Abstract:
"A post-conflict context can be conceptualised as a transitional period bounded by past war and
future peace, a period which introduces several new challenges. Whether a war was civil or
international in scope, concluded through a peace agreement of by a military victory, for states,
a war's conclusion is a time to consolidate political gains" (Cunningham, 2017, p. 2). Based on
Cunnigham's interpretation of post-conflict, this research is therefore to understand the process
of post-conflict politics which aims to transform past war stories into peace and its impacts on
Tamil, the major victim group in Sri Lanka. The literature of Sri Lanka post-conflict points out
that militarisation, the presence of the military in everyday life and militarism in civil
administration are new political development in the post-conflict context (Thambiah,, 2005;
Goodhand, 2012). The literature future reveals that at the end of the civil war in 2009, the
military took over the civil administration in the North and East Sri Lanka and in the Covid 10
Global Pandemic, the military became the tool of implementing civil affairs in the South as well.
The literature describes the transformation of civil power and functions to the military in an
emergency or a disaster though the political ideology behind this transformation is yet to be
explored. This paper is therefore to examine the political ideology of militarisation in the agenda
of liberal peace in the post-conflict context. The research problem is that despite promoting demilitarisation,
why the post-conflict liberal peace policy of the Government of Sri Lanka
reinforces military role in civil tasks. The research question is how the Government of Sri Lanka
fosters the military in governing process? The qualitative data has been collected through a
library survey. The qualitative data has been analysed through Feminism. The key finding of the
research is that militarisation in post-war Sri Lanka is defined as a humanitarian operation,
locating it in the politics of ethnonationalism which mentions the military as necessary for
securing territorial integrity. Also, the Sinhala-majoritarian politics justifies the presence of the
military and run the capital accumulation project at the micro-level in the North and East where
the civil war occurred. However, the criticism on militarisation gradually emerges from South
Sri Lanka recently due to its intervention in implementing the neoliberal-capitalist projects i.e.
privatisation of free education.