Documenting Disappearance

This article examines the use of sexual violence and rape during the Sri Lankan civil war by the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL), as well as the control of sexuality by the insurgent force by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While in both circumstances male bodies were also victims of sexual violence by the state, particularly when in custody, or forced celibacy, I specifically examine the political imaginaries which surrounded female bodies during and since the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 as forms of nation-building and state cartographic practices. Following Matthew H. Edney’s (2007) observation on the connected imaginaries of mapped bodies and female bodies, as they can be claimed and controlled in much the same way, I argue that sexual violence and/ or control becomes a form of nation-building. I suggest that the Sri Lankan civil war can tell us much about the violence required in nation-building.

This chapter analyzes the nexus of disability, disablement and masculinity in the context of the twenty-six year Sri Lankan civil war and the disability theatre workshops of the Sunera Foundation in which disabled soldiers of the Sri Lanka army have continued to participate in after the war. It asks what specific characteristics constitute war related impairment and its impact on military men, and draws attention to how disabled soldiers negotiate their impairment in a specific Sri Lankan cultural and political context. It also explores the exceptionality of their participation in the theatre, opening themselves up to gender reversal, homoerotic sensuality and non-indigenous forms of aesthetic expression. By exploring aspects of masculinity and disability in a South Asian context, as well as issues of applied/devised theatre, its promise of transformation, and aesthetic criteria, the chapter brings together a range of conditions, discourses and practices that shape disability, gender, embodiment and performance in Sri Lanka today.

The Sri Lankan Civil War originated in religious and ethnic divides among the Sri Lankan population. Under British colonial rule, Sri Lankan society was dominated by English‐educated Christians who were disproportionately Tamil. With independence in 1948, the Sinhalese, the Buddhist ethnic majority comprising approximately 70 percent of the population, asserted their own identity, making Sinhalese the official language, establishing Buddhism as the official religion, and disenfranchising Tamil migrants who had moved to Sri Lanka from India under British rule to work on tea plantations. This created resentment among the largely Hindu Tamil minority. Tensions between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils grew steadily.

Ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka is a chronic problem, and it can be sustained even without the active support of a particular government. This understanding of violence prompts further reflection – both on the factors that drive such violence and the complex relationship between ethnicity, religion, and the Sri Lankan constitution. This article delves into the post-war context in Sri Lanka and examines how and why ethno-religious violence has persisted regardless of the government in power. It is presented in three sections. The first analyzes the current state of ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka. The second offers a hypothesis on why such violence has persisted despite the democratic transition of January 2015. It argues that democratic transitions alone cannot prevent chronic ethno-religious violence due to certain factors that serve to entrench violence within the country’s constitutional practice. The final section discusses the relationship between ethno-religious relations, the nature of the Sri Lankan constitution, and the space for meaningful constitutional reform. It concludes that the Sri Lankan state – informed by Sri Lanka’s ‘political constitution’ – embodies a certain structural dispensation towards ethno-religious violence. Until this fundamental dispensation is in some way transformed, meaningful religious freedom and power sharing will remain elusive aims.

After the seminal work of Durkheim (1897), many subsequent studies have revealed a decline in suicide rates during wartime. However, their main focus was inter-state wars and whether the same argument holds for civil conflicts within a country is an important unresolved issue in the modern world. Moreover, the findings of the previous studies are not conclusive due to unobserved confounding factors. This study investigated the relationship between civil war and suicide rate through a more rigorous statistical approach using the Sri Lankan civil war as a case study. For this purpose, we employed a linear regression model with district and year fixed effects to estimate a difference-in-difference in the suicide rate between the peacetime and wartime periods as well as the contested and non-contested districts. The results indicate that the suicide rate in the contested districts in the wartime was significantly lower than the baseline by 11.8-14.4 points (95% CI 6.46-17.22 and 7.21-21.54, respectively), which corresponds to a 43-52% decline. The robustness of the possible confounding factors was analyzed and not noted to have so much effect as to alter the interpretation of the results. This finding supports the Durkheimian theory, which places importance on social integration as a determinant of suicide, even for civil conflicts.

Sri Lanka, at present, is haunted by memories and experiences of the protracted ethnic conflict which lasted for nearly three decades due extremities of extrajudicial and rampant killings, suicide bombing, and human rights violation. The war was mainly fought between the Liberation of Tamil Tiger (LTTE) and Sinhalese dominated state government. At the primary level, the conflict is viewed as the manifestation of ancient ethnic rivalry between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority. However, the causes of this conflict are far more complex than ethnic differences among the communities and stem largely from the pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence history of the country. Albeit many circumstances and situations have contributed to Tamil separatism and consequent insurgency but this paper is centred on the role of language politics and education in the conflict. The politicization of the issue of official language during the various phases of the war turned out to be the most powerful manifestation of the Sinhala –Tamil conflict, since language is a crucial factor in the maintenance and preservation of the cultural and ethnic identity, here the language became the exclusive marker of the ethnographic boundary between them. The language issue later manifested in the form of discrimination against Tamils in education. The indiscriminate practices after 1972, especially standardization policy and quota system for admission into universities based on language and pro-sinhala policies in the government sector paved the way for Tamil demand for a separate traditional homeland for Tamils. Hence this paper will analyse language politics and policies -Sinhala only act, and policies standardization and quota to understand the Tamil separatism during Sri Lankan civil war

Ethno-graphic narratives have increasingly served as an alternate politico-historical commentary on traumatic events, and Vanni is no exception. By analyzing the iconical language embedded in this graphic ‘non-fiction-fiction’, the article portrays the varied aspects of trauma experienced by individuals and the collective during the prolonged Sri Lankan conflict, thereby documenting the enduring biopsychosocial impacts of the trauma of dwelling, living through, and leaving conflict zones. To elaborate, the paper explores the visual and verbal mechanisms through which the spectrum of trauma, namely intergenerational, collective, and individual trauma, finds representation in this ethnographic text. Firstly, the article explores how Vanni represents the protracted conflict that impacts generations of the Tamil community through the visual-verbal mode of the text, thereby showcasing the mechanisms of understanding intergenerational trauma. Secondly, it analyses the varied aspects through which collective trauma finds representation in the ethnographic narrative, and finally, the study outlines select individual experiences of trauma within the frame of collective suffering. By decoding the lexical and imagistic expressions of trauma in Vanni, the article argues that the graphic narrative form has been able to memorialize the abysmal trauma(s) experienced during the Sri Lankan conflict, thereby serving as a site of memory and countering collective amnesia.

The Sri Lankan state's power to narrate the war and characterize the enemy is an expression of “triumphalist nationalism” and is a selective remembering of war. Based on photographs taken during several field visits to these sites by both authors between December 2012 and January 2014, we analyze the relationship of war and tourism and how a particular Sinhala nationalist remembering of the war and landscape of memory are being constructed in post‐war Sri Lanka.Today, Sri Lanka is a former war zone where the Government's troops defeated the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) and ended 26 years of violent conflict in May 2009. The end of the war came at a huge cost to civilian life in the northern part of the country; the UN estimates that over 40,000 people were killed, most of whom were Tamils who form the majority in Northern Sri Lanka. Despite the end of military conflict, war continues by other means, and its representation encapsulates a nationalist politics of victory that at once vilifies the defeated LTTE “terrorists” and excludes Northern Tamils from the Sri Lankan polis. The LTTE's former hideouts, training facilities, weapons, and vehicles are now tourist sites on display for public viewing.

In March 2025, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Harini Amarasuriya, met with students at Sciences Po, Paris and answered many questions, among which were inquiries about the new government’s engagement with the diaspora. She referred to the diaspora as “good ambassadors of the country”, a description which, in a context of high expectations regarding national reconciliation and justice, incites reflection about identities and identity politics. Drawing from existing scholarship and the lived realities of diasporic communities, this commentary explores how identities are shaped across generations, through legal and political structures, and in response to the evolving relationship with the Sri Lankan state. The Prime Minister’s remark offers an opportunity to revisit longstanding tensions and to reimagine diaspora-state relations through a lens of pluralism, memory, and accountability.

Research suggests that robust social networks have positive effects on peoples' well-being. An instrumental methodology for studying networks is the social convoy model, a diagram of concentric circles that illustrate network size, structure, and satisfaction. Convoys have been described as dynamic. Specifically, as people age, their convoys become stronger and smaller due to focusing on what matters most and accumulating losses. Therefore, convoys only include meaningful, living persons. The continuing bonds model posits that it is normal for people to maintain connections with the deceased. The objective of the current study was to integrate the social convoy and continuing bonds models in order to examine the presence of deceased loved ones in convoys. Eighteen individuals (M = 66 years), recruited via fliers and snowball sampling, participated in one semistructured interview regarding the death of a loved one and their convoy. Participants also completed a convoy model, identifying where the deceased fit (if anywhere) when they were alive and at present. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for themes. Three themes emerged: communication (i.e., writing or speaking to the deceased), continuity (i.e., a continuing relationship), and reciprocity (i.e., perceived exchange of support(s)). Eighty-nine percent of participants felt their loved one's death did not change their convoy presence and 88% reported that their positioning in the convoy remained unchanged. This research offers a new way to think about convoys and may prompt the development of supportive interventions for bereaved individuals.

Huge amounts of news items are being published from various sources around the world. Our interest in this paper is from the perspective of peace keeping organizations such as United Nations and Red Cross that can benefit from information aggregated from different sources to make important decisions. GDELT project is one such source where data about conflicts is aggregated from various newspaper sources around the globe. This paper makes three contributions to the analysis of peace and conflict data available on GDELT. First, the paper presents two case studies to investigate whether the data extracted from news items in fact captures the global events accurately. The case studies considered were the Sri Lankan civil war, and the 2006 Fijian coup. Second, in these case studies, the study demonstrates how change point analysis can be used to identify important trends which will be valuable for making decisions. Third, based on experience gained through the exploration of these two case studies, it proposes a conceptual model of a multi-level analysis in the form of a dashboard system that would be of interest to different stakeholders.

For decades since the Sri Lankan civil war, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have lived as stateless persons in India. However, India does not recognise “refugees” and “stateless persons” as legally separate categories, and treats them in a common immigration system with “ foreigners”. This conflation of citizenship law with the immigration regime is a result of the introduction of the category of “illegal migrant” as a determinative tool of Indian citizenship. This paper explores recent shifts in Indian citizenship laws, which have been embroiled in the tension between jus soli and jus sanguinis bases of citizenship, particularly with the category of “illegal migrant” and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, and their impact on Sri Lankan Tamil refugees’ citizenship. This paper finds that despite the influence of international human rights, formal citizenship continues to be the clinching factor in Sri Lankan Tamil refugees’ quality and security of life in India today – an echo of Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “right to have rights”, by which she meant that the right to citizenship is a gateway for an individual to access all other rights. Against this backdrop, this paper suggests interim solutions for Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to secure formal citizenship in India, and in particular, the role of courts in crafting jurisprudence that would support the alleviation of their statelessness. In the same breath, this paper strongly argues in favour of, first, the need for a forward-looking reconceptualization of Indian citizenship laws based on the jus soli principle; and second, a recognition of India’s burden under the UN Conventions on statelessness to reduce and prevent statelessness, particularly through eliminating documentation-heavy citizenship determinations.

The resumption of civilian mobilities after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) produced new forms of travel, distinct from the military manoeuvres and refugee displacements of the past. Amongst o...

The three‐decade‐long Sri Lankan civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers) came to an end following a major GoSL offensive in May 2009, which resulted in GoSL claiming a “victor's peace.” The war caused the death of around 80,000 to 100,000 people and internally and externally displaced hundreds of thousands. During the three decades, five attempts at formal peace processes were initiated, all of which ended unsuccessfully. This paper identifies the root causes of the Sri Lankan civil war using the social cubism analysis by Byrne and Carter (Peace and Conflict Studies, 1996, 3, 5). It then examines two of the five formal negotiations, namely the Indo‐Lanka Agreement of 1987 and the Wickramasinghe‐LTTE agreement in 2002. Finally, it explores an alternative approach to building peace in Sri Lanka using the multimodal approach by Byrne and Keashly (International Peacekeeping, 2000, 3, 97) utilizing the nested paradigm, and the time dimension of peacebuilding by Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (1997).

Sri Lankan Civil War, and Reasons for Victory of the Government Forces and for Defeat of LTTE Rebels