ABSTRACT
This chapter examines women's movements in Timor-Leste as they sought independence and gender equality during the resistance era and, in turn, how these movements developed in response to the end of occupation and the beginning of international peace interventions. It focuses on the period of United Nations (UN) intervention, with the immediate post-occupation period and getting 'gender' onto the UN agenda. The chapter discusses the ideological, and hierarchised, separation between 'gender' and women's organisations on the one hand and the political elite on the other was in part fomented by the presence of a peace operation whose ontology of statehood was informed by gendered logics of high and low politics. It argues that the commencement of UN peace operations significantly shaped the landscape in which East Timorese women's activists and organisations operated as well as prescribed and limited the means of their organising.
