Paper short abstract:

What are the processes occurring in conflict-divided societies after truth commissions and tribunals end? This paper explores competing timelines, scales of actions, and priorities people place in the processes of peace and healing after massive violence among the East Timorese.

Paper long abstract:

On a global scale, post-conflict interventions rely heavily on future-oriented actions designed to confront painful memories of the past. The mechanisms aimed at assisting societies in transition operate within strict constraints of time, mandate, and funding. On the other hand, the afterlife of violence remains in and goes beyond the present, sediments in the landscape and the emotional terrains (dis)connecting everyday relations. The ways individuals and societies deal with the past occur at a different pace and scale from how external actors and nation-states conceive peace and healing. Non-human factors shape these processes profoundly. Thus, as one survivor of a village massacre stated, "You cannot rush us to reconcile. Reconciliation is as much a matter for the dead as it is for the living."

What are the implications of conflicting temporalities of peace and healing in everyday societal, cultural and political life? What are the processes occurring in conflict-divided communities after truth commissions and tribunals end? How can we conceptualise these processes in contemporary anthropological thinking? This paper draws on long-term ethnographic work among the East Timorese and explores competing timelines, scales of actions, and priorities people place in processes of peace and healing after massive violence.