Homo Academicus & East Timor: Boundary-Maintenance and Erasure in the Social Sciences

• In Event: 30455 - Complexities of Conflict: Dynamics, Responses, and Ethical Dimensions

Abstract

Mass atrocities like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosova have become symbols and points of reference for United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. However, in the Cold War geopolitical context, the world (all but) ignored Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor and associated human rights violations. This research seeks to understand whether there was an erasure of atrocities in East Timor in the academic and social science fields. Our effort is founded on a large corpus of social science articles (full text and metadata) provided by JSTOR (1.75 million articles published between 1850 and 2019). Specifically, JSTOR shared all articles identified as: sociology, political science, anthropology and criminal justice. In the enormous corpus, only 2380 articles mention East Timor. Moreover, even after Indonesia’s invasion in 1975, relatively few of these articles mention human rights violations.
Despite the Indonesian regimes efforts to isolate East Timor and to limit the flow of information about atrocities, of the systematic violation of human rights, mass starvation, and genocidal policies were documented. International human rights monitors, transnational networks, religious organizations, and a handful of academics spread the word about the tragedy unfolding in East Timor. Most deaths in East Timor occurred during the famine period between 1975 and 1979, when the violence of the occupation was at its peak. Interestingly, this period also saw considerable criticism in the West of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. However, the media largely ignored the atrocities in East Timor (Herman and Chomsky, 2002). Furthermore, academic scholarship in the social sciences largely remained silent on the human rights violations committed during Indonesia’s twenty-four-year occupation. Few articles made reference to East Timor, and those that did often focused on other subjects, showing surprisingly little interest in the widespread and persistent atrocities.

Authors

• Julian Torelli, McMaster Uninversity

• Gregory Hooks, McMaster University