We are delighted to congratulate Dr Janet Hunt, a Fellow at CAEPR, on winning the RMIT University Vice-Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Thesis 2009 for her thesis titled Local NGOs in National Development: The Case of East Timor, submitted in 2008.

The thesis studied the ways in which local East Timorese NGOs, which had operated under the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, engaged with and tried to influence the UN-supervised transition to independence and nationhood, as well as how this turbulent period affected them as organisations. It reflected on self-determination and the  way in which building a new state must involve building a new  relationship with civil society in the development of a new nation.