Homeland, territory, property: contesting land, state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste
Stead, Victoria 2015, Homeland, territory, property: contesting land, state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste, Political geography, vol. 45, pp. 79-89, doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.05.002.
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Homeland, territory, property: contesting land, state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste
This article considers contestations over land, state and nation in Aitarak Laran, an urban settlement in post-independence Timor-Leste. Since 2010 the settlement has been resisting eviction by the East Timorese state, which wishes to use the land it occupies to build a National Library and Cultural Centre. In exploring the contestation, the purpose of this article is two-fold. Firstly, it explores the nature of social connection to land within postcolonial state- and nation-building. Here, the contestation at Aitarak Laran reveals counter-posed imaginings of land as homeland, territory and property. Secondly, the article draws out the implications of these counter-posed imaginings for thinking about the 'right to the city', a notion first theorised by Lefebvre (1996 [1968]) and subsequently developed to encompass a range of modes of urban protest. In the settlement, the promises of independence-unity, equivalence, and inclusion within the sovereign nation-state-are at odds with residents' experiences of what independence has in fact brought. Land, in its multiple imaginings, becomes a crucible upon which this painful disjuncture plays out. Reading Aitarak Laran as an instance of 'right to the city' struggle, these tensions emerge as well not only in practice but also in theory, reflected particularly in the limitations and ambiguities of rights discourse.
160104 Social and Cultural Anthropology 160499 Human Geography not elsewhere classified 160514 Urban Policy 1604 Human Geography 1606 Political Science 1605 Policy And Administration
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