East Timor, Australia and Regional Order: Intervention and its Aftermath in Southeast Asia

While humanitarian intervention was the major innovation in global governance in the 1990s, until the East Timor case it was always in the territory of a failing state. This book explains the exceptional nature of the East Timor intervention of 1999, and deals with the background to the trusteeship role of the UN in building the new polity. All of these developments had an important impact on regional order, not least testing the ASEAN norm of 'non-interference'. Australian complicity in the Indonesian occupation of East Timor was a major factor in the persistence of Indonesian rule in the territory which was maintained for 25 years despite international censure and which required an unremitting campaign against the independence movement. This work reviews the reasons for that history of complicity, and explains the extraordinary change of policy that led ultimately to the occupation of the territory by the Australian-led INTERFET coalition. This book will be essential reading for students ofpolitical science, Asian studies and international relations.

James Cotton is a professor in the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.