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Why has multilateral peacebuilding in conflict-ridden states emerged as a depoliticized practice that rarely engages with local actors and agendas? And why has depoliticization persisted despite continued criticisms? Claiming Impartiality offers an innovative answer to the puzzling persistence of depoliticization in post-war peacebuilding that focuses on the institutional mandates, interests, and practices of those international and bilateral organizations that design and implement most peacebuilding interventions. 

Drawing on and expanding a Bourdieusian field perspective, the book examines international organizations as actors in multiple fields of global governance. Using the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Timor-Leste, it traces the emergence and transformation of peacebuilding practices by leading international and bilateral organizations during the first two decades of the field’s existence. The organizational lens highlights the tensions that exist between the objectives of simultaneously acting as a peacebuilding organization and as a peacekeeping, humanitarian, or development organization whose practices are to varying degrees committed to observing the twin principles of impartiality and neutrality. By thinking through these sometimes contradictory roles, the book offers new insights into how these organizations sideline questions of political agency in favor of expanding their influence into related fields of global governance. Claiming Impartiality discusses the future of peacebuilding and explores avenues for addressing political challenges to peace itself.

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them. 

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.