Victory’s Categories, Contingent Histories: Re-visiting Sri Lanka’s Ethno-separatist War [review essay]

Ahmed Hashim’s When Counterinsurgency Wins (2013) and Sharika Thiranagama’s In my Mother’s House (2011) may appear similar at first sight. Both books look back on Sri Lanka’s ethno-separatist war; both pay close attention to the rise and fall of Tamil militancy; and both are published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. However, in crucial ways, they are opposites. Hashim’s book is a military analysis focusing on the Sri Lankan government’s victorious campaign against the Liberation Tige..

Mediating the margins: the role of brokers and the Eastern Provincial Council in Sri Lanka’s post-war transition

This article explores the political dynamics surrounding the Eastern Provincial Council during Sri Lanka’s post-war transition. We show that decentralisation constituted an intervention in conflict, rather than a solution to it. It creates new institutional arenas to re-negotiate centre-periphery relations, resulting in new forms of political mobilisation. There are crucial spatial dimensions to these contentions: it involves contested territorialisation of power, scalar manoeuvring, and boundary drawing. We illustrate how wider tensions between deconcentration and devolution play out in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, highlighting the key role performed by brokers in mediating centre-periphery relations, both through and alongside the Provincial Council

Showing one's colours: the political work of elections in post-war Sri Lanka

This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance

Is the QCI framework suited for monitoring outcomes and costs in a teaching hospital using value-based healthcare principles?:A retrospective cohort study

Objectives The objective is to develop a pragmatic framework, based on value-based healthcare principles, to monitor health outcomes per unit costs on an institutional level. Subsequently, we investigated the association between health outcomes and healthcare utilisation costs.Design This is a retrospective cohort study.Setting A teaching hospital in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.Participants The study was performed in two use cases. The bariatric population contained 856 patients of which 639 were diagnosed with morbid obesity body mass index (BMI) &lt;45 and 217 were diagnosed with morbid obesity BMI ≥45. The breast cancer population contained 663 patients of which 455 received a lumpectomy and 208 a mastectomy.Primary and secondary outcome measures The quality cost indicator (QCI) was the primary measures and was defined asQCI = (resulting outcome * 100)/average total costs (per thousand Euros)where average total costs entail all healthcare utilisation costs with regard to the treatment of the primary diagnosis and follow-up care. Resulting outcome is the number of patients achieving textbook outcome (passing all health outcome indicators) divided by the total number of patients included in the care path.Results The breast cancer and bariatric population had the highest resulting outcome values in 2020 Q4, 0.93 and 0.73, respectively. The average total costs of the bariatric population remained stable (avg, €8833.55, min €8494.32, max €9164.26). The breast cancer population showed higher variance in costs (avg, €12 735.31 min €12 188.83, max €13 695.58). QCI values of both populations showed similar variance (0.3 and 0.8). Failing health outcome indicators was significantly related to higher hospital-based costs of care in both populations (p &lt;0.01).Conclusions The QCI framework is effective for monitoring changes in average total costs and relevant health outcomes on an institutional level. Health outcomes are associated with hospital-based costs of care.</div

Demos at war: Revisiting the democratic boundary problem with a performative lens

This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different conceptions of the demos. Sri Lanka's conflict protagonists have advanced a wide range of institutional forms for their competing ideological projects. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, reenacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: Constitution, election, court, checkpoint, and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed

Everyday ethnicity in Sri Lanka : Up-country Tamil Identity Politics : [book review]

Non UBCUnreviewedOthe

Showing One's Colours: The political work of elections in post-war Sri Lanka

This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbanc

In the wake of war. The political geography of transition in eastern Sri Lanka

This dissertation explores the situation in eastern Sri Lanka after the end of the ethno-separatist war. It comprises four articles, which grapple with identity politics, contested state rule, and territorialisation. Taking issue with preponderant, directional understandings of “war-to-peace transitions”, this PhD advocates a non-teleological perspective. It conceives of post-war transition as the re-articulation of the region’s political geography: a recalibration of the way people define themselves, their “other”, and the way they are ruled. This involves dramatic changes in people’s space for manoeuvre, new forms of antagonism, and authority. But there are also many continuous processes and unexpected counter-currents that escape the war-peace cadenc