The law’s gender: entanglements and recursions – three stories from Sri Lanka

Our essay examines the recursions, rationalities, limits, and promise of the law drawing on three recent cases of women who encountered law enforcement authorities and the courts in Sri Lanka. It provides a strong account of how dominant gender norms are mobilized to determine who is afforded the sanctuary of the law and who is not. By foregrounding the troubled encounters of the women with the law the essay also demonstrates the ways in which the law, culture, and the state combine, pull apart, and recombine in a manner that draws attention to their own internal relations; and how procedures established to ensure legal objectivity and judicial impartiality often fold back on themselves, reflecting the pliancy of the law. The essay also foregrounds the conditions of possibility, including feminist legal methodologies, that enable women to (re)turn to the law despite its transgressions. In doing so it argues for seeing the law as multilayered and recursive, reflecting the thick and uneven conditions under which women access justice in Sri Lanka. In highlighting how these women challenge and bargain with the law, the essay also acknowledges their tenacity and endurance in what, ultimately, is an effort at demanding an improved and substantive justice

DSC Prize shortlisting: reflections on South Asian literature

On 26 November, the DSC Prize for South Asian literature shortlist was announced at LSE for the third year in a row. The novels selected were Family Life by Akhil Sharma (Faber & Faber, UK); Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy (Hachette, India); Hangwoman by K.R. Meera (Translated by J Devika; Penguin, India); The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed (Viking/Penguin India); The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee (Vintage/Penguin Random House, UK); and She Will Build Him A City by Raj Kamal Jha (Bloomsbury, India). After the announcement, Sonali Campion caught up with the five members of the jury about why they accepted the invitation to participate on the panel and their experiences of judging the novels

Gendering the New Security Paradigm in Sri Lanka

This article points to the significant military turn that has taken place in Sri Lanka following the armed conflict between the Sri Lanka government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It is particularly concerned with the impacts on gender relations and how the lines between women's insecurity and militarised masculinity have been redrawn and reinforced. It argues that these gender relations can be seen in sharp relief in the country's Free Trade Zones, where young rural women in the garment industry and young rural men who join the military meet, and where features of transnational labour, violence against women, law and the state combine to reinforce globalisation and militarisation as the twin rationalities upon which national security regimes and the global order rest today. The article discusses resistances to this paradigm, and assesses their successes and failures in the context of how security is currently marketed as a public good and militarism as a path to the ‘good life’. It concludes by pointing to how these constructions have elicited consent on the part of a significant segment of Sri Lankan society to the militarisation of its society as a whole

On sacred ground:the political performance of religious responsibility

Parts of this paper were presented at the 2013 Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS); at a ‘Post-War Sri Lanka’ workshop at the London School of Economics; and at a workshop on Muslims in Sri Lanka held at the University of Edinburgh.April 2012: In Dambulla, a bustling market town built around a crossroads on the northern cusp of Sri Lanka's central province, a mosque was attacked by a procession of protestors led by the chief priest of the nearby Buddhist temple. Ostensibly the protest was against the presence of the mosque on the grounds that it had been built in an exclusively Buddhist ‘sacred area’. Beginning with an empirical account of the attack on the Dambulla mosque, this paper argues that the preservation of what is deemed to be ‘sacred’ in Sri Lanka provides an effective idiom through which certain religious figures can intelligibly articulate political claims whilst maintaining critical distance from the dirty world of ‘Politics’. Corollary to this, and drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Dambulla, the paper explores the various different meanings of politics locally: highlighting the interplay of everyday politicking and high-profile political performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

Woman as Gendered Subject and other Discourses in Contemporary Sri Lankan Fiction in English

Sri Lankan literature in English is not a major player in the country\u27s mass media scenario.1 Those who choose to write in English are people who, through education and family background, have their roots in the history of English as the language of colonialism and socio-economic privilege in Sri Lanka, and, consequently, belong to a very small group. Failure to teach English as a vital second or third language, along with continuing institutional marginalization of Sri Lankan English, have meant that only a handful of writers are confident and fluent enough to write in English? The lack of a large reading public for books in English results in commercial reluctance by major publishers to publish more than one, or at the most, two books per year. Those writing in English are forced therefore to publish privately, or collectively through The English Writer\u27s Cooperative. They may also look to an interested NGO, or put their faith in the Arts Council of Sri Lanka which, after competition, awards Rs.10,000/- to different categories of writing, or the National Library Services Board which at most agrees to buy Rs.25,000/- worth of books but only after they have been printed by their authors in the first place. The fact remains then that most books published in English are self-financed

(ICES Research Paper 4)

"This essay raises some issues about justice in post-war Sri Lanka in relation to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) and selected women who testified before the commission. It contextualises the LLRC within two dominant schools of thought on justice, and takes into account several factors that shaped its formation and functioning. It also speaks to a paradox: of why the LLRC attracted hundreds of witnesses from within Sri Lanka and approximately 5,000 written submissions when its very legitimacy was in question by both international and local actors, and in some cases by the witnesses who came forward themselves. Did this overwhelming response to the LLRC simply point to the (by now) common understanding that victims of violence must, of necessity, give public witness to atrocity inorder to record, shame, voice grievance, assert dignity, celebrate the exceptionality of their survival, and cope with their daily lives?... By discussing, in particular, what some female witnesses hoped to gain from the LLRC, this essay explores what the commission meant for these women survivors of war, and by extension, the gendering of post-war justice itself.

State Reform from Below : Local and Community Initiatives for Peace Building, Development and Political Reforms in Sri Lanka; draft final progress report, November, 2008 to September, 2011

A key objective of this research project is to identify possibilities for state reform from below. Based on extensive field research, establishing alliances between local level political institutions and informal community institutions of citizens is crucial to democratize local governance. Sustainable peace-building in Sri Lanka requires political reform initiatives not only at the level of macro-political structures, but also at the level of the community and in the periphery. Deepening democracy at the local level in Sri Lanka requires linking political democratization with societal democratization. Research findings from project activities are delineated in this report

The Law’s Gender

The essay examines the recursions, rationalities, limits, and promise of the law drawing on three recent cases of women who encountered law enforcement authorities at courts in Sri Lanka. It provides a strong account of how dominant gender norms are mobilized to determine who is afforded the sanctuary of the law and who is not. By foregrounding the troubled encounters of the women with the law the essay also demonstrates the ways in which the law, culture, and the state combine, pull apart, and recombine in a manner that draws attention to their own internal relations; and how procedures established to ensure legal objectivity and judicial impartiality often fold back on themselves, reflecting the pliancy of the law. The essay also foregrounds the conditions of possibility, including feminist legal methodologies, that enable women to (re)turn to the law despite its transgressions. In doing so it argues for seeing the law as multilayered and recursive, reflecting the thick and uneven conditions under which women access justice in Sri Lanka. In highlighting how these women challenge and bargain with the law, the essay also acknowledges their tenacity and endurance in what, ultimately, is an effort at demanding an improved and substantive justice

‘Two Homes, Refugees in Both’: Contesting Frameworks – The Case of the Northern Muslims of Sri Lanka

Policies that address post-war displacement often reflect temporal linearity as transitional periods during which they are developed imply a shift from one situation to another. These policies obscure complexities experienced by local communities for whom displacement is ongoing and interminable. This essay applies Sri Lanka’s National Policy on Durable Solutions for Conflict-Affected Displacement (NPDSCAD) to the case of Northern Muslims who were expelled from the Northern Province of Sri Lanka in 1990 and have lived in prolonged displacement for over 25 years. For these Muslims, return-remain is an oscillation and not an either/or option. Using “frames of recognition” to analyze policy documents and data from fieldwork, the paper critically unpacks the category of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) – the displacement-related frame applied to the Northern Muslims – to reveal the multiple subject positions respondents navigate in presenting their own stance to this category. Calling for recognition of the circumstances of their displacement, the respondents’ footing to the IDP frame holds in it both needs-based and justice-based discourses and demands that Northern Muslims be recognized as political subjects. Return-remain is complicated by issues respondents face as they travel between their current home in Puttalam and origins in the North. The paper concludes that while the Northern Muslims are denied full recognition by the NPDSCAD, their complex experiences continue to contest the frames deployed by the policy