Product Description: Have we reached an end to the era of peaceful third party intervention in conflict management and resolution? In the 1990s, with the ending of the Cold War, the intervention of third parties as a non-violent means of negotiating settlements of intra-state conflicts gained prominence but the emphasis in the twenty-first century has been increasingly on military responses...read more

Product Description: At the point of independence in 1948, Sri Lanka was projected to be a success story in the developing world. However, in July 1983 a violent ethnic conflict which pitted the Sinhalese against the Tamils began, and did not come to an end until 2009...read more

In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—better known as the Tamil Tigers—officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war.Sharika Thiranagama's In My Mother's House provides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war.In My Mother's House revolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence—carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state—on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for postconflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.

Product Description: This is the story of the man who defined the armed struggle for an independent Eelam for over three decades and who lived by the gun and died by the gun–Velupillai Prabhakaran. The book is a first-person account by the author based on his innumerable visits to Sri Lanka during its turbulent years...read more

Product Description: This book tells the story of why the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) lost the war that it had always dreamt of winning in Sri Lanka. It is a collection of news stories and commentaries penned by the author from 2003 to 2009 on the ethnic conflict in the country...read more

Patrick Grant explores the relationship between Buddhism and violent ethnic conflict in modern Sri Lanka using the concept of regressive inversion. Regressive inversion occurs when universal teaching, such as that of the Buddha, is redeployed to supercharge passions associated with the kinds of group loyalty that the universal teaching itself intends to transcend. The book begins with an account of the main teachings of Theravada Buddhism and looks at how these inform, or fail to inform, modern interpreters. Grant considers the writings of three key figures Anagarika Dharmapala, Walpola Rahula, and J. R. Jayewardene who addressed Buddhism and politics in the years leading up to Sri Lanka s political independence from Britain, and subsequently, in postcolonial Sri Lanka. This book makes the Sri Lankan conflict accessible to readers interested in the modern global phenomenon of ethnic violence involving religion and also illuminates similar conflicts around the world."

Product Description: Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict has become protracted and intractable. The twenty five- year-old civil war has been interrupted numerous times for a negotiated peace and political settlement, yet the conflict has defied deescalation. All failed attempts at negotiated peace have propelled the civil war forward with greater vitality and intensity...read more

Product Description: "Will be of interest to those working on conflict and peace studies, economic development, cultural studies, and women in the modern world. A key new publication." ―Chandra R. de Silva, Old Dominion University"... offers a superb overview of how a civil war, driven by ethnicity, can engender a new culture and a new political economy...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In Sri Lanka, staggering numbers of young men were killed fighting in the armed forces against Tamil separatists. The war became one of attrition—year after year waves of young foot soldiers were sent to almost certain death in a war so bloody that the very names of the most famous battle scenes still fill people with horror...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first book to examine war and violence in Sri Lanka through the lens of cross-cultural studies on just-war tradition and theory. In a study that is textual, historical and anthropological, it is argued that the ongoing Sinhala-Tamil conflict is in actual practice often justified by a resort to religious stories that allow for war when Buddhism is in peril...read more