Conflict in East Timor is generally viewed as a
recent, urban phenomenon. As a consequence, after independence in 1999,
sporadic but persistent low-level communal conflict in rural areas went largely
unnoticed until a major, national level upsurge in 2006. The violence of 2006, popularly
known as the ‘Crisis’, and the many informal security groups that emerged to
the public eye during this time, were thus attributed to a range of political
and economic factors such as poverty, a youth bulge, poor statebuilding and elite
political tensions. This framework continues to be highly influential in scholarship
on East Timor and in the design of peacebuilding, security and development
initiatives. Closer examination, however, reveals that conflict in East Timor
does not occur randomly, as such a framework would suggest, but in particular geographic
locations – both rural and urban – with a long history of conflict. Drawing on
seven years of fieldwork and the use of maps, this paper takes an ethnographic
approach to analyse patterns of conflict in East Timor. As I will argue here, there
are spatial and social symmetries between informal security group and descent
group territories, and regions with a long history of endemic conflict.
Constant circular migration, combined with complex kinship networks, ensures that there is an
ongoing, interactive dynamic between rural and urban conflict. Such a dynamic
has important implications for peacebuilding interventions. As this paper will
show, accurately identifying the true scale, source and location of a conflict,
is essential to effective conflict resolution.