| Summary: | This thesis is about the new international paradigm of resilience approaches in peacebuilding in the post-conflict Timor-Leste. In these three decades, international governance has significantly changed its focus, approaches and outcomes in order to cope with an uncertain and volatile world. There are two aims motivating this research: unfold new theoretical frameworks of global governance; and analyse the impact of prevalent resilience approaches on security systems, especially in terms of peacebuilding.
As theoretical contributions, I have analysed resilience approaches in peacebuilding by looking at four different disciplinary critiques: liberal peace, liberal understanding of subjects, international security and psychosocial work. Consequently, three core arguments are developed. First, the liberal subject has shifted from traditional autonomy to vulnerability, which is closely associated with human or agent-centred regime. Second, liberal ideas of international security have shifted from traditional national security to the 1990’s human security and to the 2000’s post-human approaches. Third, resilience works on the shift to post-humanist ethics and frameworks as resilience approaches imply acceptability and adaptability to an uncontrollable world.
The practical contributions to other scholars are: 1) the method of using ethnographic approaches, including personal interactions with local populations and the attention to the disparity of daily life between expatriates and locals, in the field of peacebuilding and development studies; and 2) the data coding process based on an attitude model, which is popular in social psychology, in international political and IR research.
My finding is that Timor-Leste has been struggling with self-determination and self-responsibility since independence. I conclude that the reason why peacebuilding in Timor-Leste has unintentionally caused dependency lies in the presumption that liberal peace is not true liberalism but liberal paternalism. Additionally, resilience approaches do not directly aim to resolve a conflict as the 1990’s peace operations. Thereby, peace implies accommodating to an acceptable, dangerous world, rather than trying to end any conflicts.
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