Colonisation, securitised development and the crisis of civic identity in Sri Lanka (original) (raw)
Related papers
Post-war Sri Lanka: exploring the path not taken
Dialectical Anthropology, 2015
The notion of 'races' divided by such fundamental and immutable differences that they cannot live together has long been rejected as unscientific and ideological. The notions of 'nationalities' and 'ethnic groups' at first seem more acceptable, yet they too are increasingly being used to refer to supposedly mono-lithic entities that are permanently divided from each other. When used by those who are trying to establish the supremacy of their own nationality or ethnic group in a given territory, they can be a pretext for persecution of minorities and ethnic cleansing, but all too often, the very same notions are used by those who see themselves as fighting against such policies. Sri Lanka offers a striking illustration of the impossibility of resolving the problem of persecution of minorities while using the same racist ideological framework that was used to create it in the first place. A completely different framework, acknowledging multilayered, multifaceted identities and multiple belongings, in combination with the politics of solidarity rather than segregation, has proved to be far more promising.
In Pursuit of Hegemony: Politics and State Building in Sri Lanka
2007
textabstractSince the late colonial period, Sri Lanka has been subject to modern democratic state building experiments. The number of challenges this project has encountered is rising. Many of these challenges have been identified alongside the multi-ethnic character of Sri Lanka’s population, illuminating the antagonistic inter-ethnic relations between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. The various policy measures designed endogeneously and exogenously focused on building a democratic state where the rights of the ethnic minorities could be guaranteed. However, the outcomes of these policy measures have not reflected this goal. These policy measures have not sufficiently contributed to a guarantee of rights for ethnic minorities and paid ill attention to numerous other tensions that are of a non-inter-ethnic nature in Sri Lanka’s state building project. By focusing on the broader state-in-society relations and privileging hegemonic formations in Sinhalese politics thro...
Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, 2017
Postwar reconstruction in Sri Lanka, which is aided by many countries, is aimed at consolidating the unitary state structure as part of a geo-strategic security complex in the Indian Ocean Region. In this process, discourses of democratization and human rights have been reconfigured to contain or totally remove any threat to the unitary state emerging from the Tamils in the North and East whose claim to selfdetermination is seen as a major challenge to the geo-strategic complex in South Asia. In such a context, the bio-politics of the development-security nexus and neoliberal governmentality operates by strengthening the hegemony of the Sinhala state against the Tamils and weakening or destroying the essential foundations of Tamil nationhood. Without recognizing these local and global dynamics every peacebuilding attempt will fail.
Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, 2013
This article investigates the period before Sri Lanka was engulfed by civil war and ethnic strife and how things changed so rapidly following colonial rule. Sri Lanka’s independence was seen as a model to be followed in the decolonisation of the British Empire due to the island’s peace, prosperity, indigenous leadership and its preference for British institutions. However, behind this façade the years surrounding Sri Lankan independence also saw the foundations for the vicious civil war that has dominated all recent coverage of this Indian Ocean state. This article assesses how warning signs were misread or ignored and how early political decisions in this era forged the beginnings of the future problems ahead.
Post-war Sri Lanka: exploring the path not taken—a commentary
Dialectical Anthropology, 2015
The article ''Post-war Sri Lanka: exploring the path not taken'', provides a thorough summary of the complexities of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka since its independence and challenges the taken-for-granted categories of ethnicity, nationality, and culture typically used to explain the conflict. It is strong in that it unpacks the complexities of these categories in light of empirically rich data and relevant scholarly studies. Much of the article is devoted to substantiating the author's claim that the meaning of these categories is generally assumed to be pure and fixed and that we instead need to approach them as diverse, hybrid, and fluid over time and space. Certainly, the author forces us to explore new approaches, or ''pathways not taken,'' to solve ethnic conflict by taking into account the theoretical and empirical complexities of these categories and the false premises on which they are based. However, despite the title of the article, the author fails to provide a clear explanation as what these ''pathways not taken'' to solve the ethnic conflict entail. It is unclear whether these pathways are ones already taken by the Sri Lankan government, Tamil community, or yet to be imagined. Indeed, the only alternative path suggested in the article is the need for a better understanding of culture and community and to replace ''ethnicity'' and ''ethnic group'' with ''culture'' and ''cultural community,'' with an emphasis on the hybridity, diversity, and fluidity of these categories over time and space. How these re-imaginations and replacements will lead society to fight against ''forms of oppression, ranging from discrimination to genocide and build inclusive democracies based on equality before the law'' is unclear. Would they not succumb to the same limitations of those concepts that the author wants us to discard? How would
2019
This paper argues that the indigenization of development is not a simple reaction to the dominance of western development ideology, but intricately embedded in the process of the postcolonial state and social formation. The paper examines this thesis in relation to Sri Lanka, in the context of changing national politics in the 1950s–the immediate post-colonial phase, elaborating how the indigenization of development became established as a discourse of power. Tracing the historical roots of indigenization of development, the paper suggests that it is neither the opposite of western development ideology as it is generally understood and interpreted nor a simple nostalgic plea for a march backward towards an Arcadia.
Through a case study of Sinhala nationalism and its impact on ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, this article explores the idea that the study of ethno-national conflict management as well as the wider field of nationalism studies tend to render nationalism as epiphenomenal and explicable through other underlying political and socio-economic dynamics. The article contends that nationalism studies needs to take on board lessons learnt in the social sciences from ontological, post-Gramscian and Foucaultian studies of power that do not disqualify nationalism as a channel for political mobilisation. In the case of the literature on Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka, the predominant tendency has been to explain these dynamics as a consequence of elite instrumentality. In contrast, what is contended here is that it is the ‘deep hegemony’ of Sinhala nationalism, demonstrated in the mobilisation of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, that has impacted profoundly on the recurrence of ethnic conflict and the consistent failure of attempts to broker peace.
Who is the rogue? Discourse, power and spatial politics in post-war Sri Lanka
Political Geography, 2006
This article analyses ethnic antagonisms and related political discourses in Sri Lanka after the ceasefire agreement in 2002 using the Derridean notion of vouyou (rogue) and Agamben's concept of state of exception. In all three ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, we can observe discourses on ethnicity, space and territories that create fictions of ethnic homogeneity and purity based on a social construct of the ethnic other as ''rogue''. Roguishness is linked with issues of territorial control, political justice and virtual or real ''rogue states''. It is also pertinent in the justification of violence and the differentiation of just(ified) and unjust(ified), roguish violence and the rivalry over sovereignty.