Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2014

This article addresses, from a sociological point of view, the involvement of the Portuguese armed forces in international peace operations. After reviewing some major sociological contributions for understanding change in military institutions and the development of international military missions, it concentrates on the Portuguese case, aiming at uncovering the place and meaning of peace operations for the Portuguese armed forces during the past two decades. After briefly recalling some facts and figures concerning the Portuguese participation in peace operations, it addresses the relevance of such involvement at different analytical levels, showing that peace operations have come to play a decisive role in the national defence political discourse, the organizational configuration of the Portuguese armed forces and the soldiers’ professional identity. The last section consists of a short prospective exercise looking at possible implications of disengagement from international peace missions. The conclusion is that, considering the strategic, organizational and socio-psychological centrality of these missions, disengagement is likely to have important consequences in the overall strategic definition, purpose and identity of the Portuguese military, while entailing an additional cost: the possible loss of at least part of a recently reinforced legitimacy.

Security sector reform (SSR) aims to create a secure environment that is conducive to development, poverty reduction, good governance, and in particular the growth of democratic states and institutions based on the rule of law. This relies on the ability of the state to mitigate its people’s vulnerabilities through development and to use a range of policy instruments to prevent or address security threats that affect society’s wellbeing. Timor-Leste is currently relatively stable compared to the 2006–08 crisis period, but it is still seen as a fragile state. In the security sector, this fragility highlights the conflictual relationship between the armed forces (FALINTIL – Forças de Defesa de Timor-Leste, F-FDTL) and the police (Polícia Nacional de Timor-Leste, PNTL) as the most significant threat to national stability. This article examines the United Nations’ efforts in Timor-Leste as an important case for the study of SSR in post-conflict countries and tries to answer the following questions: how has SSR evolved in Timor-Leste? What has the role of the military and police forces been in the country’s stabilization and reconstruction? Are they contributing to peace or are they a source of potential conflict?

This article looks at the process of intervention that took place in Timor-Leste particularly after the 1999 popular consultation where the majority of the voting was in favour of independence from Indonesian rule. Since then, the United Nations (UN) presence in Timor-Leste assumed different configurations, from the transitional administration to elections monitoring, including the use of force to contain violence. In the process of peace consolidation, the role of international interventionism was to assist the country in developing institutions and setting up processes for promoting good governance, aiming at stability-building. This article looks at the context where interventionism took place, particularly looking at the UN role until the end of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) mandate in December 2012, seeking to shed light on the UN’s contribution to peace. The article argues the UN’s approach to peace has been mainly an institutional one, and that the challenges remaining and/or arising in the post-interventionist context are many regarding the consolidation of the state, both internally (structural approach to peace) and externally (projection of stability at the regional and international levels). Despite the remaining challenges, the article concludes with a positive assessment of the course of Timorese peace consolidation, and that the active foreign policy of Timor-Leste might constitute a building block in its internal consolidation process.

Although it is currently recognized that peacebuilding and development aid constitute interlinked dynamics, it is still open to debate if they should be addressed sequentially or simultaneously. This article discusses this relation in terms of UN (United Nations) peace missions. The UN has adopted an inclusive narrative regarding development and peace; however, UN peace missions still reveal an exclusive approach. Timor-Leste demonstrates how this discrepancy between discourse and practice has the potential to undermine both efforts.

The term ‘governance’, in the social sciences as well as in political practice, has emerged as a result of a crisis of interventionist thinking. Post-interventionist theories and concepts of pluralist societies had raised questions that the idea of governance promised to answer by replacing more rigid concepts of social steering by new ideas of cooperation, negotiation, coproduction, hybrid communication, self-regulation, network, etc. It is not so much this often-criticized blurriness of the semantics of governance that provokes questions again, but rather the specific amalgamation of social theory and practice connected to governance. As an effect of this amalgamation, the ‘social-scientification’ of sovereignty and control tends to produce two contradictory effects. Besides the traditional guarantee of freedom, usually connected with a strong rule of law, a very far-reaching pressure and demand of cooperation and participation are becoming powerful, closely guarded under the surface of the brave new world of governance. Against this background, the recollection of the functional nucleus of governance is suggested with the term ‘regulation’ and with a particular emphasis on certain delegalizing effects of governance. The intention of this proposal is neither to dismiss the perspective of governance in toto, nor to revert to interventionist concepts, but rather to set the stage for a dispassionate and detached analysis of law and politics.

The military coup on 25 April 1974 initiated the Carnation Revolution that put an end to the New State, the longest-lasting authoritarian regime in twentieth-century Europe. There are several alternative explanations about what caused such a process of regime substitution in Portugal. This article focuses on one of them: military discontent and participation in politics. It analyses the history of civil-military relations from the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars until the demise of the New State. It shows that the attitude of the military in 1974 was not merely conjunctural and that the tendency to intervene in politics was entrenched in the armed forces since the fall of the ancien régime. Although the nature and intensity of its participation in state affairs evolved throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Portuguese military never completely accepted civilian supremacy. Military interventionism was nurtured by political polarization, institutional weakness, and disagreements over foreign policy, the use of the armed forces against internal enemies and the deficient equipment and preparation of the troops. Periods of active involvement in politics alternated with others in which interventionism remained latent.

O Império Colonial em Questão (Sécs. Xix–Xx): Poderes, Saberes e Instituições/The Colonial Empire in Question (Nineteenth-Twentieth Centuries): Power, Knowledge and Institutions, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (ed.) (2012) Lisbon: Edições 70, 600 pp., ISBN: 9789724417233, Paperback, €19.80

A Concordata de Salazar/Salazar’s Concordat, Rita Almeida de Carvalho (2013) Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores and Temas e Debates, 642 pp., ISBN: 9789896442132, Paperback, €17.90

Parceiros em Rede: Estratégias Territorializadas para o Desenvolvimento Local nas Áreas do Emprego e Formação/Network Partners: Territorialized Strategies for Local Development in Employment and Training, João Emílio Alves (2012) Oporto: Fronteira do Caos, 250 pp., ISBN: 9789898070975, Paperback, €14.30