Impact of Armed Conflict on Education in Timor-Leste

The number of armed conflicts, subsequently producing large-scale refugee and displacement crises, has been continuously increasing across the world. Many children who have experienced conflict and fled from a country are often interrupted in their education during and even after the conflict period. This study attempts to identify the long-term impact of conflicts on children’s educational outcome and mitigating factors that reduce the negative effect of the conflict. The research uses the case of Timor-Leste where several foreign governments enforced their policies on education for a long time, and people experienced conflicts during the Indonesian occupation as well as at the time of the independence referendum in 1999. Using available educational data, the study analyzes irregular trends in the educational conditions during the conflict, and estimates how the previous conflict’s experience affects the current official-age student’s test score. The study confirmed the long-term negative effect of students’ conflict experience, including refugee and forced migration, in the secondary education level, and found several school-related factors that mitigate the negative effect of conflict’s experience. The author interprets and discusses this phenomenon in terms of the Timorese contemporary context and the educational situation distorted by the history of foreign rules.