Resource Management and Geography - Theses
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ItemDisplacement: the unsettled geographies of Sri Lanka's civil war( 2015)This thesis provides a multi-scalar spatial analysis of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) and the five-year post-war period (2009-2014), focusing on how various scenarios of displacement unsettled normative representations of national space. Using ontological insecurity as a conceptual starting point, it examines these displacements across five spatial categories – nation, home, city, route and camp – as they are impacted by varying degrees of wartime violence that multiply their meanings and representations for the social agents involved in the conflict. The argument at the centre of this thesis is that violence and geography are co-constitutive; that highly sought after and secure forms of emplacement are invariably underscored by multiple geographies of displacement, and that their sociospatial ontologies provide equally valid ground for analysing the nation’s turbulent past. This research follows the spatiotemporal inscription of wartime social mobilities across Sri Lanka’s multiple displacement geographies. It adopts a hermeneutic approach for analysing a range of socio-spatial phenomena using discourse analysis, fieldwork, participant observation and a small number of interviews as its main investigative methods. The five normative spatial categories proposed for investigation form distinct case study chapters. They draw on theories of spatial violence and interdisciplinary literature on the Sri Lankan conflict. This thesis further reviews the civil war as shaped by post-Cold-War forces of liberal democratisation, marketization and securitisation, illustrating how the resultant porosity of borders destabilised the nation, heightening inter-ethnic contestations, with violent spatial impacts. As national borders were increasingly opened to human traffic, goods, services and capital, fragmenting previously-insulated national subjectivities, the Sri Lankan government used militarisation to maintain sovereignty and its associated forms of ontological security. Armed resistance to its hegemonic representations and policies by minority Tamil groups thrust the Sri Lankan government into a protracted civil war. Literature on this period has largely represented the conflict as an ethno-nationalist contest, neglecting the ramifications of and internal responses to global economic change. This thesis proposes to broaden this analytical framework. The thesis’ chapters illustrate the process of dissolution and heightened mobility provoked by violent conflict. They raise salient questions regarding the nature of displacement linking wartime dislocations to post-war strategies for expediting neoliberal economic change. In doing so, this research situates the territorial understanding of Sri Lanka within broader discourses of globalisation reorienting the nationalist question towards post-national or denationalised concerns. The chapters provide an analytical over view of the range of ontological insecurities produced during the violent political dissolution of the postcolonial nation and highlight its resultant political and economic porosity.