Camilla Orjuela

• University of Gothenburg

This special issue explores the complex dynamics between authoritarian states and their new generation(s) diasporas. It examines the strategies employed by non-democratic regimes to engage with and control their diaspora populations, particularly focusing on the youth and subsequent generations who have grown up outside their ancestral homelands. T...

This article aims to advance the understanding of famine memorialization—or the lack of it—in postcolonial Africa by focusing on famines in Ethiopia. It analyses the memory politics of Ethiopian state actors, and the silenced or marginalized place of famines, particularly the 1984–1985 famine. Drawing on interviews with individuals involved in memo...

Resumo Embora as fomes agudas historicamente tenham ceifado milhões de vidas, elas raramente são lembradas publicamente por meio de monumentos, eventos comemorativos ou museus. Este artigo investiga o aparente silêncio em torno da memória das fomes, questionando se há algo que as tornam menos “comemoráveis” do que outras atrocidades em massa, e em...

Although famines have historically claimed millions of lives, they are rarely publicly remembered through monuments, commemorative events or museums. This article investigates the apparent silence around famine memory by asking if there is something about famines that makes them less ‘commemorable’ than other mass-atrocities, and in which circumsta...

This contribution analyses conflicts around genocide memory in the diaspora. It shows how Assyrian/Syriac initiatives to create memorials to the 1915 genocide has triggered reactions by Turkish diaspora groups and the Turkish government. The Rwandan government, in contrast, has mobilized its diaspora to fight denial of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, while...

Recent scholarship on diaspora engagement and transnational repression has investigated how authoritarian regimes seek to engage, govern and control their diasporas. Recognizing that diasporas are diverse and that homeland states thus devise different strategies in relation to different groups, this research has—to a large extent—focused on the var...

Transitional justice (TJ) has emerged as a key global norm and set of mechanisms for societies to come to terms with a past of mass atrocities. Legal measures to hold perpetrators accountable, attempts to seek the truth about and acknowledge past human rights abuses, and compensation for victims and memorialization are all part of the TJ repertoire...

This article analyses diaspora mobilization for transitional justice as efforts to gain recognition for victim‐based identities. Building on research among diaspora groups from Rwanda and Sri Lanka in North America and Europe, the article investigates how diaspora actors in their quest for victimhood recognition navigate, make use of and challenge...

Armed conflicts do not only generate migration but are also influenced by migrants. “Diaspora” has emerged as a popular term of self-identification as well as academic analysis. It is widely recognized that diaspora groups and individuals are important actors in global politics, including in relation to armed conflicts and post-conflict reconstruct...

In a gesture of reconciliation, Spain and Portugal in 2015 passed bills inviting the descendants of Sephardic Jews – expelled 500 years earlier – to acquire citizenship. Applicants are to ascertain their Sephardic heritage through family trees, evidence of belonging to a religious community, language skills and/or retained links with the homeland....

The role diaspora actors play in transitional justice (TJ) has recently been recognized by practitioners and scholars. This article focuses on how TJ initiatives, by re-emphasizing, retelling or silencing traumas of the past, can play an important role for the transfer of diaspora identity and homeland engagement across generations. Based on resear...

Violence and hate speech endorsed by Buddhist monks against Muslim minorities in South and Southeast Asia have attracted global attention in recent years, and been the focus for a growing academic scholarship. This article turns the attention to peace activists, religious – including Buddhist – leaders and other civil society actors seeking to coun...

The pain of war and genocide is often very physical and place-based. At the same time, displacement compels many of those who lost their loved ones to remember them and their homeland’s violent past from afar. This article explores the territoriality and materiality of diaspora remembrance by looking at diaspora initiatives to remember victims of g...

Corruption is endemic, pervasive and embedded in the very fabric in social life in some societies, although its degree varies case to case. Previous academic research and anti-corruption watchdogs have examined corruption in Sri Lanka, where corruption is perceived to be pervasive and endemic but, existing studies are inadequate to explain why corr...

Global discourses and measures to combat corruption have often built on and reinforced the image of a dichotomy between the supposedly non-corrupt European Self and the underdeveloped, corrupt Other. This article unsettles this binary by looking at practices and discourses of corruption among Portuguese migrants to Angola. Recently, the economic cr...

This article problematizes the dichotomies between “survival” and “resistance,” and between “dominance” and “subordination.” Based on fieldwork in Rwanda among peasants who experienced the country’s large-scale villagization program, the article shows how some poor farmers – motivated by survival needs – negotiate the reform pressures in a way that...

This article investigates how the global dominance of the transitional justice (TJ) discourse and practice – and the controversies and conflicts that arise around TJ – have come to make up an important context for diaspora mobilisation. The article looks at the increasingly globalised mechanisms and norms of transitional justice as a set of opportu...

In the armed conflict in Sri Lanka (1983–2009), the diaspora was actively involved, most importantly through its financial and political support to the Tamil separatists. This article explores the dynamics within the diaspora itself, looking at how conflict divides were maintained and reshaped outside Sri Lanka, but also at the possibilities for di...

Despite the growing importance of the concept human security, security studies in Africa remain largely focused on the threat of direct violence and the role of state actors. This article broadens the security agenda by focusing on food security, and discusses how women in rural Rwanda experience and view food security. In making individual women t...

It is widely recognized that corruption risks undermining state legitimacy, diminishing trust and reducing resources for reconstruction in the aftermath of war. This article aims to advance the understanding of corruption in post-war societies by examining how local experiences of corruption relate to ethnic and other divides in Sri Lanka, where a...

‘Corruption in the aftermath of war’ brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to enquire into the dynamics of corruption in post-conflict societies. This introduction discusses five themes, problematising and summarising key findings from the 10 articles included. First, we discuss the problems with the corruption concept, related to...

Corruption is a major problem for populations in various parts of the world. This article argues that to understand the problems and dynamics of corruption, we need to understand how discourses and practices of corruption (and anti-corruption efforts) are intertwined with the construction and contestations of identity. Identity politics is a salien...

This article engages with friction between international and local actors in an era of globalised transitional justice processes with cases from post-war Sri Lanka. We find that in the context of a victor's peace, the prevailing actor can mobilise ordinary people against international transitional justice initiatives, and can stage localised proces...

This article analyzes hybrid peace governance and illiberal peacebuilding in postwar Sri Lanka. While discussing the kind of hybridity that has emerged, it focuses specifically on the international/domestic nexus by exploring the interplay between international intervention and domestic politics of peace governance and public mobilization. The anal...

In the transition from war to peace, one key challenge is to ensure that those who gained something from the war can be convinced to support the peace. At the same time, however, it is crucial to avoid reproducing corrupt practices and inequalities that fuelled the conflict. The problem of corruption during post-war peace-building has gained consid...

This article explores the global dimensions of violent conflict and the parallels and links between violence in the diaspora and the homeland. It does so by discussing Tamil street gangs in London, Toronto and Paris. The Tamil diaspora played a key role in the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), wh...

How can a relapse into violent conflict be prevented in Sri Lanka? This article examines how the case of Sri Lanka effectively exposes the limitations of the international discourse and practice of conflict prevention. Conflict prevention in Sri Lanka has to take place within a global and domestic context which is largely unaccounted for in the con...

It is increasingly recognised that civil society has an important role to play in conflict resolution by involving and educating grass roots and granting legitimacy to top-level peace processes. A growing interest among donor agencies to support peace has paved the way for an influx of funds to 'civil society', often to NGOs doing peace education a...

After the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009, the Sri Lankan government and international donors embarked on massive efforts at ‘reconstructing’ the war-torn areas in the north and east of the island. A closer look at the rhetoric surrounding these efforts shows that they are not only about the physical rebuilding of houses, liv...

This article investigates the security-development nexus through a study of local experiences in a neighbourhood in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo. As the Sri Lankan state struggles to secure 'the nation' from 'terrorism', and to develop it towards a twin vision of modernization and return to a glorious past, large parts of the population in Colombo 1...

This article provides a critical, empirically based analysis of the multiple ways in which diaspora communities participate in transnational politics related to their war-affected former home countries. The case of Sri Lanka — and the Tamil and Sinhalese diasporas in the West — is used to illustrate how contemporary armed conflicts are increasingly...

When the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) entered into a peace process in 2002, the term “peace dividend” was often used, both in and outside the peace negotiations. The need to reconstruct and normalize war-torn areas was identified as a shared interest between the parties. It was believed that if ordinary peop...

The Identity Politics of Peace Building looks at civil society and peace movements in the context of the identity-based armed conflict(s) in Sri Lanka. It focuses specifically on the identity politics implied in attempts at mobilizing a movement for peace and shows why civil society groups engaging in ‘peace work’ often fail to increase the sense o...

This article argues, using the case of Sri Lanka, that what is theoretically lumped together as ‘civil society’ is not uniform, neutral or necessarily pro-peace. In Sri Lanka, the civil society sphere is shaped by colonial heritage, post-colonial structures of political patronage and the growth of an NGO sector dependent on foreign funding. Civil s...

This article deals with civil society in the ethnically polarized violent conflict of Sri Lanka. It spells out the possible role of civil society in peacebuilding, while at the same time problematizing the civil-society concept and pointing to the problems faced by civil society in Sri Lanka in taking on this role. Civil-society actors in Sri Lanka...

'What is civil society, really? What good can it do? And how can we help strengthening civil society?' When representatives of Swedish non-governmental organisations met at a workshop about 'The Role of Civil Society in Development Work' in Härnösand, January 2004, a struggle to find answers to the above questions was at the centre of the discussio...

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