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Tamil diaspora activism in the post-liberal international order: navigating politics and norms
Globalizations
Abstract
Diasporas play a key role in universal norm transfer processes, mainly through transnational political activism. For decades, Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora activists have been drawing attention to injustices in the home country by and applying liberal, cosmopolitan normative frameworks. The use of these frameworks helps these actors to advance their transnational political goals and to cultivate transnational political networks that aid in advancing their struggles to influence positive change in Sri Lanka. In the current post-liberal phase of international politics, the main architects of the liberal, cosmopolitan international norms, who previously supported their implementation, have started to abandon them. This turnaround has tragically coincided with an increasingly hostile reception to these norms in Sri Lanka, home of the Tamil diaspora. This article examines how the recent retraction of and reaction to international norms in international and national politics is reshaping Tamil diasporic transnational political activism and transnational-national political relationships.
KEYWORDS: Tamil diaspora activism, liberal, cosmopolitan, norms, transnational politics, post-liberalism
... While a substantial body of literature has delved into the intersections of diaspora studies (Godwin, 2022;Hirt & Mohammad, 2018;Jayasundara-Smits, 2022;Modi & Taylor, 2017;Moss, 2018), political geography (Agnew, 1994), migration and nomadic studies (Holleran, 2022), diplomacy studies (Ho & McConnell, 2017), transnational migration (Levitt & de la Dehesa, 2003), the rescaling of nation-states and international relations (Calzada, 2022d), and datafication (Van Dijck, 2018), there exists limited research focused on the changing state-citizenship e-diasporic relationships within datafied societies (Tammppu et al., 2022). The literature encompassing machine learning political orders (Amoore, 2022), blockchain (Al-Saqaf & Seidler, 2017;Atzori, 2017;Viano et al., 2023;Werbach, 2019;Woodall & Ringel, 2020), digital nomads (Cook, 2020), digital citizenship (Hintz et al., 2019), citizenship by connection, and paradiplomacy (McHugh, 2015) serves as a few instances of the emerging scholarship that pertains to state-citizenship e-diasporic relationships within datafied societies. ...
E-diasporas are communities of diaspora members utilizing digital technologies and data platforms to establish connections among themselves and with their homelands. In response to the pandemic, governments worldwide have intensified efforts to reinforce e-diasporas. However, these endeavours often rely on social media extractivist Big Tech platforms, which are referred to as ‘hyperconnected diasporas’ in this article. This trend potentially poses a threat to institutional trust and data privacy. This article introduces HanHemen (ThereHere in Basque language, Euskera), an ongoing action research-driven e-diaspora platform facilitated by the Basque Government. HanHemen aims to ensure data privacy through experimentation with blockchain technologies and co-production with end-users via DAOs. This article reveals findings from an online survey completed by 419 Basque diasporic citizens (N = 1,385), who demonstrated support for digital nomadism (62%) and expressed concerns about data privacy (84%). These findings highlight the need to overcome the mainstream ‘hyperconnected diaspora’ trend through HanHemen.
In early 2022, in the wake of the state collapse in Sri Lanka (due to a severe economic meltdown with near-political anarchy), we observed an extraordinary ambience of ethnic tolerance and togetherness among masses gathered under the slogan #GoHomeGota to protest the corrupt regime. The nexus between state collapse and ethnic identity construction is puzzling. Does state collapse facilitate the disintegration of ethnic attributes? To find answers, this paper draws on protest materials publicly posted on Twitter from April to June 2022. Rather than the collapse of the state in Sri Lanka weakening the ethnic ties of all ethnic groups equally, findings suggest that the state’s collapse has hindered the ability of Sinhalese nationalism/majoritarianism to take hold, which may give the impression that the Sinhalese are becoming less tied to their ethnicity. However, while Aragalaya is largely represented by all ethnic, religious, and language groups in the country, it has been unable to erase minorities’ strong in-group attachment, as well as their suspicion of Sinhala majoritarianism.
This paper explores the motivations and actions of Indian Americans who actively oppose Hindutva, that is, a Hindu nationalist vision for India. Diaspora activists who advocate in favour of progressive values for India tend to be underreported in the media and underanalysed in scholarship. The following study addresses this gap. Based on public records, interviews with activist leaders, and participant‐observation, the paper demonstrates how anti‐Hindutva diaspora actors identify and leverage political opportunities in order to engage in moral signalling in local, national and global spaces. By shining a light on ongoing counternarratives to Hindutva, this study highlights contestations within Indian‐origin communities and challenges monolithic portrayals of diaspora politics.
The contemporary global order is widely said to be in crisis. But despite a rapidlyproliferating literature on the subject, there is little clarity or consensus aboutwherein the‘crisis’consist, or what precisely is under threat. We offer arestricted characterization of the post-war global order based on itsfundamental substantive and procedural ordering principles: sovereign inter-state relations and a relatively open global economy, characterized bypractices of inclusive, rule-bound multilateralism. We argue that only if one ofmore of these foundational principles are systematically violated, can wespeak of a demise of the order. To this end, we consider the extent to whicheach of these basic principles is currently endangered. We conclude that what we are witnessing is not the collapse of the current world order, but rather its transformation and adaptation into a broader, more flexible and multifaceted system of global governance–a change within the order rather than of the order.
(PDF) Of the Contemporary Global Order, Crisis, and Change. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336411920_Of_the_Contemporary_Global_Order_Crisis_and_Change [accessed Oct 28 2019].
This special issue was provoked by the desire to critically interrogate the frequently made Eurocentric assertions by many politicians and academics that ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ are fundamentally different in terms of their aims and methods of intervention. Bringing together scholars of intervention with regional experts on China, Russia, the Gulf Arab states and Turkey, detailed empirical knowledge is used to analyse current interventionist practices by Western and non-Western actors, and to assess whether they are similar or fundamentally different. Through their analyses of different forms of intervention (that constitute a wider range of actions than just ‘boots on the ground’), the authors present informed critiques of existing categories, question the episteme of interveners, and observe changes of language in the justifications made for interventions – for both Western and non-Western actors. These allow us to conclude overall that the difference between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ in interventionist terms is not so huge, and that existing categories and frameworks in intervention studies are inadequate and require a rethink.
For decades, European Union (EU) member states have fought an illegal proxy war – a form of state crime – against refugees and migrants, far beyond EU external borders. Fatalities make this proxy war equivalent to international classifications of war. To justify this war, migrants have progressively been reclassified by the EU as “illegal” or criminal. This article situates the proxy war within wider deterrence-based EU migration policies. Examples like the 2008–2009 Italy–Libya deal and 2016 EU–Turkey deal show the high price paid by refugees, minorities and the damage to the EU's own stability and reputation. Forcibly confining people at “holding points” along migratory routes, expelling people to unsafe countries and raising barriers to legal movement, the violence of the proxy war became more visible in 2015. We conclude that far from counteracting the dynamics of mass displacement, the proxy war may have contributed to the recent crisis of refugee reception in Europe.
ABSTRACT Scholars continue to draw attention to the link between the war economy and post-war crime. The majority of these studies are about cases of civil war that ended with peace agreements. Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with a military victory for the state armed forces; thus, it can help shed new light on the above link. Situated in the war economy perspective, this article investigates the dominant types of crimes reported from post-war Sri Lanka and the mechanisms linking them with the war economy. The culture of impunity, continued militarisation and enduring corruption are identified as key mechanisms through which the war economy and post-war bodily and material crime are linked. It suggests, although the ‘victors’ peace’ achieved by state armed forces was able to successfully dismantle the extra-legal war economy run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, it was responsible for promoting criminality in the post-war period. Overall, this points to the urgency of breaking away from legacies of the state war economy in the post-war period, before introducing programs of longer term political and economic reform.
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 opportunity structures – political, legal and discursive – which shape diaspora mobilisation. Diaspora engagement in commemoration, truth-seeking and legal justice in relation to atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka is studied. The article shows that in relation to Rwanda, state dominance and divides are largely replicated in the diasporic space, while the Sri Lankan case provides examples of how Tamil diaspora engagement have been able to reverse power dynamics around TJ. Combining opportunity structures with the concept of ‘past presencing’, the article shows how diaspora groups appropriate and strategise in relation to the dominant norms and practices of TJ, and how in doing so the past is performed and experienced in ways which are both personally and politically meaningful.
This special issue seeks to move the scholarly conversation beyond notions of conflict-generated diasporas as simply agents of conflict or peace. The field is ripe to unpack the notion of context for diaspora mobilisation in International Relations, the focus and novelty of this special issue. Theorising in this volume goes beyond current prevalent thinking that contexts are host-states in which diasporas live, and original home-states to which they are transnationally connected. The emphasis here is that diasporas have linkages to different contexts, and that their embeddedness in these contexts – simultaneously or sequentially in time – either shapes their mobilizations or is shaped by them. The volume theorises about spatialities and temporalities of diaspora engagement: it emphasises spatial notions such as multi-sited embeddedness, positionality, and translocalism on the one side, and temporal notions such as critical junctures, transformative events, simultaneity, crises, and durability of conflicts on the other. This collection further adds new thematic areas to current scholarly inquiry, opening the discussion beyond interest in diaspora remittances, economic development, and extraterritorial voting. The authors take little-explored paths to examine diasporas as agents in transitional justice processes, contested sovereignty, and fragile and de facto states, as well as in civic and ethnic-based activism.
The case of Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora can be cited as a classic case of participation by a diaspora in the homeland conflict and to some extent also in conflict resolution. Influenced by lived experiences of discrimination and suffering in an ethnocentric homeland and a range of racial prejudices and economic deprivation, in the host lands, the diaspora Tamils developed a strong sense of Tamil identity and ethno-nationalism which the LTTE could successfully harvest on. However, with the devastating civil war coming to an end, and a new government in power, numerous opportunities have opened up for diaspora participation in the development and reconstruction of the war-torn regions. All that is required is a pragmatic and reconciliatory approach by both sides – by the diaspora as well as by the Sri Lankan state.
The chapter demonstrates that the historical context out of which diasporas are born and the internal politics of the diasporas themselves influence the ability and willingness of the diaspora community to contribute to development efforts in Sri Lanka. The plurality of voices and activities within the Tamil diaspora indicates that there are real moral debates taking place about the validity and ethics involved in assisting a country that has long isolated its ethnic kin. The state’s persistent rhetorical demonization of the Tamil diaspora, including the banning of several organizations, indicates that the government views the diaspora primarily through the lens of security, and not development. The complexity and plurality of opinions in the Tamil diaspora have led to a fragmentation of efforts to provide development assistance in post-war Sri Lanka.
Over the past decade, diaspora mobilization has become of increasing interest to International Relations scholars who study terrorism, civil wars and transnational social movements and networks. Nevertheless, an important area remains under-researched: conditions, causal mechanisms and processes of diaspora mobilization vis-a-vis emerging states, especially in a comparative perspective. This article asks why diaspora entrepreneurs in liberal states pursue the sovereignty goals of their original homelands through the institutional channels of their host-states, through transnational channels or use a dual-pronged approach. Empirically, the article focuses on a comparison between the Albanian, Armenian and Palestinian diasporas in the UK and their links to the emerging states of Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Palestine. Two variables act together to explain differences in mobilization patterns: the host-state’s foreign policy stance towards the homeland’s sovereignty goal; and diaspora positionality, the relative power diaspora entrepreneurs perceive as deriving from their social positions in a transnational space between host-state and homeland. If a host-state’s foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but diaspora entrepreneurs experience their positionality as relatively strong vis-a-vis the host-state, they are more likely to mobilize through host-state channels, as in the Armenian case. If the foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, activists are more likely to pursue transnational channels, as in the Palestinian case. If the foreign policy stance is open towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, entrepreneurs are likely to engage with both channels, as in the Albanian case.
The case of R2P calls for greater attention to agency and feedback in norm dynamics. New international norms are more likely to spread if the responsibility for their creation and diffusion is seen to have been more broadly shared than being credited to any particular group. Many new norms have multiple sources and contexts, yet there is a tendency to credit them to their final point of articulation. Moreover, once created, norms do not remain uncontested and static. The application of new norms in different locations and contexts can lead to their subsequent modifications, which in turn can reshape its initial features and support mechanisms. This feedback constitutes a form of agency, which might broaden the legitimacy and appeal of the norm and the possibility of its greater diffusion. The case of R2P shows that although it is generally attributed to the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the norm had multiple prior sources, including the idea of ‘responsible sovereignty’. Furthermore, its development has had a strong African context. Lastly, subsequent controversies over the norm’s application, especially in Libya, attests to the possibility of critical feedback, such as calls for stricter enforcement of the norm’s criteria of last resort and proportionality, and greater accountability in operations conducted in defence of the norm.
Since the late colonial period, Sri Lanka has been subject to modern democratic state building
experiments. The number of challenges this project has encountered is rising. Many of these challenges
have been identified alongside the multi-ethnic character of Sri Lanka’s population, illuminating
the antagonistic inter-ethnic relations between the majority Sinhalese and the minority
Tamils. The various policy measures designed endogeneously and exogenously focused on building
a democratic state where the rights of the ethnic minorities could be guaranteed. However,
the outcomes of these policy measures have not reflected this goal. These policy measures have
not sufficiently contributed to a guarantee of rights for ethnic minorities and paid ill attention to
numerous other tensions that are of a non-inter-ethnic nature in Sri Lanka’s state building project.
By focusing on the broader state-in-society relations and privileging hegemonic formations in
Sinhalese politics through historical and contemporary times, this thesis re-problematises the issue
of Sri Lanka’s state building. This thesis also aims to answer the following key questions:
what are the key hegemony building processes identified in Sri Lanka’s state building project?;
how do the dynamics in Sinhalese politics and the broader political and economic context influence
these processes?; what were the main tensions between hegemony building and state building
in Sri Lanka?; and how did they affect democratic state building? These questions are examined
by applying a qualitative method of inquiry. The data for this study has been collected
through a series of field interviews conducted in Sri Lanka in 2009 and 2011, as well as a preliminary
literature survey conducted between 2005–07. The in-depth field interviews were carried out
with the aim of gathering primary data on the perceptions, first hand experiences and narratives
of the trajectories of elite and subaltern politics and state building. The primary data gathered
through an extensive literature survey that was further complemented with the field interviews
and a process of observation. Based on critical analysis of the data gathered from the above mentioned
multiple sources, the research argues primarily that state building in Sri Lanka has been a
struggle for hegemony of the right, in which the Sinhalese political elites and the broader Sinhalese
community have played a decisive and an equally important role.
The empirical inquiry identified four hegemony building processes – Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism,
a political party driven and a patronage system institutionalised at the state level, and events
xvi IN PURSUIT OF HEGEMONY: POLITICS AND STATE BUILDING IN SRI LANKA
and discourses of war, peace and conflict that were used by the dominant Sinhalese political elites
in their attempt to build political alliances in order to obtain consent and legitimacy for their rule,
which essentially influenced the trajectories of Sri Lanka’s state building. The findings of this research
suggest that, due to the underlying principle of inequality and right-wing political ideologies
present in the above hegemony building processes, the state building project has consequently
been drifting away from the path of democratic state building and fermenting the conditions
for realising hegemony of the right.
The results of this study show several implications for state building at the scholarly and policy
level. At the scholarly level, it shows the relevance of examining politics as usual and politics taken
for granted. Further theoretically and methodologically this research shows the relevance of
enaging with class and the dynamics of class relations for the study of Sri Lanka’s state building.
At both the policy and scholarly levels, this study shows that in understanding the paths and dilemmas
of state building, particularly in the contexts of civil war and post-civil war scenarios, it is
not only the much debated and antagonistic inter-ethnic relations that should receive attention,
but also the subtle hegemonic relationship formations and the hegemony building strategies taking
place at the intra-ethnic community level. Last but not least, this study highlights the need for
re-examining policies aimed at state building by considering state–in-society relations in the
broadest possible manner, which is done by tracing the seemingly disconnected strategies that are
being pursued by the political elites under changing social, political and economic contexts in
both the local and global spheres.
The ending of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009 led to significant changes in the political strategies pursued by Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora groups in the UK. One contentious feature of these groups' campaigns has been their use of the ‘genocide’ frame to describe the actions of the Sri Lankan state, which has been predominantly viewed either as a signal of these groups' strategic naivety or as a coded expression of a wider nationalist agenda. In this article I argue that its growing use in the post-war period is more complex and is best understood in relation to these organizations' strategies of legitimation. Deploying the genocide frame has served two key functions: to demonstrate groups' responsiveness to popular demands, and to challenge dominant international approaches to post-war Sri Lanka. Together these functions served to bolster groups' legitimacy in an environment characterized by political change and high levels of inter-organizational competition.
This article explores how the Rwandan state ‘stages’ its diaspora as agents of change. I argue that ‘staging’ – in the sense of creating a specific, positive image – is an important aspect of the present government's effort to create a new Rwanda of national unity and reconciliation. Although the diaspora mostly is articulated in policy documents in positive terms, there is also a strong acknowledgement of the so-called ‘negative forces’ of the diaspora. Staging the diaspora as agents of change is therefore a means to deal with this ambiguous perception of the diaspora and cultivate only its positive sides, and becomes part of a larger state-building project that is about ‘staging’ or ‘performing’ national unity and asserting state sovereignty. I argue that the Rwandan state performs its sovereignty and governs its hostile diaspora through processes of categorising the diaspora and through processes of inclusion and exclusion of certain categories.
During the last decade, African diasporas have emerged as agents of change in international development thinking. Diasporas are being courted by donors, sending states, and NGOs for their contributions to development in their countries of origin; praised for their remittances, investments and knowledge transfer. This Introduction seeks to scrutinise critically these processes, examining issues of governance and categorisation in relation to African states and diasporas. We explore the theoretical and political implications of the emergence of diasporas in relation to questions of hybridity, state responses, neoliberalism, depoliticisation, and mistrust. We thereby aim to establish an analytical framework that focuses on how various actors stage, govern, and seek to instrumentalise so-called diaspora involvement. Two central questions arise: Are we witnessing an anti-politics machine in the sense of making development a matter of how to involve diasporas and build their human and organisational capacities? Or are there means by which diasporas may re-politicise development issues in the home country?
Diaspora organisations are significant, and increasingly politicized players in today's global world. In order to understand diaspora support for homeland conflicts we have to study the interplay of distinct processes tied to both homeland and host country contexts. The new nature of war and concomitant centrality of identity groups has brought diasporas to the fore as important sources of outside support for parties in conflict. However, diaspora activism should not be understood as a mere response to the 'Homeland Calling'. Rather, the host country context can be seen as a distinct source of diaspora mobilization and, as this article shows, turns out to play a highly complex and ambiguous role in diaspora strategies of identification and political action.
Much contemporary analysis of world order rests on and reproduces a dualistic account of the international system, which is divided into liberal and non-liberal spaces, practices and subjectivities. Drawing on postcolonial thought, we challenge such dualisms in two ways. First, we argue that, as a specific form of governmental reason and practice produced at the intersection of the European and the non-European worlds, liberalism has always been hybrid, encompassing within its project both ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ spaces and practices. Second, through analysis of liberal engagement with diasporas, a specific set of subjects that occupy both these spaces, we show how contemporary practices of transnational security governance work to reproduce the hybridity of liberal peace. The article demonstrates the shifting conditions for local agency in relations and practices that transcend the simple dualism between liberal and non-liberal spaces, in the process showing how practices of transnational security governance also reproduce diasporas as hybrid subjects. The argument is illustrated with reference to the Tamil diaspora and the Sri Lankan state’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Affirmative action policies came into effect in Sri Lanka in the 1970s with the left-of-centre United Front government headed by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her government introduced changes in the criteria for university admission, initially designed to benefit the majority Sinhalese students. These policies were later transformed into a regional quota system cutting across ethnic and religious identities. The schemes were condemned for straying away from principles of merit and fairness, failing to guarantee social mobility through education and limiting the number of Tamil students in the science and medical faculties. The perceived unequal distribution of educational entitlements was a central issue in the Southern leftist insurrection and the Tamil insurrection in the North and East in the 1970s. While issues of unemployment led the Sinhala rural educated youth to rebel in 1971, the early Tamil militancy was energized by the issue of standardization in the university admission of students. Affirmative action policies can be usefully read as linked to an understanding of democracy that originates in the late colonial period founded on the premise that the democratic state has a responsibility to correct imbalances that exist in society between communities and classes and to distribute entitlements in the fairest manner. The politics of university admissions can also be traced back to the practice of Ceylonization of the public service that began in the 1930s and to the commitment to welfarism that was borne out of the Fabian inclinations of the men who drafted the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931.
The diffusion of international norms and their effects on policy and political behaviour are central research questions in international relations. Informed by constructivism, prevailing models are marked by a crucial tension between a static view of norm content and a dynamic picture of norm adoption and implementation. Observing that norms continue to evolve after they emerge, we argue that a discursive approach offers a more promising way forward for theorizing and analysing the life cycles of international norms. We present a view of norms as processes, calling attention to both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sources of dynamism. We illustrate this theory by tracing and comparing the life cycles of two global equality norms: gender-balanced decision-making and gender mainstreaming. We find that these norms emerged from two distinct policy realms, and after briefly converging in the mid-1990s, have since developed largely separately from, and often in tension with, one another.
Introduction. As Checkel notes in his introduction to this volume, the roles of external and transnational actors are attracting increased attention in studies of civil war. Diasporas are unique in this regard as they consist of populations and actors that are both external and internal. They exist “outside the state… but inside the people” (Shain and Barth 2003, 451). As such, they epitomize the complexities of disentangling processes and actors in the study of transnationalism and civil war. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to a broader understanding of the transnational dynamics of civil war through a study of diaspora mobilization and conflict. The chapter does so by briefly pointing to the existing literature, before focusing on several causal mechanisms that can help us to disentangle and disaggregate aspects of diaspora mobilization that may exacerbate violent conflict in the home state. I then employ these mechanisms to examine the case of the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state in the 1980s and 1990s. I conclude by discussing both the contributions and limits of focusing on mechanisms of diaspora mobilization in civil war, placing them within a broader context that includes other factors such as geopolitics and state interests.
This chapter situates human mobility at the intersection of security and development. Capitalism prompted much of the population of Europe to move out of rural areas into cities, and from there imperialism led to huge forced and voluntary migration towards settler colonies. By tying development funding and humanitarian aid to cooperation of developing states in migration control, 'the West' uses development aid to criminalize whole categories of migrants, well beyond its borders. Myths around migration perpetuate containment and control that keeps around 90 per cent of forced migrants and refugees in or near their home regions. More humane migration and asylum policies could benefit host and home countries alike, in the long run. Migrants can be viewed as economic assets, a demographic boon, and a source of cultural enrichment.
Are rising authoritarian powers such as China and Russia converging towards or challenging the normative structures of the liberal international order? This article argues that scholarship on norm contestation provides a fruitful theoretical avenue for addressing this question. It finds, however, that this literature has problematically tended to either overlook or externalize power dynamics from norm contestation. The article therefore proposes and develops a power political approach to norm contestation that, informed by a realpolitik sensibility, more explicitly and consistently makes power central to the analysis. A power political perspective conceptualizes norm contestation as the expression of battles for influence in world politics that take place at the ideational level and through symbolic instruments. It understands these struggles as occurring in the context of an international system profoundly marked by conflicting interests, cultural pluralism, hierarchical structures, and power asymmetries. This power political lens is then used to identify four modes of contestation that Russian and Chinese actors are engaged in: liberal performance, liberal mimicry, civilizational essentialization, and counter-norm entrepreneurship. It empirically explores how these contestatory practices express themselves at different intensity levels—applicatory, meaning, and validity—and display specific power political logics—fragmenting and integrative—with the goal of undermining the ideational hegemony of liberal Western-based actors and structures in world politics, and advancing alternative non-liberal visions of domestic and international order. Along with contributing to the literature on norms, this article also makes a broader intervention in current debates about rising powers and the future of the liberal international order.
This article considers data on London Tamils from Jaffna peninsula, northern Sri Lanka, to examine caste interactions in relation to their efforts to reconnect with people in the diaspora and ‘at home’. The Tamils are part of a substantial number of ūr (home/native place) associations in London and areas outside London. I consider their efforts through changing and unchanging attitudes to caste to recreate a sense of community away from home. They do so by forming associations comprising members of a specific caste group, hailing from a particular village, region, or island in Sri Lanka. I examine the diaspora communities’ understanding of the institution of caste as a wider landscape of belonging. This further considers how caste divisions in the ūr become re-territorialized among the Tamil diaspora. The historical context of these activities relate to the wide dispersal and separation of Tamils from their Sri Lankan homeland during the upheaval of the armed conflict. The article also demonstrates how caste-based relationships and kinship ties shape the lives of members of the Tamil diaspora in London, and how caste-based and fragmented identities operate in such transnational Tamil diaspora localities.
Book Description : Even when armed conflicts formally end, the transition to peace is not clear-cut. This comprehensive volume explores the mounting evidence which suggests that it is rather ‘unlikely to see a clean break from violence to consent, from theft to production, from repression to democracy, or from impunity to accountability’. The authors analyse the complex endeavour of transitioning out of war, studying how it is often interrelated with other transformations such as changes in the political regime (democratisation) and in the economy (opening of markets to globalisation). They explore how, in the same way as wars and conflicts reflect the societies they befall, post-war orders may replicate and perpetuate some of the drivers of war-related violence, such as high levels of instability, institutional fragility, corruption, and inequality. This book thus suggests that, even in the absence of a formal relapse into war and the re-mobilisation of former insurgents, many transitional contexts are marked by the steady and ongoing reconfiguration of criminal and illegal groups and practices.
To absorb millions of immigrants into European societies requires a normative integration. This paper examines the dominant paradigms which characterize integrations, situating assimilation and unbounded pluralism at opposite ends of a continuum. Diversity Within Unity (DWU) is offered as a third approach. It calls for adherence to core values from all (the Unity realm), but beyond these shared values, diversity is fully accepted. The implications for religious practice, education, language, and communal loyalties are explored.
Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, many Rwandans fled and a modest diaspora was established throughout Canada and the United States. Diaspora are subject to many of the same concerns regarding justice and reconciliation as those who remain in Rwanda. This research focused primarily on how this diaspora attempted to achieve justice and reconciliation, if institutional mechanisms (gacaca) in Rwanda had a residual effect, and if they created any specific mechanism to facilitate justice and reconciliation among themselves. In-person and telephone interviews were conducted with eight members of the diaspora in the United States and Canada between May 2015 and March 2016.
Interviews suggested that justice among the diaspora is inherently connected with justice in Rwanda, and participants felt that justice has not been achieved in either location. Reconciliation among the diaspora, while tied to reconciliation in Rwanda, may be its own construct. Interviews demarcated ‘thin’ reconciliation and ‘thick’ reconciliation, suggesting that ‘thin’ reconciliation exists among the diaspora, but that ‘thick’ reconciliation is rare. Discussion of gacaca was limited, as participants stated it did not address justice and reconciliation in Rwanda. Participants did not report any diaspora specific mechanism regarding attempts at justice and reconciliation.
[ The full article is available Open-access at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2018.1432214]
Conventional analyses of terrorism proscription rely on conceptions of policy in terms of bureaucratic institutions and processes functioning according to means-end rationality, and law as an institutionalised body of rules expressive of sovereign power. By contrast, this article argues that the workings of Western terrorism proscription are inseparable from and deeply conditioned by situated interpretations of the contexts and dynamics within which West-led interventions for global stability—equated with liberal order—are pursued. Predicated on a seemingly self-evident division between “liberal” conduct, actors, and practices and illiberal ones which threaten the former, the production of good order requires the strengthening of the former, and the disciplining, transformation, or destruction of the latter. However, categorisations as “liberal” or “non-liberal” are not derived from “objective” criteria, but always mutually dependent on the situated interpretations by (self-recognised) liberals of the contexts within which they are intervening. Taking an interpretive approach that treats state action as situated practice, the article traces Western states’ security engagement with Sri Lanka before, during, and after the armed conflict (1983–2009) to show how changing calculations for liberal peace there governed evolving proscription practices in relation to the LTTE and the Tamil diaspora.
This book begins from a critical account of the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, tracing themes of nationalism, discourse and conflict memory through this period of immense violence and into its aftermath. Using these themes to explore state crime, atrocity and its denial and representation, Seoighe offers an analysis of how stories of conflict are authored and constructed. This book examines the political discourse of the former Rajapaksa government, highlighting how fluency in international discourses of counter-terrorism, humanitarianism and the ‘reconciliation’ expected of states transitioning from conflict can be used to conceal and deny state violence.
Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, academics, politicians, state representatives and international agency staff, and three months of observation in Sri Lanka in 2012, Seoighe demonstrates how the Rajapaksa government re-narrativised violence through orchestrated techniques of denial and mass ritual discourse. It drew on and perpetuated a heightened majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which consolidated power under Sinhalese political elites, generated minority grievances and, in turn, sustained the repression and dispossession of the Tamil community of the Northeast. A detailed and evocative study, this book will be of special interest to scholars of conflict studies, political violence and critical criminology.
The conceptualization of an ethnic identity is complicated when one considers how this identity is understood by the diasporic community and by the homeland community. This article argues that the second-generation Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic community in Toronto conceptualize their Tamil ethnic identity in a manner that supports their right to engage in homeland politics. However, not all Tamils in Sri Lanka share this understanding. Drawing on over one hundred interviews conducted among second-generation Tamils in Toronto and their age-cohort in Sri Lanka, this article argues that the very premise upon which the diasporic population base their right to engage in homeland politics and their right to claim membership of a shared ethnic identity may not be justified by those in the homeland. These diverging perspectives of ethnic identity challenge the role of the diasporic community in homeland affairs. Journal compilation
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 dialogue. It studies both Sinhalese and Tamils in the diaspora and enquires into their experiences of interaction with the ethnic other. Based on multi-sited fieldwork carried out during the latter phase of the war, it maps meeting spaces in the host countries and discusses how divides were entrenched or bridged in these spaces. The reversed majority–minority relations between the two groups are discussed, as are the perceptions that dialogue attempts can be a way of co-optation and an activity in which divides are confirmed rather than overcome.
Although Beijing maintains its diplomatic stance of ‘non-interference’ in the internal affairs of other countries, a debate has appeared in recent years on the sustainability of this principle. The various arguments fall into three general groups: abandoning the principle; strict adherence to the principle; and more flexibility in practice while maintaining the principle. Among them, the third, represented by new concepts like ‘creative involvement’ and ‘constructive involvement’, has attracted growing support in academic circles. After a close reading of certain representative arguments, this article suggests that the controversies among different analysts derive largely from divergent judgments on two interrelated, strategic issues: whether China should continue to keep a low profile in global affairs, and China’s relations as a whole with the Western-led international society. The non-interference debate thus reflects the conflicting orientations that underlie the worldview of contemporary China, and the non-interference dilemma Beijing faces. The impact of the debate on Beijing’s policy is difficult to ascertain, but it is noticeable that in spite of its unquestioning commitment to sovereignty and non-interference, which will not change in the short run, the Chinese government is nevertheless moderately adjusting its policies. A loose pragmatic consensus among scholars both reflects and brings about this change.
The Tamil diaspora is not monolithic; it is differentiated by class, excludes certain castes and is gendered in its exploitation. The mobilisation of the diverse Tamil diaspora abroad and the rhetoric used have become the rationale for reinforcing the security establishment in Sri Lanka. A democratic Tamil leadership from within the country should challenge the larger Tamil diaspora to change course and work constructively towards building a plural and democratic society out of the ravages of war.
Diasporas are now well-established players in the global political economy, yet their role in conflict and post-conflict settings remains controversial. Diasporas have variously been described as war-mongers, peace-builders, or ambivalent in their influence on conflict. We suggest that this variety of characterizations might be explained by disaggregating forms of diaspora engagement and the public and private spaces in which they occur into three ‘spheres of engagement’. We then go on to consider two variants of conflict-related diasporas: ‘distant diasporas’, alluding particularly to Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Somalia, and ‘contiguous diasporas’, referring mainly to the Russian-speaking peoples in the former Soviet Union but also to groups like the Kurds spread across several nation-states. We show that different forms and levels of engagement generate varying levels of demand on diasporan households. Differences of wealth, resources, social capital and class also influence the capacity of diasporas to engage in conflict and post-conflict roles.
The increase in the number of States in the 20th century has not abated in recent years. The independence of many small territories comprising the 'residue' of the European colonial empires alone accounts for a major increase in States since 1979, while the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR in the early 1990s further augmented the ranks. With these developments, the practice of States and international organisations has developed by substantial measure in respect of self-determination, secession, succession, recognition, de-colonisation, and several other fields. This book discusses the relation between statehood and recognition; the criteria for statehood, especially in view of evolving standards of democracy and human rights; and the application of such criteria in international organisations and between States. Combining a general argument as to the normative significance of statehood with analysis of numerous specific cases, this second edition gives an account of the developments which have led to the birth of so many new States.
Norm diffusion theorists have advanced our understanding of how ‘norms emerge, spread and become internalized.’ Although this literature and especially the norm life cycle model is based on a constructivist ontology that gives equal weight to agency and structure, one can make out ‘a tendency in this literature to erase’ agency from norm diffusion narratives. This article suggests that the ‘invisibilization’ of agency stems from two mutually reinforcing scholarly practices. For one, insufficient attention is paid to the metaphors describing norm propagation (diffusion, cascade, life cycle, etc.). These metaphors are frequently employed in ways that point to mechanistic and automatized processes of ‘norm diffusion.’ Secondly, norms are often placed in the subject position in sentences. Although uncontroversial in terms of syntax, this mode of writing leads to narrative structures in which norms function as agents. Rather than identifying actual actors, the norm diffusion literature suggests that norms emerge, norms diffuse, and norms cascade. These semantics create an ‘illusion of agency’ without accounting for the actual processes through which norms are articulated, propagated, contested, adapted, adopted, or rejected. Norm diffusion research subsequently comes to be closely associated with self-actionist modes of thinking, which focuses research on intrinsic qualities of norms, rather than on socially embedded agency and power relations central to processes of diffusing norms. Being more attentive to metaphors and syntax will be instrumental in moving the literature from a misplaced focus on norm diffusion to a focus on the underlying power relations of agential norm politics.
Most empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EU's implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of ‘living by example’. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to ‘live by example’: the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle.
As the use of 'diaspora' has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamental change in the social world; and proposes to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim.
This article examines the 2009 humanitarian disaster in Sri Lanka through fieldwork conducted at the time and through theoretical lenses supplied by Arendt, Foucault and Agamben. The article suggests that this catastrophe represents a salutary example of the consequences of promoting a ‘lesser evil’ in the context of a government-fuelled human rights disaster. In line with Arendt's critique of the ‘lesser evil’, the case illustrates the limits to prioritising compromise, quietude and ‘access’. At the same time, while ‘democracy’ and ‘terror’ have frequently been posed as opposites, this tragedy shows how democratic forces, nationally and even internationally, can embrace something that approximates to Agamben's ‘camp’, a state of emergency in which entire groups of people lose their rights and can, at the extreme, be killed with impunity. Meanwhile, a pervasive official language of ‘care’ and ‘humanitarianism’ (corresponding to Foucault's politics of ‘life’) not only proved entirely consistent with ethnic cleansing and the large-scale killing of civilians; it also actively assisted in this endeavour by creating a smokescreen behind which massacres could be carried out.
In this article, we study the emergence of the political spaces of activism of second-generation Swiss Tamils resulting from a critical event – the suffering of Tamils during and after the final battle in early 2009 of a civil war in northern Sri Lanka that had lasted for decades. We contend that we can explain the geographies of newly emerging second-generation activism committed to achieving Tamil Eelam through two factors. These are first, this generation's multiple senses of belonging both to Switzerland and to the Tamil ‘nation’ and, second, the way a specific politics of affect remoulded second-generation identities because the pain of witnessing the brutality of war and suffering of Tamils occurred concurrently with a perceived lack of interest from their ‘new home’ (Switzerland). The combination of these factors made them want to acknowledge their Tamil ‘roots’ and encouraged them to become politically active. Consequently, these second-generation activists primarily sought to engage with their host society – to awaken it from its indifference to the suffering of Tamils and from its passivity in taking action on an international level. We thereby witness the emerging of a new type of Tamil activism in Switzerland, which is firmly located in and bound to the host country.
This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an earlier elite Tamil movement gave way to the contemporary migration of much larger class-and caste-fractured communities, while a cultural imaginary of migration as a form of mobility persisted. I suggest that concomitant status anxieties have propelled culturalist imaginations of a unified Tamil community in Toronto who, through the actions of LTTE-affiliated organizations, have condensed the Tigers and their imagined homeland, Tamil Eelam, into representing Tamil community life. While most Tamils may not have explicitly espoused LTTE ideology, as a result of the LTTE becoming the backbone of community life, Tamils became complicit with and reaffirmed the LTTE project of defending Tamilness militarily in Sri Lanka and culturally in Toronto. I suggest that the self-presentation of diasporic communities should be analyzed within specific histories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and active mobilizing structures.
In May 2009, Sri Lankan government armed forces defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after more than a quarter of a century of civil war. With the elimination of most of the LTTE leadership and the waning of its hold over Tamils in Sri Lanka and abroad, the scene was set for a transformation of relations between the diaspora and those at home. It is the dynamics of this transformation that we explore in this article, which traces the shifting centre of gravity in Tamil politics between actors in the homeland and those in the diaspora. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of a ‘political field', we characterise what we call the local, diasporic and transnational political fields in the Sri Lankan setting. This article shows how the LTTE's power derived largely from its control of the transnational political field, including in places that were otherwise isolated from diasporic connections. The defeat in 2009 fundamentally changed the dynamics of transnational politics by greatly weakening the LTTE's grip over the transnational political field, and this article explores the new dispensation that is now unfolding.