This paper examines the development of judicial system building in post-1999 East Timor. Central to the following discussion is an examination of the frictions, overlaps, and interactions between the newly introduced system and locally-maintained laws and social orders. When the judicial system building process commenced, security in local communities was largely maintained by local ‘traditional’ leaders, and conflicts were solved primarily through local conflict resolution mechanisms. Was the local social orders taken into account in the process of judicial system building? If so, how? And how did the local population, living within local social orders, respond to a judicial system built under international intervention?

The discussion commences by critically examining the conventional approach to understanding liberal peace-building and state-building. The mainstream literature of international peace-building and statebuilding has often regarded Western democracies as a normative goal of governance, assuming that the construction of liberal-democratic state institutions would, inherently, bring peace and stability to conflict-ridden societies. Such literature tends to overlook the locally-grown ‘traditional’ forms of law,and, moreover, regards the local society and its population as passive objects of the liberal peace-building rather than active participants in the process. Consequently, these conventional approaches tend to fail to appropriately grasp the nature of contemporary state-institution building.

Taking local actors and their legal culture seriously, the subsequent sections of this paper examine the development of legal order in post-1999 East Timor. First, the formation of local social orders in Timor-Leste are placed in a historical context that highlights how encounters with external forces, such as Portugal and Indonesia, have resulted in a state of legal pluralism, where a variety of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ laws coexisted in one society. Attention then turns to the judicial system building in post-1999 East Timor. Led and supported by international actors, state-builders tended to focus on ‘modern’ institution building, while overlooking legal plurality, or dismissing the local legal system in East Timor. At first this modern legal system faced difficulties engaging with the local population; the formal courts were rarely used for the purpose of conflict resolution because people continued to rely on local community mechanisms to solve their day-to-day problems. However, in recent years efforts to provide access to justice—such as legal support and financial assistance—have increased interaction between the formal judicial system and the local population. As such, local law and order practices are now in a dialogue with the new institutions, and a process of constructing and reconstructing local legal orders is underway.

This study aims to measure the impact of conflict on education outcome in the long term and to find out school factors that can effectively improve academic performance of students who have been exposed to conflict in the past. In order to examine the school factors which mitigate the conflict's negative impact on the education outcome, the research principally employs a multi-level regression model structured with cross-level interaction terms between school level characteristics and individual level conflict experience. The study focuses on the case of Timor-Leste which experienced intensive conflict for its independence in 1999, and used the 2015 EMIS individual data, results of 2015 national examination of 9^th grade students completing the basic education cycle as well as the 1999 conflict data.

The study found, first, that students who were born during or before the conflict period (1999-2002) in any provinces of Timor-Leste that were exposed to severe conflict tend to receive lower national examination score in the end of the 9^th grade. However, the study also found that the negative impact of a student's conflict experience in Timor-Leste is mitigated if the proportion of permanent teachers (shown as a proxy of teacher quality) in the school increases while the negative impact of conflict, on the contrary, is aggravated if the number of students in a school increases. The study further found that the existence of a school fence (shown as a proxy of school safety) raises average examination score of the school by 0.55 points compared to schools without fences, and this result can be possibly explained by the context of post-conflict situation.

This research contributes not only to making more effective education policy and system in post-conflict countries, but also serves as an additional research example in the field of measuring the impact of conflict on education outcome where not many researches have been conducted up to date.