Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Jayadeva Uyangoda
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 100
ISBN-13:
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The Political Economy of Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Nikolaos Biziouras
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-26
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 1317805526
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the point of independence in 1948, Sri Lanka was projected to be a success story in the developing world. However, in July 1983 a violent ethnic conflict which pitted the Sinhalese against the Tamils began, and did not come to an end until 2009. This conflict led to nearly 50,000 combatant deaths and approximately 40,000 civilian deaths, as well as almost 1 million internally-displaced refugees and to the permanent migration abroad of nearly 130,000 civilians. With a focus on Sri Lanka, this book explores the political economy of ethnic conflict, and examines how rival political leaders are able to convince their ethnic group members to follow them into violent conflict. Specifically, it looks at how political leaders can influence and utilize changes in the level of economic liberalization in order to mobilize members of a certain ethnic group, and in the case of Sri Lanka, shows how ethnic mobilization drives can turn violent when minority ethnic groups are economically marginalized by the decisions that the majority ethnic group leaders make in order to stay in power. Taking a political economy approach to the conflict in Sri Lanka, this book is unique in its historical analysis and provides a longitudinal view of the evolution of both Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic drives. As such, this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to policy makers as well as academics in the field of South Asian studies, political science, sociology, development studies, political economy and security studies.
Blowback
Author: Neil DeVotta
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780804749244
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the mid-1950s, Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese politicians began outbidding one another on who could provide the greatest advantages for their community, using the Sinhala language as their instrument. The appeal to Sinhalese linguistic nationalism precipitated a situation in which the movement to replace English as the country’s official language with Sinhala and Tamil (the language of Sri Lanka’s principal minority) was abandoned and Sinhala alone became the official language in 1956. The Tamils’ subsequent protests led to anti-Tamil riots and institutional decay, which meant that supposedly representative agencies of government catered to Sinhalese preferences and blatantly disregarded minority interests. This in turn led to the Tamils’ mobilizing, first politically then militarily, and by the mid-1970s Tamil youth were bent on creating a separate state.
Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times
Author: Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2019-10-15
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 0810140764
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAssembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.
Sri Lanka
Author: Jonathan Spencer
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-09-11
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1134949790
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the past decade, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by political tragedy as successive governments have failed to settle the grievances of the Tamil minority in a way acceptable to the majority Sinhala population. The new Premadasa presidency faces huge economic and political problems with large sections of the island under the control of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and militant separatist Tamil groups operating in the north and south. This book is not a conventional political history of Sri Lanka. Instead, it attempts to shed fresh light on the historical roots of the ethnic crisis and uses a combination of historical and anthropologial evidence to challenge the widely-held belief that the conflict in Sri Lanka is simply the continuation of centuries of animosity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The authors show how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period with the war between Tamils and the Sinhala-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place-name etymologies, and the political use of the national past. The book is also one of the first attempts to focus on local perceptions of the crisis and draws on a broad range of sources, from village fieldwork to newspaper controversies. Its interest extends beyond contemporary politics to history, anthropology and development studies.
Sri Lanka--Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy
Author: Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 0226789527
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the historical events of post-independence Sri Lanka, S. J. Tambiah analyzes the causes of the violent conflict between the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and the minority Tamils. He demonstrates that the crisis is primarily a result of recent societal stresses—educational expansions, linguistic policy, unemployment, uneven income distribution, population movements, contemporary uses of the past as religious and national ideology, and trends toward authoritarianism—rather than age-old racial and religious differences. "In this concise, informative, lucidly written book, scrupulously documented and well indexed, [Tambiah] trains his dispassionate anthropologist's eye on the tangled roots of an urgent, present-day problem in the passionate hope that enlightenment, understanding, and a generous spirit of compromise may yet be able to prevail."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor "An incredibly rich and balanced analysis of the crisis. It is exemplary in highlighting the general complexities of ethnic crises in long-lived societies carrying a burden of historical memories."—Amita Shastri, Journal of Asian Studies "Tambiah makes an eloquent case for pluralist democracy in a country abundantly endowed with excuses to abandon such an approach to politics."—Donald L. Horowitz, New Republic "An excellent and thought-provoking book, for anyone who cares about Sri Lanka."—Paul Sieghart, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Rajesh Venugopal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-10-18
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 1108428797
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamines the relationship between the ethnic conflict and economic development in modern Sri Lanka.
The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Asoka Bandarage
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-11-19
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 1135970858
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book provides a detailed historically-based analysis of the origin, evolution and potential resolution of the civil conflict in Sri Lanka over the struggle to establish a separate state in its Northern and Eastern provinces. This conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the secessionist LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is one of the world’s most intractable contemporary armed struggles. The internationally banned LTTE is considered the prototype of modern terrorism. It is known to have introduced suicide bombing to the world, and recently became the first terrorist organization ever to acquire an air force. The ‘iron law of ethnicity’ – the assumption that cultural difference inevitably leads to conflict – has been reinforced by the 9/11 attacks and conflicts like the one in Sri Lanka. However, the connections among ethnic difference, conflict, and terrorism are not automatic. This book broadens the discourse on the separatist conflict in Sri Lanka by moving beyond the familiar bipolar Sinhala versus Tamil ethnic antagonism to show how the form and content of ethnicity are shaped by historical social forces. It develops a multipolar analysis which takes into account diverse ethnic groups, intra-ethnic, social class, caste and other variables at the local, regional and international levels. Overall, this book presents a conceptual framework useful for comparative global conflict analysis and resolution, shedding light on a host of complex issues such as terrorism, civil society, diasporas, international intervention and secessionism.
The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka
Author: Francis Boyle
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Published: 2010-04-20
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 0932863876
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world’s most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers, including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a “war without witnesses.” This book traces the ongoing engagement of international lawyer Francis A. Boyle during the last years of the conflict. Boyle was among the very few addressing the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government’s grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was taking place. This is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law.
Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Patrick Grant
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2009-01-05
Total Pages: 163
ISBN-13: 0791493679
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPatrick Grant explores the relationship between Buddhism and violent ethnic conflict in modern Sri Lanka using the concept of "regressive inversion." Regressive inversion occurs when universal teaching, such as that of the Buddha, is redeployed to supercharge passions associated with the kinds of group loyalty that the universal teaching itself intends to transcend. The book begins with an account of the main teachings of Theravada Buddhism and looks at how these inform, or fail to inform, modern interpreters. Grant considers the writings of three key figures—Anagarika Dharmapala, Walpola Rahula, and J. R. Jayewardene—who addressed Buddhism and politics in the years leading up to Sri Lanka's political independence from Britain, and subsequently, in postcolonial Sri Lanka. This book makes the Sri Lankan conflict accessible to readers interested in the modern global phenomenon of ethnic violence involving religion and also illuminates similar conflicts around the world.
