Performing Sovereign Aspirations: Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka (South Asia in the Social Sciences) - Hardcover

Klem, Bart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009442465 ISBN 13: 9781009442466

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2024

Synopsis

In a society that experiences secessionist conflict, many things are not what they seem. This book adopts a performative perspective to understand the peculiar institutional landscape the ensued around the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, both during and after the civil war. It draws on two decades of fieldwork across towns and villages in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, ethnography within Sri Lanka's civil service, and privileged access to Norwegian-facilitated peace process. This yields a compelling analytical narrative that shows how political institutions are enacted and witnessed, rather than cataloguing them in the strictures of the law. This provides a fertile vantage point to address the to-be-or-not-to-be dilemmas that we face when seeking to interpret the legitimacy, legality, and validity of the institutions that separatist movements create in aspiration of sovereign status. And as such, this book provides food for thought for broader conceptual debates concerning armed conflict and insurgency. This title is available Open Access.

About this title

About the Author

Bart Klem is an Associate Professor in Peace and Development studies at Gothenburg University (Sweden). He writes about everyday life and politics amidst armed conflict. He has conducted fieldwork across Sri Lanka's northeast since 2000. He co-authored Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque (Pluto 2015) and co-edited journal issues on insurgent politics (Modern Asian Studies 2018) and on legal identity under insurgencies (Citizenship Studies 2024).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009442465
• ISBN 13: 9781009442466
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250