Liberal and Illiberal Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka
- PDF / 228,367 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 504.567 x 720 pts Page_size
- 29 Downloads / 247 Views
Liberal and Illiberal Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka Oliver Walton1 and Waradas Thiyagaraja2 1 University of Bath, Bath, UK 2 University of Colombo, Colombo, Sri Lanka
conflicts, using a detailed historical analysis of the varied waves of peacebuilding interventions to explore some of the limitations of global categories such as liberal and illiberal peacebuilding in the Sri Lankan context. In doing so, it highlights some important analytical biases that inform existing scholarship on peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.
Synonyms Conflict in Sri Lanka; Ethnic conflict; Postconflict reconstruction; Reconciliation; Sri Lankan peace process
Definition Sri Lanka’s long-running separatist war, which began in 1983 and lasted for 26 years, ended with a military victory for the government armed forces in 2009. Although the likelihood of a return to organized armed conflict remains slim and the country has seen its economy expand significantly, grievances from minority groups remain, and new societal conflicts have emerged. The Tamil separatist conflict was not the first instance of armed conflict in the post-colonial period: in 1971 and between 1988 and 1989, a youth-based movement in the south of the country, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, lit. People’s Liberation Front), staged two insurrections against the state. This entry analyzes a variety of international, regional, and local efforts to address these
Introduction Sri Lanka’s experience of conflict has provided scholars with a useful case study with which to explore shifting global conditions and approaches for peacebuilding. International peacebuilding in Sri Lanka intensified in the early to mid-2000s, at around the same time as academic interest in liberal peacebuilding was reaching its peak. As a result, the country became a prominent case study for exploring this model and highlighting its deficiencies. After the breakdown of an internationally backed peace process in 2006, and particularly since the end of the war in 2009, the Sri Lankan case has more recently become a “paradigmatic case of victor’s peace” (Smith et al. 2020, p. 5) and has contributed to discussions around emerging concept of illiberal peacebuilding. For the purposes of this entry, liberal peacebuilding will be used to refer to the mainstream approach to international peacebuilding which involves combining democratization,
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Richmond, G. Visoka (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_129-1
2
economic reform, and conflict resolution. Smith et al. (2020) have argued that illiberal peacebuilding can be contrasted with the liberal peacebuilding approach on the grounds that it is led by local actors, is economically oriented not toward neoliberalism but cronyism and corruption, and emphasizes inequality and order not liberty and equality. While acknowledging the benefits of using general concepts such as liberal and illiberal peacebuilding to explain and critique broad
Data Loading...
