LGBT Actors, Ritual and Martial Arts Groups, and State-Building in Post-Conflict Timor-Leste

Abstract

Despite decades of research on women’s involvement in political violence, it remains assumed that the modal participant in a wide variety of extra-governmental political organizations which engage in violence is (young) and (cishetero)male. Despite decades of research on the diversity of politically violent organizations by specialists studying each organization, scholars, especially political scientists, continue to treat these organizations as if generalizations about them are intellectually useful. Taking these common assumptions for granted, one would seriously underestimate the complexity of ritual/martial arts groups (RAGs and MAGs) in Timor-Leste. Men are the majority of members of Timor-Leste’s RAGs and MAGs, and MAGs have been characterized as gangs, extremist organizations, and irregular forces by scholars and policymakers.

Reading these two facts, however, often produces reductive understandings of these organizations —in terms of their membership, structure, and even political role. With the understanding that the majority of these organizations’ members are men often comes the idea that men join their organizations to engage in making violence, inspired by the traditionally understood push and pull factors for violent extremism like unemployment, poverty, lack of education, and opportunity. Members have been characterized as “social outcasts” who are “prone to alcohol abuse and violence” including “street fighting, assault, murder and extortion”. If RAGs and MAGs are (largely) reduced to outlets of male aggression for their participants, the organizations themselves are simultaneously treated as criminal, and responsible for myriad political, economic, and social issues. Our research interrogates this simple framing and finds that there is much more to (gender and) RAG and MAG membership than one-dimensional stories suggest.

The article finds that RAG and MAG members in Timor-Leste are not all cishetero men, and that these organizations’ LGBT members strategically negotiate and present gender identities. Looking more closely at these negotiations paints a picture of RAG and MAG members as political agents beyond violent hypermasculinity. This article uses ethnographic, semi-structured interviews with ten RAG and MAG members who identify as LGBT to get a deeper understanding of how they fit into their organizations, how they navigate them, and what they do as members. We discuss the findings within the context of the assumed violent, masculine depiction of RAGs and MAGs and argue that we must re-think LGBT membership in these groups in Timor-Leste within a broader framework of understanding the relationships between agency, violence, and gender, both in Timor-Leste and in global politics generally. To this end, we discuss LGBT RAG and MAG members’ self-understandings of their organizations as builders of community and state in the context of the organisations’ gender diversity. We start by contextualizing RAGs and MAGs in post-conflict Timor-Leste before discussing the interviews that we did and the methods we used to collect and analyse data. We then present our data analysis in three sections —engaging questions about genders and sexualities in RAGs and MAGs in Timor-Leste, these organizations’ relationships to their communities and their propensities (or lack thereof) to violence, and then these organizations’ role in community-building and state-building. We conclude by arguing that openness to seeing more complexities in gender and sexuality within RAGs and MAGs can also show more complexities in their activities, including but not limited to community-building and state-building.

It is our argument that the substantial and meaningful roles that RAGs and MAGs play in community-building and state-building is obscured by the tendency to reduce these organizations to gangs, and that the tendency to reduce these organizations to gangs is bound up in a (mis)reading of them as hypermasculine outlets for male violence. We see, both through our observations and through our interviewees’ eyes, more complexity in and around sex and gender roles and sexed and gendered agency than most media or even scholarly coverage of RAGs and MAGs captures. We suggest that these complexities are meaningful not only for the participation of LGBT members in RAGs and MAGs but also for thinking about what those organisations are and how they work.

The LGBT RAG and MAG members who we talked to are people who might otherwise be invisible to analysis of RAGs and MAGs that treat them (exclusively) as gangs which do violence around and against the state, cause disruptions and make trouble, and that see them as having (exclusively) young, cishetero, male members. Seeing the ways that LGBT RAG and MAG members curate their sexual and gender identities to suit the needs of their lives and their organization membership helps us to understand the complexity and fungibility of roles in, and agency in, these RAGs and MAGs. Looking at how LGBT members of RAGs and MAGs change and grow their organizations’ notions of brotherhood to create and protect bonds among LGBT members across organizations reveals to us that the mechanisms under which RAGs and MAGs operate are multidimensional. Engaging with the ways in which LGBT members of these organizations understand their RAGs’ and MAGs’ relationship with violence provides a starting point to (re)think the political positionalities of RAG and MAG members and indeed of the organizations themselves.

Our beginnings of this rethinking suggest that looking more broadly at these groups’ gender dynamics and (therefore) at their scope and function provides the ability to see them not only as more than violent, but as actors that do community-building and state-building work. There are many ways in which our research is quite preliminary: we had access to a small number of LGBT interviewees who gave us information about their organizations, and we have not had the opportunity to look at if (and if so, how) RAG and MAG community-building and state-building measures are seen by, understood by, or of benefit to, anyone other than our LGBT interviewees —particularly, either non-LGBT members of the groups or people outside of the groups. Further, while our findings run contrary to a broad consensus among international organizations that classify RAGs and MAGs as gangs, we are confident that our participants have helped us to see more to these organizations —a confidence bolstered by similar though not exactly the same findings by other scholars who are experts in post-conflict Timor-Leste. That said, we hope that this article’s findings, and those of our other work, open a dialogue for further and more in-depth research in this area, which we hope comes to include more scholars of Timor-Leste from Timor-Leste.

Even with all of these caveats, however, we think that there is something important here —for thinking about RAGs and MAGs in Timor-Leste, and for feminist and queer approaches to thinking about global politics more broadly. For thinking about RAGs and MAGs in Timor-Leste, we think that it is important to see complexities in gender configurations, and that seeing complexities in those gender configurations help to show otherwise-invisible complexities surrounding questions of organization activity, organization violence, and organization politics. For feminist and queer approaches to global politics generally, this exploration bolsters the feminist argument that blindness to gender in global politics obscures more than gender, but also other dynamics that are necessarily related to gender and genderings. It also suggests that there is payoff in seeing not only local contextual dimensions of genders and sexualities, but the ways in which those local contextual dimensions shape gender perceptions, gender structures, organization structures, and even politics more broadly.