Performing Sovereign Aspirations
Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka

Challenges state-centric interpretations of insurgent politics by offering a performative perspective on Sri Lanka's Tamil nationalist movement.

Bart Klem (Author)

9781009442466, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 November 2024

250 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

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.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Frequently Used Sri Lankan Terms
A Typographical Note on Separatism
Introduction
1. Sovereignty, Performativity and Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka
2. Performing an Insurgent Sovereign Experiment
3. Reconstituting 'Pure Tamil Space' after Sovereign Erasure
4. The Bureaucratic Evolution of Devolution
5. Tamil Nationalist Anti-politics in the Wake of Defeat
6. Conclusion
Epilogue
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]