East Timor
Article
East Timor is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 04, 2021 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “imperialist interventions in … East Timor”; “seem (as far as I can tell) to be relevant to other places, from East Timor to various Myanmar would-be independence movements”. It most often appears alongside Britain, China, Iraq.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 04, 2021
- Last seen: April 06, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Iraq (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 19th century (1 shared issues)
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- 2008 (1 shared issues)
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- 21st century (1 shared issues)
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- 11 attacks (1 shared issues)
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- A Brief History Of Neoliberalism (1 shared issues)
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- ABHoN (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
This appeal to the universalism of rights is a double-edged sword. It may and can be used with progressive aims in mind. The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and others cannot be dismissed as a mere adjunct of neoliberal thinking. The whole history of humanism (both of the Western—classically liberal—and various non-Western versions) is too complicated for that. But the limited objectives of many rights discourses (in Amnesty’s case the exclusive focus, until recently, on civil and political as opposed to economic rights) makes it all too easy to absorb them within the neoliberal frame. Universalism seems to work particularly well with global issues such as climate change, the ozone hole, loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction, and the like. But its results in the human rights field are more problematic, given the diversity of political-economic circumstances and cultural practices to be found in the world. Furthermore, it has been all too easy to co-opt human rights issues as ‘swords of empire’ (to use Bartholomew and Breakspear’s trenchant characterization). So-called ‘liberal hawks’ in the US, for example, have appealed to them to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, and, above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.
You missed one obvious aspect of the 'right' to "declare yourself to be independent", namely some version of fairness. Otherwise as soon as oil gets discovered, the oil-rich province decides it would rather secede than share the loot. This was, of course, a large part of the background in Biafra and the Second Sudanese Civil War, and versions of this seem (as far as I can tell) to be relevant to other places, from East Timor to various Myanmar would-be independence movements.