Speaking Out for Justice: Bella Galhos and the International Campaign for the Independence of East Timor

In this chapter, I explore the transnational feminist activism of Isabel ‘Bella’ Antonia da Costa Galhos, a prominent yet understudied East Timorese woman activist, and her role at a critical moment in the international campaign for the independence of East Timor. Drawing extensively upon oral history interviews, I trace Bella’s activism from the local to the global, placing her life and experiences within a broader frame of the internationalisation of East Timor’s independence struggle and the international women’s human rights movement. Using the language of women’s human rights and the mobilisation of personal testimony to this end, I contend that Bella played a key role in cultivating and sustaining a broad, international solidarity network for East Timor that included emerging communities of politically engaged women.