This is an excellent book written 21 years after the 30 August 1999 UN-sponsored referendum in Timor Leste in which East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence. Vijayalakshmi Menon is a Singaporean diplomat, scholar, and UN official who served in successive UN missions in Timor Leste. She has some surprisingly candid analyses of her white European male bosses: ‘Jean-Christian Cady was an extremely nice person, but given the extraordinary challenges he was facing, he was totally overwhelmed …. We had to learn on the job most of the time’ (pp. 32–3).

And the things Menon writes about the Timorese male leadership are revealing. She refers to Xanana Gusmao, the former president and prime minister, as having an ‘oversized political persona’, adding: ‘Speaking before the diplomatic community in Dili, the Prime Minister stated that he was described in a UN document as “a big obstacle to the development of democracy in Timor Leste” … The Timorese leader advised the mission's international and Timorese staff to pack up’ (pp. 79–81).

Menon reflects on the disappearing international aid agencies and the deteriorating relationship between the UN and Timor Leste, a relationship which began with the United Nations being welcomed wholeheartedly to being regarded with suspicion:

However, since the first UN mission to Timor Leste, there had been protests about the UN's leadership from the opposition. The late Fernando Lasama de Araujo, then president of Partido Democratico, in a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan dated 25 July 2006, wrote:

The most compelling sections are in her analysis of socioeconomic development, such as: ‘The 2017 and 2019 budgets allocated $547 million or 39% for infrastructure, and only one-fifth of the budget was allocated for education, healthcare, agriculture, and water’ (p. 141). Her recommendations to ASEAN and the Timorese government on economic diversification instead of dependence on oil, more knowledge transfer in skills training for youths through scholarships, and assistance in tackling corruption are excellent. It is rare to read a woman's perspective on UN Peacebuilding. However, it would have been good to get a gendered analysis, especially on sexual violence by UN peacekeepers and the rise of domestic violence that the police cannot handle, as silence speaks louder than words.

The ‘note on Timorese political leaders’ and their biographies mentions only three from the older generation who keep recycling themselves between the posts of president and prime minister. It is as if no one else in Timor Leste exists. And yet by not including the names and more nuanced sociopolitical histories of the emerging younger generation of new critical leaders, the author participates in their erasure.

As a female scholar/outsider myself, who is a naturalised Timor Leste citizen and a witness to the same events (albeit from a different perspective), this was a difficult book to read. It is the story too of thousands of people who were part of the nation-state building process in Timor Leste. Many of them have died and are no longer able to speak in response to Menon's version of events; they include Lucas da Costa and Fernando La Sama de Araujo who wrote letters of protest to the United Nations. The silence on certain topics that were so central to the Timorese social movements I worked with is revealing. To this day, a lot of questions remain unanswered. Critical Timorese have asked: ‘Why and how could the UN allow the Indonesian armed forces to be responsible for security in 1999?’

The book is riveting — in terms of what Menon focuses on, her language, rhetoric, and vocabulary, and even the chosen visuals. The majority of the photos are of landscapes and government buildings, devoid of Timorese people and communities. This is revealing. There are also unpublished letters of protest that provide a counter-narrative to the UN ‘success story’ in East Timor, Cambodia, Kosovo, Haiti. But Menon's book is also valuable because it is a critical account from the perspective of a Southeast Asian woman in the male-dominated fields of UN Peacebuilding and the Timorese government. We usually think of security people as being confident. But according to her, they were ‘learning on the job’. Hard to imagine. Yet, in this era of increasing isolationism and nationalism, global institutions are still crucial in building communities of cooperation without domination, to produce solutions on climate change and Covid-19.

The power of being an outsider and being retired, and no longer being entangled with any of these players and institutions, is that one can be a profoundly honest mirror. Let's hope that Rising from the ashes is read by people in the institutions that helped build the foundations of independent Timor Leste, and that it makes them reflect critically on their own ethical accountability and social responsibility; and may it keep them awake at night instead of allowing them to merely wash their hands clean of our current crisis.