The Untold Narration of the Discourse on Militarisation in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka

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.