Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Venugopal, Rajesh

doi:10.1017/9781108553414

Cited by 54 publications

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“…Expressing a sense of belonging was not merely tactical, but appeared to index a sincere attitude of loyalty to the nation. In a context in which Sinhala‐Buddhist nationalism is the strongest ideological current (Venugopal ), reactions to dispossession and displacement must be understood in relation to broader questions of citizenship and belonging. Sinhala nationalism is not merely a superficial set of ideas to be taken up or cast aside when convenient, but rather forms the very fabric of reality that Mutuwall residents navigate.…”

Section: Thinking Of the Countrymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo

Radicati

2020

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This article explores how residents of a small coastal fishing enclave in Colombo live with cumulative waves of dispossession brought on by exclusionary projects of urban development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I introduce the analytic of navigation to describe how people move, plan and live with both present and future threats of dispossession. Navigation offers a unique perspective on questions of agency and resistance in oppressive conditions. Rather than framing subjects as "resisting" projects of world-class city-making, this analysis shows that urban residents instead engage in complex and occasionally contradictory modes of living with uncertainty. I complicate existing understandings of the term "navigation" by describing how questions of nation and belonging are crucial to comprehending how people navigate. Ultimately, I suggest that expressions of belonging and obligation to an imagined community might not only be strategic, but instead reflect some of the broader social forces which structure possibilities for action.

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Section: Thinking Of the Countrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“… For a recent and particularly cogent account of scholarly debates on Sinhala nationalism, see Venugopal (). …”

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confidence: 99%

The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo

Radicati

2020

Antipode

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“…As Hill (2013) has argued, it was the successful reintegration process, caused in part by the de-proscription of the government, but also driven by other contextual factors including the JVP's own success at organizing and growing public dissent against successive ruling governments, which can best explain the successful resolution of the JVP conflict. In an ironic twist, the JVP's rehabilitation and later electoral success in the early 2000s led to them playing a central role in the disintegration of the 2002-2004 peace process between the government and LTTE (see Venugopal 2018).…”

Section: Overview Of Conflict and Peacebuilding Effortsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Liberal and Illiberal Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka

Walton

Thiyagaraja²

2020

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies

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Sri Lanka's long-running separatist war, which began in 1983 and lasted for 26 years, ended with a military victory for the government armed forces in 2009. Although the likelihood of a return to organized armed conflict remains slim and the country has seen its economy expand significantly, grievances from minority groups remain, and new societal conflicts have emerged. The Tamil separatist conflict was not the first instance of armed conflict in the post-colonial period: in 1971 and between 1988 and 1989, a youth-based movement in the south of the country, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, lit. People's Liberation Front), staged two insurrections against the state. This entry analyzes a variety of international, regional, and local efforts to address these conflicts, using a detailed historical analysis of the varied waves of peacebuilding interventions to explore some of the limitations of global categories such as liberal and illiberal peacebuilding in the Sri Lankan context. In doing so, it highlights some important analytical biases that inform existing scholarship on peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.

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“…Concomitantly the insurgent activity in the north of the Island also became more prominent. The violence provoked several anthropologists into analyses of the underlying political, economic, and ideological factors of ethno-religious violence (e.g., Obeyesekere 1984;Gunasinghe 1986;Tambiah 1986Tambiah , 1992Kapferer 1988;Rogers 1987;Spencer 1990;Roberts 1994;Abeysekara 2002;Ismail 2005, and more recently Udalagama and de Silva 2014;Haniffa 2016;Nagaraj and Haniffa 2018;Venugopal 2018). Further, given the escalation of the conflict since 1983, the question of ethno-religious nationalism and violence has informed most anthropological and sociological work on Sri Lanka.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative

Silva¹,

Haniffa²,

Bastin³

2019

The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity

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The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how intersecting not only ethnicity and violence but also religion, caste, class, linguistic, and cultural mosaics have been and might be billeted within the borders of a nation-state. However, state building in Sri Lanka has been riddled with paradoxes. The curious notion of numerically dominant ethnic group, Sinhala manifesting a "minority complex" or anxieties about minority groups, Tamil and Muslims, is evident in the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the nineteenth and the twentieth century of the country. Since state building has often meant

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Nationalism, Development and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Cited by 54 publications

References 0 publications

The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo

The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo

Liberal and Illiberal Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka

Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka: An Ethnohistorical Narrative

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