- 著者
-
井上 浩子
- 出版者
- 一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会
- 雑誌
- 国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.2016, no.185, pp.185_98-185_113, 2016-10-25 (Released:2016-11-22)
- 参考文献数
- 59
This paper examines the development of judicial system building in post-1999 East Timor. Central to the following discussion is an examination of the frictions, overlaps, and interactions between the newly introduced system and locally-maintained laws and social orders. When the judicial system building process commenced, security in local communities was largely maintained by local ‘traditional’ leaders, and conflicts were solved primarily through local conflict resolution mechanisms. Was the local social orders taken into account in the process of judicial system building? If so, how? And how did the local population, living within local social orders, respond to a judicial system built under international intervention?The discussion commences by critically examining the conventional approach to understanding liberal peace-building and state-building. The mainstream literature of international peace-building and statebuilding has often regarded Western democracies as a normative goal of governance, assuming that the construction of liberal-democratic state institutions would, inherently, bring peace and stability to conflict-ridden societies. Such literature tends to overlook the locally-grown ‘traditional’ forms of law,and, moreover, regards the local society and its population as passive objects of the liberal peace-building rather than active participants in the process. Consequently, these conventional approaches tend to fail to appropriately grasp the nature of contemporary state-institution building.Taking local actors and their legal culture seriously, the subsequent sections of this paper examine the development of legal order in post-1999 East Timor. First, the formation of local social orders in Timor-Leste are placed in a historical context that highlights how encounters with external forces, such as Portugal and Indonesia, have resulted in a state of legal pluralism, where a variety of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ laws coexisted in one society. Attention then turns to the judicial system building in post-1999 East Timor. Led and supported by international actors, state-builders tended to focus on ‘modern’ institution building, while overlooking legal plurality, or dismissing the local legal system in East Timor. At first this modern legal system faced difficulties engaging with the local population; the formal courts were rarely used for the purpose of conflict resolution because people continued to rely on local community mechanisms to solve their day-to-day problems. However, in recent years efforts to provide access to justice—such as legal support and financial assistance—have increased interaction between the formal judicial system and the local population. As such, local law and order practices are now in a dialogue with the new institutions, and a process of constructing and reconstructing local legal orders is underway.