Land Policy in Post-conflict Circumstances: Some Lessons from East Timor - New Issues in Refugee Research Series

From Cambodia to Kosovo, and now East Timor, the United Nations has undertaken broad governmental functions in an effort to ensure that peace is maintained after the departure of the peacekeepers.1 On its face, these “peace-building” missions have a powerful logic. Brokering a peace, but leaving behind a vacuum in institutional capacity, only encourages the return of conflict after the peacekeepers leave. Providing urgent humanitarian relief, but failing to integrate it with development aid, ignores the way that development assists in preventing future humanitarian crises. Providing development aid, but failing to establish the institutional conditions for sustainable development, is likely only to entrench a cycle of aid dependency and lead to allegations of waste and inefficiency. In all these senses, therefore, there appears to be the need for some form of UN political control in post-conflict circumstances, particularly so as to build institutional conditions for sustainable development and maintenance of peace agreements.

This paper considers these issues relation to land policy in post-conflict circumstances. It does so by analysing UNTAET’s land policy in the immediate aftermath of the conflict in East Timor; and it argues, in particular, that lessons from the successes and failures of this policy may be applied to generate certain recommendations for template land strategies in other peace-building and post-conflict environments.