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Sri Lanka’s present political predicament is already somewhat hastily being described as ‘post-conflict’ by both international and local actors, for example by both the Government of Sri Lanka and the IMF.
However, there are very good reasons for remaining sceptical about the use of this terminology, not just because of the nebulousness of definitions of conflict (and a simplistically assumed opposition with peace), and its injudicious past use in places like Afghanistan, but also due to present dynamics in Sri Lanka which are being deliberately papered over and viewed through a skewed lens.
Indeed, ‘post-conflict’ is a misnomer that flows from the predominance of a particular international common sense knowledge and the way it understands the power dynamics in the interface of the global and local that we find in Sri Lanka.
Economics or Politics?
In a double sense, the description of Sri Lanka as a ‘post-conflict’ space is founded on the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009. Firstly, according to this common sense perspective, the defeat of the LTTE has removed the main driver of the conflict, which was ultimately the LTTE itself.
In such a view the conflict dynamics of almost thirty years of insurgency and counter-insurgency were driven by the self-empowerment, interests and goals of the LTTE which used ethnonationalism as a flag to recruit and mobilize sections of the Tamil community around the militant Tamil nationalist project. These sections, according to this analysis, were predisposed to recruitment not because of a range of identity-based discontents but because of the unevenness and disparities in development.
In other words, an emphasis is placed upon economistic drivers of conflict. This dominant view tends to reduce both nationalism and conflict to the ‘greed’ and interests of ‘elites’ (who post facto transcode these interests in ethnic terms) rather than to underlying grievances or to identity-based insecurities and inequalities. (This view, by the way, is as much beholden to neo-liberal as to crude marxist frameworks of knowledge).
Secondly, at the same time, the removal of the LTTE from the political landscape is held to provide a space for the Sri Lankan government to pursue an accelerated ‘development war’ which will pacify Sri Lanka’s ‘borderlands’ of the North and East, containing any attempted militant resurgence and providing a stable space in which to pursue development.
'Securitized Development' ...
This development, furthermore, has the ultimate aim to unify, integrate and homogenise areas which Tamil nationalists view as ‘homelands’ with the justification that this is conducive to the production of an All-Sri Lanka identity.
In that sense, according to this logic, the defeat of the LTTE also hypothetically allows for the reduction in the potency of an elite-led, instrumental Sinhala nationalist mobilisation as it removes a core driver of insecurities in the South about the potential for balkanization (rata bedeema).
‘Securitized development’ is thus a project which brings both the Sri Lankan Government and a range of international development actors and agencies into alignment.
However, this framework tends to obfuscate core dynamics of what is in actuality a political conflict in which grievance and identity are inextricably linked. What is missed is the core issue of hegemony, and historical processes of hegemonisation in relation to forms of nationalist identity.
Rather than being purely rarified, elite-led instrumental projects, Sinhala and Tamil nationalism need to be understood as modes of identification have become hegemonic and counter-hegemonic and therefore socially diffuse to the extent that they also encompass aspects of being, identity and belonging amongst a much wider social strata than the ruling or elite classes.
Sinhala nationalism certainly began its journey as an elite-led project connected to the Buddhist Revival in the nineteenth century and is still mobilized by elites for political goals. However, over time and as Sinhala nationalist logic has pervaded a range of state and social practices and policies including constitutional law, rights, welfare, development, religion and the military and policing apparatuses, Sinhala nationalist ideology and discourse has become bound up with a dominant political and social imaginary that is widely reproduced.
Hegemony
Albeit that this hegemonic envelope is a fluid and in no sense a static entity – the frontiers of inclusion and exclusion in the battleground for nationalist authenticity are in constant flux and ruptures are possible albeit constrained by the contours of a dominant imaginary. The recurrent historical reproduction of Sinhala nationalist motifs in the recruitment programme and ideology of supposedly ‘anti-systemic’ actors such as the JVP is testament to this hegemonisation amongst marginalized sections of Sinhala-speaking marginalized youth, and rural and urban subaltern classes.
It is this same hegemony that has set in motion the gradual counter-hegemonisation of what was initially an elite-led reactive Tamil nationalism responding to grievances that are directly attributable to the marginalization and discrimination suffered as a result of a hegemonic Sinhala nationalism.
It is in this sense, that we must understand and take seriously the identity-related aspects of the conflict and not just dismiss them as epiphenomenal to underlying (economic) dynamics and a result of elite manipulation. This is not to state that economic factors are irrelevant but merely to understand that they are always bound up with a complex of social, political, cultural and other factors.
If this is taken on board, it is quite clear that scepticism about both the effects of a strategy of securitised development and the description of Sri Lanka as ‘post-conflict’ are fully justified. What it instead emphasizes is that both identity and grievance and their inter-relation are central to the political present and must be brought back into frameworks for understanding conflict and nationalism in Sri Lanka and for their resolution through political means.
Redeveloping grievances
Whilst it might be countered that the Sri Lankan government is involved in negotiations with the TNA, has discussed political reform around the Thirteenth Amendment or through the APRC process, and that this is evidence of a political, rather than developmental, engagement of conflict-related issues, many observers are increasingly doubtful about the government’s past record and therefore future promise of processes which appear to have been little other than smokescreens for a strategy of further Sinhalisation of the North-East.
Furthermore, these processes of Sinhalisation, which are implicitly tied up with the development process currently underway, reveal the profoundly nationalist logic that ultimately encompasses the ‘securitised development’ framework being pursued today. In other words, these are profoundly political currents of a framework that seeks to efface its own hegemonic properties within the anti-political machinery of securitised development.
In this way, the very framework believed by international actors to resolve the conflict itself intensifies the self-same dynamics that have reproduced Tamil grievances and therefore conflict in the past. This indicates that Sri Lanka is not only far from ‘post-conflict’ but that the common sense practices implicit in ‘post-conflict’ frameworks may themselves engender future waves of violence.
Dr. David Rampton teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. His research explores nationalism, international securitized development and international relations with a specific focus on Sri Lankan politics.
