Dysfunctional democracy and the dirty war in Sri Lanka

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/After more than 50 years of independence, Sri Lanka, once a model democracy, has been devastated by a war in the north east that has gained a violent and self-sustaining momentum. The two sides in the armed conflict are the government's Sinhala-dominated military and the separatist group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). From a distance, Sri Lanka's war appears to be a Sinhala-Tamil conflict, dividing the island's two main ethnic groups. But the view from the war zone reveals something much more complex. A variety of politicians as well as members of the defense industry and paramilitary groups have used the armed conflict to acquire personal and political profit. In the war zones, violence by paramilitary groups and military forces alike has become routine and includes torture, rape, massacres, and summary executions. The war itself has become a "dirty war," reaching across ethnic and national boundaries, undermining civil-military relations and democratic practice, eroding multicultural social structures, and creating hidden economies of taxation and terror

Sri Lanka and the Violence of Reconstruction

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake analyses the politics of representation embedded in international development, reconstruction and peace building discourse and practice in the wake of war and natural disasters. Using the experience of Sri Lanka, she focuses on the emergence of violence as focus of development discourse at the end of the Cold War and argues that socially, politically and culturally insensitive reconstruction policies can morph into blue prints for renewed conflict and violence years or decades later. Analyzing local–global power and knowledge hierarchies in the post-conflict and tsunami reconstruction process in Sri Lanka, she suggests the need for a new paradigm for reconstruction as well as a structural adjustment of the international peace and reconstruction industry in the global south. Development (2005) 48, 111–120. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100171

Transnational peace building and conflict: Lessons from Aceh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka

10.1355/SJ24-2CSojourn242211-23