gradually erode the feminist goal of challenging the power structure and emancipating women from it. Therefore, unlike the expectations of feminist security scholars in bringing women and gender back, protecting women though affirming a gendered policy made on the ground of depoliticizing women could silence women in the process of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, intensify the tension between the international and the local, and weaken feminists’ contribution to empower women in the host countries.

My dissertation points out the danger of oversimplified representation of women, which has its influences in marking out women as well as delegitimizing feminist goals, when feminists as well as locals are coopted and integral to the global peacekeeping in theory and in practice.

Peacekeeping functioning as a discursive practice is enabled by and actualizes women’s situations by representing women as victims: peacekeeping is initiated to save women, it affects women positively and negatively, and it needs to correct its wrong-doing by criminalizing the behavior of SEA of peacekeepers. In other words, peacekeeping is the problem and the solution to the suffering and misfortune of women in the host countries. However, such a formulation is ungrounded and deserves to be challenged since it is isolated and abstracted from the complexity of relationships and the social and political milieu.

Embracing a representation of victimized women risks silencing voices of women who are labeled as malae nian as well as other locals who perceive women and peacekeepers in different ways. My empirical findings point out how discourses could do: first, women who do not conform to categories of victims/ non-victims are not recognizable. Second, how the local perceive and interact with the international in different ways might be reduced to one and

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circulated among the local. Third, the victimization of discourse of women helps naturalize and depoliticize the stigmatization of women who are considered as malae nian by highlighting their relations with the peacekeepers and foreigners while subsiding their relations to the political imaginary of Timorese in the process of nation- and state-building. Although it is not clear whether nation- and state-building by Timorese instead of peacekeepers will better protect women who were once victimized by peacekeepers, my findings suggest that both the discourse of peacekeeping as well as the political imagination of post-intervention Timor-Leste is not possible without including and othering malae nian as racialized and gendered subjects. This also indicates how gender operates to include and protect women in host countries and reworks itself to other these women as gendered and racialized subjects which need to be contained and purged in the process of nation- and state-building. Although malae nian and its meanings are unique to Timorese context, malae nian is the globalized and localized result of an ongoing process of global peacekeeping denoted of gender and militarism. Therefore, it should not be simply understood as a kind of local response to the anti-colonial and anti-Western intervention.

Instead, it is the result of transformative power of peacekeeping discourse working to create the state and the nation which did not exist before. The whole nation after the intervention is required to perform militarism and nationalism, where pure femininity is integral to the integrity of the whole nation. Therefore, women whose bodies are marked by having sex with foreigners need to be purged against the ideal type of good women, even though those women also participate in the peacekeeping process which overlaps with nation- and state-building process where women interact and form relationships with the peacekeepers when they were present.

Returning to the complexity of peoples’ life experiences and understanding peacekeeping from the local perspective help feminists scholars adopt a bottom-up narrative approach in order

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to see how women and the locals exercise their power and agency in different forms empirically, which are not recognized in the dominant peacekeeping discourse. Moreover, different and multiple narratives of the local also have normative implications. They suggest although categories, relationships, and bodies might be instrumental to the silencing women and some disempowered local populations, they are also important sites of contestation, negotiation, and resistance of power, where the locals constantly challenge, navigate, and even reconstruct narratives, which do not necessarily conform to the dominant discourse of peacekeeping on a daily basis. Silence in these sites, I argue, does not mean that people do not have their voices and thus their voicelessness should be taken for granted or normal. Rather, silence is a form of non- verbal invitation from the local to request feminist scholars and the policy makers to remain curious and ask questions about gender. Feminists might contribute to the perpetration of the silence of some locals and women, and further recast them as victims through feminists’ engagement of the peacekeeping discourse. From my viewpoint, feminists’ cooptation of power can only be corrected by centering the experiences of the locals while being alert to the danger of gender shaping what we see and how we see.

Significance and Contributions

I contribute to feminist security studies and feminist IR scholarship by providing a more complex picture of the intimacy between women and the UN peacekeepers by incorporating the power and social contexts as well as different forms of women’s agency. Women’s experiences of relationships cannot be understood by the findings of evidence of SEA in the case studies, or simply encapsulated by certain categories of victims/non-victims as well as wives and mothers in dominant discourses of peacekeeping and in local society of host countries.

This dissertation examines why SEA is not effective in protecting women as well as how women are silenced in the peacekeeping frameworks. It suggests that future peace-building and

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peacekeeping schemes in post-intervention societies have to include locals as well as adopt gender-sensitive policies to acknowledge those who have been victimized yet invisible not directly in the aftermath of peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is an ongoing process, which depends on the performance of militarism by all internationals and locals. Meanwhile, it is realized in everyday life of people who live in it. These women as well as other locals’ experiences can be fertile soil for social and political transformation by deconstructing current discourses and their according use of categories and assumptions, as well as gender relations which undermine or exclude women from participating or being acknowledged as political actors. More narratives and experiences of peacekeeping of the local could be revived and discovered, which indicates that different solutions and suggestions to balance the side-effects of peacekeeping can be thinkable.

I believe that my findings can provide alternative stories and perspectives of thinking peacekeeping and its effects, which help challenge and even transform the ways existing feminist scholarship theorize women in peacekeeping contexts, as well as the ways in which political elites design and implement peacebuilding frameworks in the form of state-building.

Future Research

In this dissertation, I found that the agency and power of women who are in the voluntary relationships are existent and practiced in their everyday life, as well as that the perceptions of these women and other locals are obscured and buried by the dominant discourse. I suggest that the agency and power of locals can only be found in the local narratives emerging from the contexts locals are situated by using a gender-sensitive bottom-up approach. I point out some directions for future research as follows:

First, the heterogeneity and the power dynamics of the local necessitate the following questions to be further addressed: Who is local and what is their agency in post-peacekeeping

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contexts? Since local is not a unified collective entity, multiple and different forms of the local narratives might be fabricated but undermined or downplayed because of the predominance of the discourse of peacekeeping. Consequently, they have to be politicized. Those narratives anchoring on the everyday life of the local highlight different forms of local agency of peacekeeping beyond simple resistance or cooption of liberal peacekeeping. Everyday and local also point to multiple sites where the local interact with the international on a daily basis. One possibility is that stories of the local could be further collected by interviewing ordinary

Timorese who make tais6, people who open and visit coffee shops, and people who make mural arts on the street. People who have different positions and engage in different activities perform post-peacekeeping in different ways. Those physical places where people participate in their everyday activities collectively are imbued with meanings which are negotiated and renegotiated between self and other, as well as the international and the local on the daily basis. In post- peacekeeping contexts, the identities of people and their lifestyles are subject to change. There are many ways local people navigate the peacekeeping or to the change it causes. Some of them are expressed in verbal and non-verbal ways and they might take place in private realm, which require scholars to adopt more nuanced and innovative ways to listen to or see these narratives of the locals.

Second, I suggest that scholars need to pay attention to what or who might also be silenced and invisible in the dominant peacekeeping discourse, especially local men, whose agency tend to be depoliticied in post-intervention countries. Although my dissertation indicates that malae nian are integral but silenced in the peacekeeping discourse, local men and their roles in maintaining the local order and security might be also delegitimized and replaced in the

6 Traditional clothes

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political process of peacekeeping. Take gang violence for example, gang violence was used to protect the security of the communities in the face of foreign occupation, but now it transforms to protect the community from other communities after Timor-Leste changed extremely in terms of its political stance and economic situation. However, the political and economic development brought by peacekeeping does not take place without tradeoff. Peacebuilding modernizes the state and replaces local leadership and local conflict mechanism in the communities with liberal democracy, police, and army to solve conflicts. By returning to how people live and perceive violence in the individual level, we will better see how peacekeeping functions to depoliticize local leadership and knowledge in tackling violence in traditional ways, how it helps nurture the tension between the local and the international, and why exported peacekeeping is ineffective in containing or preventing local violence.

Lastly, in addition to further case study in Timor-Leste, scholars in Global South could also work together to collect and compare different forms and patterns of power and agency based on local narratives of peacekeeping. The bottom-up approach of peacekeeping tends to be limited to case studies, which rendered a comparative research of peacekeeping on the micro- level impossible. More stories about how the local are affected by peacekeeping and how the local perceive and perform peacekeeping every day have to be collected and analyzed.

Moreover, a comparative framework which serves as a foundation to examine the patterns of similarities and differences of the meanings and forms of local agency and power in everyday life of the local in different host countries needs to be established.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Li-Li Chen received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in the summer of 2018. Her dissertation is Women’s Mixed Experiences during the United Nations (UN) Peace Operations in

Post-Intervention Timor-Leste. Her latest work is her book chapter “‘Philippine’s Trash management Policy: A Critical Examination’” in Intergenerational Responsibility in the 21st

Century published by Vernon Press (in press, 2018). She had a review article “Humanitarianism and the Responsibility to Protect: between Politics and Morality,” in The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11:2 (2017): 268-271. Her research interests include the dynamics of gender, women, peacekeeping, sustainability, as well as the politics in Southeast Asia with a particular focus on Timor-Leste.

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