The article proposes that some of the key practices in the area of international cooperation for development can be better understood in terms of a gift regime. To this end, it compares ethnographic data relating to the modus operandi of the aid sector in East Timor with the legacy of Marcel Mauss and the recent production of M.A.U.S.S.. International aid policies are shown to be important means for establishing hegemony in negotiation spaces in which different actors construct identities and relations of alliance, honour and precedence. In this debate, it is argued that East Timor’s biggest countergift to the international community has been to function as an instrument through which values cherished by aid donors, expressed in Western myths of good society, can once again be cultivated in the process of building a new nation state.
International Cooperation; Gift; Nation State; Politics; East Timor