Introduction

This book has dealt with the history of peace-building and international intervention in East Timor. However, needless to mention, there have been a variety of international peace operations including preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, peace-making or peace-building, or missions led by the UN, regional or multinational organisations. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the relative position of peace-building in East Timor with other UN peace operations. Although each UN peace operation is independent, the UN conducts its mission as a stream or as a chain of the total UN operations. In other words, each mission is influenced by the preceding ones. The UN learns from previous missions in terms of operational skills, know-how and information. This chapter will conduct a comparative analysis of the case of peacebuilding in East Timor with Cambodia.

There is much ‘lesson-learnt’ type of literature about UN peacebuilding. After writing such literature, however, few authors analysed the next cases on UN operations to confirm whether the lessons which they gave were in fact learnt or not. Unless such lessons are sent to the UN and put into the agenda when it sets up the next mission, the UN will have another ‘partially-successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ operation or receive similar lessons to the previous ones again. In reality, this negative tendency has frequently happened in UN peacekeeping and peace-building.

In this context, this chapter will discuss on whether peace-building in East Timor was based on lessons learnt from previous missions.