ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the question of cohabitation through a focus on the state in Timor-Leste. There are two perspectives on the state that are of particular relevance; together they turn directly to the question of cohabitation. The first perspective is represented in efforts to implement certain generic models of the modern state carried by international state-building exercises. The second perspective on the state focuses not on the institutions and machinery of government and law, despite their undoubted significance, but on the state as a form of political community. The state in this sense is understood as including the networks of societal institutions, collective bodies of practices, and material and ideational technologies that generate diverse forms of order across a population. Understood in this way, as an ecology of governance the state does not stand distinct from 'society' but is constituted by the patterns of relations and exchange between and across government and juridical institutions, and networks of social practice.
