Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation [Paperback]

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

Analyses 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 book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways. Based around three themes  normative spaces, human mobilities and exilic states  it is organised into ten comprehensive, chapter-based explorations of a range of spatial units, including homes, cities, routes, camps and experiences of ruin that were irrevocably politicised by protl5