Book launch and discussion - The unruly dead: spirits, memory and state formation

RegNet warmly invites you to a celebration of Lia Kent’s book, The unruly dead: spirits, memory and state formation in Timor-Leste(2024, University of Wisconsin Press). Chaired by Miranda Forsyth, the event will include a book launch by Her Excellency Inês Maria de Almeida, Ambassador of Timor-Leste to Australia, and a discussion by Lia Kent, Cian O’Driscoll and Nick Bainton.

About the book

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order - a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times - up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation - means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.

About the author

Lia Kent is an Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in RegNet. With a background in peace and conflict studies, Lia’s research over the past 20 years has focused on the myriad ways in which East Timorese communities are making sense of the legacies of the Indonesian occupation. She is especially interested in how local peacebuilding priorities and practices intersect with those promoted by the state and international actors. In addition to The Unruly Dead, Lia is the author of The Dynamics of Transitional Justice: International Models and Local Realities in East Timor (Routledge, 2012).

About the presenters

Her Excellency Inês Almeida has served as Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (DRTL) to Australia since February 2019. Prior to her appointment she held significant roles across various government ministries, including the Office of the President, Mr Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Finance, and the Secretary of State for Veterans’ Affairs.

Miranda Forsyth is a professor and socio-legal researcher in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) in the College of Asia and Pacific at ANU.  She has research interests in legal pluralism, restorative justice, crime and peace and works predominantly in Melanesia.  She has led a research agenda on Overcoming Sorcery Accusation Related Violence in Papua New Guinea since 2013 and currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship on Overcoming Violence and Building Peace in Conditions of Complexity in Papua New Guinea. 

Cian O’Driscoll is Professor of International Relations at the Bell School, ANU. Cian’s research and teaching focus on the ethics of war, with an emphasis on the just war tradition. Since moving to Australia in 2020, Cian has become very interested in how the ethics of war is represented in Australian war literature and writing. Beyond his own research, Cian is a member of editorial team for the Review of International Studies.

Nick Bainton recently joined RegNet as an Associate Professor. He is an anthropologist and has spent the last 20 years leading research on the social and political impacts of resource extraction in the Pacific Islands region and beyond. His current research is focussed on one of the greatest governance challenges of our time: the impacts of supplying the raw materials needed for global energy transitions under already existing conditions of climate change. His earlier work was focussed on mortuary rituals in the context of large-scale mining in Melanesia.

COVID protocols

The ANU strongly encourages you to keep a mask with you at all times (for use when COVID-19 safe behaviours are not practicable) and to be respectful of colleagues, students and visitors who may wish to continue to wear one. Please continue to practice good hygiene. If you are unwell, please stay home. The ACT government’s COVID Smart behaviours can be accessed here.

This event is in-person only. Registration is required for catering purposes only. 

If you require accessibility accommodations or a visitor Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan please email regnet.communications@anu.edu.au.

Image credit: 'The unruly dead: spirits, memory and state formation in Timor-Leste' book cover, from University of Wisconsin Press.