The aim of this Afterword is to foreground and discuss some of the key themes emerging from the four studies in this special issue. I first consider the critical ethnographic approach to language policy and planning adopted in the studies, and the attention to language policy processes unfolding on different scales of social and institutional life. This is followed by my reading of the ways the authors present the different actors creating, appropriating, reframing or resisting national and language-in-education policies in Timor-Leste. The last part is devoted to the analysis of discourses and practices of particular social actors taken here as 'language policy arbiters' (Johnson and Johnson in Lang Policy 14(3):221-243, 2015).