TRANSFORMASI MILITER GERILYA KE MILITER PROFESIONAL: STUDI PADA FALINTIL - FORCAS DE DEFESA DE TIMOR-LESTE

This study examines the transformation of FALINTIL from a guerrilla resistance force into the Falintil–Forças de Defesa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL) and analyzes how military professionalism is constructed and practiced in a small post-conflict state. Departing from a purely technical or normative understanding, this research conceptualizes military professionalism as a social practice shaped by historically embedded meanings, institutional functions, and power relations within a specific socio-political context. Theoretically, the study integrates classical social theory with a relational sociological framework. Max Weber’s perspective is employed to understand military professionalism as meaningful social action oriented by both instrumental and value rationalities, while Talcott Parsons’ theory of social systems provides a lens to examine the functional role of professionalism in maintaining institutional stability and integration in post-conflict state-building. These classical foundations are further elaborated through Pierre Bourdieu’s relational approach, which conceptualizes military professionalism as a practice emerging from the interaction between actors’ habitus, the configuration of the civil–military field, and the distribution of symbolic and institutional capital. This relational framework is operationalized through a set of middle-range theories, including theories of military professionalism and civil–military relations (Huntington and Janowitz), path dependency theory to explain historically formed dispositions and institutional trajectories, and the Security Sector Reform (SSR) framework to analyze international normative and institutional interventions. The Pentagon Model of Military Professionalization developed by Muhadjir Effendy is employed as an operational and comparative framework to organize empirical findings and assess the contextual adaptation of military professionalism in a small-state setting. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative descriptive-analytical approach, drawing on in-depth interviews with military actors, political elites, national intellectuals, and international SSR practitioners, complemented by document analysis of policy reports, international organization publications, and official state speeches. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is used to situate the Timor-Leste case within broader international debates on post-conflict military formation and professionalism in small states. The findings demonstrate that F-FDTL’s military professionalism does not develop linearly in accordance with ideal-type models of modern professional militaries. Instead, it emerges through a process of hybridization that combines the historical-symbolic legacy of FALINTIL, democratic normative demands, evolving civil–military relations, international institutional pressures, and the structural constraints of a small state. This study proposes a Hybrid Military Professionalism Model of F-FDTL consisting of five interrelated dimensions: historical–symbolic, normative–democratic, cultural– institutional, small-state structural, and relational–international. Theoretically, this research contributes to the sociology of the military by demonstrating that military professionalism in post-conflict small states is inherently contextual, historical, and relational rather than universal and linear. Practically, it offers insights for strengthening military professionalism and designing security sector reform policies that are more sensitive to local histories, social structures, and cultural dynamics in Timor-Leste.