Editorial: The Culture and Context of Peace
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Local/Global Encounters
Sri Lanka and the Violence of Reconstruction
DARINI RAJASINGHAMSENANAYAKE 1
ABSTRACT 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. KEYWORDS social peace; reconstruction industry; tsunami; international NGOs; ethnicity; conflict
Introduction Ten weeks after the Tsunami hit the conflict affected East coast of Sri Lanka in December 2004, killing more than 31,000 people and displacing many more in a matter of minutes, David Beckham, European football heartthrob, and Amithab Bachan, South Asian Bollywood star, spoke in a UNICEF advertisement in the aftermath of the disaster. They appeared on international TV channels speaking of the child victims of the ‘Asian Tsunami’ which has also been termed a ‘celebrity disaster’ in the age of the Internet giving (Walker, 2005). Beckham and Bachan suggested that UNICEF best understood the plight of Asia’s tsunami child victims. The viewer of the fundraising ad was invited to visit the organization’s tsunami website. A few months later the Sri Lanka authorities confirmed that 900 to 1,000 children had lost both parents, but most had been claimed by extended families, relatives or other kin sometimes after rigorous identity checks and DNA testing. It is still unclear how much funding UNICEF, which also works on the demobilization of child soldiers within the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, garnered from the advertisements and how it would be spent. After Ache Province Indonesia, the East coast of Sri Lanka was the worst affected in the 26 December Tsunami. Both regions have ongoing armed conflicts and peace processes. Our concern here is with the transnational politics and poetics of disaster representation and Development (2005) 48(3), 111–120. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100171
Development 48(3): Local/Global Encounters reconstruction that the advertisements indexed and how they configure a mindset characteristic of international relief, reconstruction and development policy and practice, and their local^global articulations. The post-Tsunami UNICEF advertisements in Colombo were aired where family members, relatives, kinship networks, religious networks, local business and civil society groups had worked round the clock from the moment the disaster struck in an unpreceden
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