In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-better known as the Tamil Tigers-officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil ...war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war. Sharika Thiranagama'sIn My Mother's Houseprovides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war.In My Mother's Houserevolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence-carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state-on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for post-conflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.
For twenty-six years, civil war tore Sri Lanka apart. Despite numerous peace talks, cease-fires, and external military and diplomatic pressure, war raged on between the separatist Liberation Tigers ...of Tamil Eelam and the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan government. Then, in 2009, the Sri Lankan military defeated the insurgents. The win was unequivocal, but the terms of victory were not. The first successful counterinsurgency campaign of the twenty-first century left the world with many questions. How did Sri Lanka ultimately win this seemingly intractable war? Will other nations facing insurgencies be able to adopt Sri Lanka's methods without encountering accusations of human rights violations? Ahmed S. Hashim-who teaches national security strategy and helped craft the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq-investigates those questions in the first book to analyze the final stage of the Sri Lankan civil war.When Counterinsurgency Winstraces the development of the counterinsurgency campaign in Sri Lanka from the early stages of the war to the later adaptations of the Sri Lankan government, leading up to the final campaign. The campaign itself is analyzed in terms of military strategy but is also given political and historical context-critical to comprehending the conditions that give rise to insurgent violence. The tactics of the Tamil Tigers have been emulated by militant groups in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Whether or not the Sri Lankan counterinsurgency campaign can or should be emulated in kind, the comprehensive, insightful coverage ofWhen Counterinsurgency Winsholds vital lessons for strategists and students of security and defense.
How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he ...remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel "walked into the ashes and mortal residue" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.
Will be of interest to those working on conflict and peace studies,
economic development, cultural studies, and women in the modern world. A key new
publication. -- Chandra R. de Silva, Old Dominion
...University ... offers a superb overview of how a civil war,
driven by ethnicity, can engender a new culture and a new political economy...
Highly recommended. -- Choice Economy, Culture, and
Civil War in Sri Lanka provides a lucid and up-to-date interpretation of Sri Lankan
society and its 20-year civil conflict. An interdisciplinary examination of the
relationship between the economy, broadly defined, and the reproduction of violent
conflict, this volume argues that the war is grounded not just in the goals and
intentions of the opposing sides, but also in the everyday orientations,
experiences, and material practices of all Sri Lankan people. The contributors
explore changing political and policy contexts; the effect of long-term conflict on
employment opportunities and life choices for rural and urban youth; life histories,
memory, and narratives of violence; the economics of enlisting and
individual decisions about involvement in the war; and nationalism and the moral
debate triggered by women's employment in the international garment manufacturing
industry. Contributors are Francesca Bremner, Michele Ruth
Gamburd, Newton Gunasinghe, Siri T. Hettige, Caitrin Lynch, John M. Richardson, Jr.,
Amita Shastri, Deborah Winslow, and Michael D. Woost.
In Sri Lanka, staggering numbers of young men were killed fighting in the armed forces against Tamil separatists. The war became one of attrition-year after year waves of young foot soldiers were ...sent to almost certain death in a war so bloody that the very names of the most famous battle scenes still fill people with horror. Alex Argenti-Pillen describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a breeding ground and reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation-state, arguing that this reservoir has been created on the basis of a culture of poverty and terror. Focusing on the involvement of the pseudonymous village of Udahenagama in the atrocities of the civil war of the late 1980s and the interethnic war against the Tamil guerrillas, Masking Terror describes the response of women in the rural slums of southern Sri Lanka to the further spread of violence. To reconstruct the violent backgrounds of these soldiers, she presents the stories of their mothers, sisters, wives, and grandmothers, providing a perspective on the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamil populations not found elsewhere. In addition to interpreting the impact of high levels of violence on a small community, Argenti-Pillen questions the effects of trauma counseling services brought by the international humanitarian community into war-torn non-Western cultural contexts. Her study shows how Euro-American methods for dealing with traumatized survivors poses a threat to the culture-specific methods local women use to contain violence.Masking Terrorprovides a sobering introduction to the difficulties and methodological problems field researchers, social scientists, human rights activists, and mental health workers face in working with victims and perpetrators of ethnic and political violence and large-scale civil war. The narratives of the women from Udahenagama provide necessary insight into how survivors of wartime atrocities reconstruct their communicative worlds and disrupt the cycle of violence in ways that may be foreign to Euro-American professionals.
Rebel groups are often portrayed as predators, their leaders little more than warlords. In conflicts large and small, however, insurgents frequently take and hold territory, establishing ...sophisticated systems of governance that deliver extensive public services to civilians under their control. From police and courts, schools, hospitals, and taxation systems to more symbolic expressions such as official flags and anthems, some rebels are able to appropriate functions of the modern state, often to great effect in generating civilian compliance. Other insurgent organizations struggle to provide even the most basic services and suffer from the local unrest and international condemnation that result.
Rebel Rulersis informed by Zachariah Cherian Mampilly's extensive fieldwork in rebel-controlled areas. Focusing on three insurgent organizations-the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) in Congo, and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in Sudan-Mampilly's comparative analysis shows that rebel leaders design governance systems in response to pressures from three main sources. They must take into consideration the needs of local civilians, who can challenge rebel rule in various ways. They must deal with internal factions that threaten their control. And they must respond to the transnational actors that operate in most contemporary conflict zones. The development of insurgent governments can benefit civilians even as they enable rebels to assert control over their newly attained and sometimes chaotic territories.
This book analyzes skills demand and supply in Sri Lanka and scrutinizes how skills are formed, the factors shaping skills demand, and the responsiveness of the system. Sri Lanka has made strong ...progress in economic growth and poverty reduction. Economic growth and structural changes in the economy, however, make skills development imperative as Sri Lanka implements its the Mahinda Chintana plan to become a regional hub in strategic economic areas. Yet, skills shortages and mismatches are widespread, and firms with undereducated employees and a shortage of skilled labor are less productive. This book proposes an effective skills development system to help diversify the country's economy, improve its labor productivity and competitiveness, offer the country the flexibility to compete effectively in the global economy, and further reduce poverty in the country. After the book's introduction to the Mahinda Chintana plan, chapter two describes the general education and training system in Sri Lanka, especially the TVET sector. Chapter three examines the main drivers of skills demand and skills mismatches and gaps in Sri Lanka. Chapter four studies the relationship between education, training, and labor market outcomes, including skills already available in the workforce. Chapters five and six analyze factors affecting the skills supply system, such as cost, financing, and governance and also private sector provision. Chapter seven briefly reviews firm-based training in Sri Lanka based on evidence from the employer survey. Chapter eight assesses workforce development policies in Sri Lanka based on the World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) framework. Finally, chapter nine provides the summary of main findings and outlines possibilities for the way forward in skills development in Sri Lanka. Please note that Figure 5.2 in the book is incorrect, and should be replaced by the corresponding figure in volume 2 of this report.
"Drawing on original ethnographic field-research conducted primarily with former guerrilla insurgents in southern and central Sri Lanka, this book analyses the memories and narratives of people who ...have perpetrated political violence. It explores how violence is negotiated and lived with in the aftermath, and its implications for the self and social relationships from the perspectives of those who have inflicted it.The book sheds ethnographic light on a largely overlooked and little-understood conflict that took place within the majority Sinhala community in the late 1980s, known locally as the Terror (Bheeshanaya). It illuminates the ways in which the ethical charge carried by violence seeps into the fabric of life in the aftermath, and discusses that for those who have perpetrated violence, the mediation of its memory is ethically tendentious and steeped in the moral, carrying important implications for notions of the self and for the negotiation of sociality in the present. Providing an important understanding of the motivations, meanings, and consequences of violence, the book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asia, Political Science, Trauma Studies and War Studies"--
