Description
Book SynopsisAnalyses of the Sri Lankan civil war (19832009) overwhelmingly represent it as an ethnonationalist contest, prolonging postcolonial arguments on the creation and dissolution of the incipient nation-state since independence in 1948. While colonial divide-and-rule policies, the rise of ethnonationalist lobbies, structural discrimination and majoritarian democracy have been established as grounds for inter-ethnic hostility, there are other significant transformative forces that remain largely unacknowledged in postcolonial analyses.
This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This
Table of Contents
Introduction: Border Part 1: Normative Spaces 1. Nation 2. Home 3. City Part 2: Human Mobilities 4. Route 5. Camp 6. Site Part 3: Exilic States 7. Ruin 8. Exile 9. Settlement
