The politics of oil and gas in Timor-Leste

This talk explores the politics of oil and gas in Timor-Leste through an anthropological lens, focusing on how resource extraction is entangled with colonial history and anti-colonial struggles.

The Greater Sunrise gas fields, discovered in the 1970s, lie in the contested waters between Timor-Leste and Australia and have long been at the centre of disputes over sovereignty and maritime boundaries. More recently, the Timorese government has launched the ambitious Tasi Mane project, a large-scale petroleum corridor along the south coast intended to process and export offshore oil and gas.

While these initiatives promise economic independence, they also expose tensions between development, environmental concerns, and local dispossession. By examining how anti-colonial and ancestral logics are strategically incorporated into extractivist agendas, this talk argues for an analytical framework that captures the coexistence of conflicting logics within resource politics in Timor-Leste.

Speaker & chair biographies

Prof. Judith Bovensiepen is the Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focusses on Timor-Leste, where she has been carrying out ethnographic research since 2005. Bovensiepen’s first book, The Land of Gold: Post-Conflict Recovery and Cultural Revival (Cornell University Press), examines the role of the spiritual landscape in processes of post-conflict recovery. She is currently completing her second monograph, provisionally entitled Oil Fever: Animism and Extractivism in Timor-Leste. Bovensiepen also leads an ERC project, entitled ‘Resource Spirits’, which involves a comparative study of resource extraction in Southeast Asia.

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Arvind Vallabh on Unsplash

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