Local Governance in Timor-Leste - Secretaria de Estado da Arte e ...

quite fragile. I argue that it is within these institutional gaps that various shadownetworks are established and even to some extent legitimised as they fill certain needswithin the suku. This dynamic in turn carries with it a danger that "local strongmen"(Migdal, 1988) can emerge. According to Migdal, local strongmen arise in the contextof a "weblike society", where the state does not hold dominant hegemonic force butrather various different actors work together or compete for influence. Such insightsoffer a more nuanced perspective to other analyses that tend to see the dangers thatare present in tradition or "atavism", but do not clearly distinguish traditionalinstitutional structures from shadow networks, or account for the many ways in whichindividuals cynically mobilise modern institutional structures (see for example Gunnand Huang, 2006: 119-21). While the influence of violent shadow networks hasemerged as an issue in many postcolonial, developing states (Comaroff and Comaroff,2007), they appear to operate in very different ways to traditional institutionalstructures. As Migdal argues, while the factors that lead to the emergence of localstrongmen are commonly described as 'traditional' they are often corruptions oftraditional structures and it is therefore "terribly misleading to speak of thesetwentieth-century forces as 'traditional' at all" (1988: 50).Local strongmen can be quite dangerous figures within a society, and over time canhave a serious negative impact on the pursuit of democratisation and non-corruptgovernance. However, the impact that they have is often not clearly seen by thoseoutside the community, as their power and influence tends to only be visiblyexercised over local communities. Once their power has been shored up within thelocal sphere they can then pose a real threat to the state, particularly if they are alsopatrons for violent networks. However, this will vary significantly depending onwhich level of governance they are operating at—and therefore what resources areavailable to them to pursue their political agendas. Many analyses of 'local strongmen'or 'bosses' focus on individuals with disproportionate influence who hold officialpositions but who use these positions to gain power beyond their institutional base(see for example Sidel, 2004). While this is an important version of local strongman,particularly as they also have access to state resources to pursue their politicalagendas, there are many other versions of local strongmen that can emerge, with thecommon feature that they strategically create and nurture networks that cumulativelygive them power beyond their institutional base. Here, I consider a version of local187