Human Rights in Timor-Leste’s Struggle for Independence

Abstract:This article investigates the role of human rights in Timor-Leste’s struggle for independence from Indonesia. It examines the context within which Timor’s Resistance movement began to employ human rights in the 1980s. It considers how human rights were used by Timor’s Resistance and the effects of this employment on the movement, using the Timor case to make larger arguments about the nature of human rights and human rights activism and about the relationships between human rights, anti-colonialism, and the right to self-determination.The article begins by examining Timor’s Resistance movement when it was primarily guided by a politics of anti-colonialism. Then, it turns to the Resistance’s embrace of human rights discourses in the early 1980s, discussing the Resistance’s motivations for this embrace and how human rights discourses and practices were employed by Timor’s Resistance movement and to what effect. Finally, it turns what the Timor case tells us more generally about human rights and about the relationships between human rights, politics, agency, and anti-colonialism.