Violent maritime spaces: Conservation and security in Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park,India

The militarisation of conservation involves the integration of conservation, security and counterinsurgency through violent and armed strategies, or ‘war, by conservation’. We describe a militarised conservation practice in which a marine protected area was established by the state and supported by international actors in a region of ongoing ethnic and military conflict as a case of conservation, by war. Conservation and security actors actively criminalise artisanal fishing communities in Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park in India. The harvest of sea cucumbers, marine species of commercial value historically traded between the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, was banned and has become the target of militarised action. When the Sri Lankan civil war broke out in 1983, sea cucumber trade turned into a security concern as the same sea routes were also being used for trafficking arms, ammunition, and other contraband. Tamil Nadu was geographically and logistically involved in the civil war due to ethnic ties. The Sri Lankan civil war and its social and political consequences on the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu due to ethnic ties is a fitting case of the nexus of conservation and security in a marine context. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with artisanal fishers and conservation and security actors, we show that violent political conflict provided the justification for securitisation of conservation. As the state focuses its conservation efforts on the marine protected area, commercial fisheries detrimental to fisheries and biodiversity conservation continue. Marine protected areas allow the state to achieve its security outcomes even as it fails to meet its conservation goals due to non-local drivers of declines in species populations. Trans-boundary marine environments are particularly difficult to govern due to the dynamic nature of the seascape. The materiality of the sea and the conservation-security nexus results in the creation of a violent maritime space.     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

From ethnic outbidding to ethnic conflict: the institutional bases for Sri Lanka's separatist war1

Abstract. Beginning in the mid‐1950s Sri Lanka's politicians from the majority Sinhalese community resorted to ethnic outbidding as a means to attain power and in doing so systematically marginalised the country's minority Tamils. This article consequently argues that institutional decay, which was produced by the dialectic between majority rule and ethnic outbidding, was what led to Tamil mobilisation and an ethnic conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people over the past twenty years. It also analyses the influence informal societal pressures exerted on formal state institutions and how this contributed to institutional decay. Evaluating the relations that ensued between social organisations and the Sri Lankan state shows how institutions can prescribe actions and fashion motives even as it will make clear how the island's varied institutions generated a deadly political dynamic that eventually unleashed the ongoing civil war.     

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality,race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy

This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri Lankan spaces central to the novel's narrative—the family home and the school—the article shows how these everyday geographies regulate and normalise carnal desire in a society which still operates anti-homosexual legislation. It also suggests how the erosion of the meanings of these familiar spaces is a tactic central to the main protagonist's sexual liberation. By reading these sexualised geographies through the polemic racialised Sinhala/Tamil divisions in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the paper shows how the novel makes an important political intervention in contemporary Sri Lankan politics where devolution and federal solutions to recent civil unrest have produced territorialised geographies of difference that prescribe ‘places for races’. By evoking the Funny Boy's fictive and sexualised geographies of exclusion and resistance, this article unsettles the logic that binds intra-racial solidarity, its cognate geographical modelling, and instead highlights the exclusions that exist at all levels in Sri Lankan society.

Amma held up her hand to silence us. ‘That's an order,’ she said.     

Is There a Conflict Between Growth and Welfarism? The Significance of the Sri Lanka Debate

This article seeks to derive some general lessons regarding the relationship between growth and welfarism by undertaking a reassessment of Sri Lanka's long experience with interventions in social spheres. While Sri Lanka has been hailed by many for pursuing the welfarist strategy with apparently spectacular results, several critics have recently suggested that she would have been better off by diverting resources away from welfare interventions towards investment for growth. They have argued that the interventions were not terribly effective anyway, and further that welfarism involved a conflict with growth which eventually undermined the very sustainability of welfarist strategy. This article contests these criticisms, and argues in its turn that the Sri Lankan experience offers a lesson not in the conflict but in the complementarity between growth and welfarism.     

Aid, conflict and migration: the Canada‐Sri Lanka connection

This paper aims to disentangle patterns of aid, trade, conflict and migration between Canada and Sri Lanka, illustrating the surprisingly significant traffic between the two countries and exploring the significance and quality of these connections. International aid to Sri Lanka is closely related to the opening of markets to multinational investment beginning in 1977. This economic liberalisation overlaps with periods of conflict in Sri Lanka and of macroeconomic growth. The prosperity it has generated, however, has not benefited all social classes and ethnic groups. Accordingly, conflict in Sri Lanka has been characterised by uprisings led by unemployed youth, peaceful and violent protests of discrimination against Sri Lankan Tamils and militarised government reprisals to both. A long period of macroeconomic growth ended in the final quarter of 2001, after the bombing of commercial airliners at Sri Lanka's international airport. Geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions in Sri Lanka changed dramatically. In this context, Canada's International Development Agency (CIDA) and other aid agencies aspire to 'correct for conflict' and promote a democratic and peaceful Sri Lanka through peace‐building and other aid measures. Militarised conflict over at least the past 20 years has generated massive human displacement both within and beyond the country's borders, spawning international migrants in search of asylum. In 1999, Sri Lanka was the leading source country of refugee claimants to Canada. Canada hosts the single largest Sri Lankan diaspora of any country. By examining the nexus of economic liberalisation and aid, I analyse its relation to conflict in Sri Lanka and migration to Canada .     

Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the 17th-Century Anglo-Dutch East-Indiaman Avondster in Bay of Galle, Sri Lanka

The Avondster was a 17th century British ship captured by the Dutch and used by the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading with Asia until it was wrecked in Galle Harbour, Sri Lanka in 1659. The shipwreck was found in 1997 to be in very good condition but under threat from development in the harbour. From 2001–2004 an archaeological project was implemented by the Dutch/Sri Lankan Mutual Heritage Centre. The aims were to record and recover important cultural material as well as to build up the capacity of a Sri Lankan Maritime Archaeology Unit for implementing future work.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Betting on Potatoes: Accumulation in Times of Agrarian Crisis in Punjab,India

Despite the widespread consensus that neoliberal India is reeling under an overarching agrarian crisis, this article argues that at least some capitalist farmers are continuing to accumulate and are thereby contributing to the process of class differentiation. Through a study of potato-growing capitalist farmers in Punjab, the archetypal Green Revolution state of India, the author shows that such farmers can navigate complex production and market processes to make profits. However, risks of volatile prices and land and credit markets have made capital accumulation more uncertain. While potato is a minor crop in Punjab and the case cannot be generalized, it brings into focus both under-explored non-state actors and processes in the state, and important tendencies of change since the plateauing of Green Revolution technologies. The analysis also highlights the agency of such farmers in negotiating a transformed political economy context, including the presence of corporate agribusinesses.     

Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef

Through a close reading of the Anglo–Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's 1994 novel Reef, this paper interrogates the misplaced concrete-ness regarding Sri Lanka's status as archetypal ‘island-state’. I show how Reef maps an imaginative geography which both naturalizes and problematizes Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’. Through the memory of the novel's main protagonist the author's exploration of modernity fixes geographical knowledge of Sri Lanka. ‘Island-ness’ emerges as a rationalization of modernity, one with its roots in Sri Lanka's colonial experience which the author then unpicks as he proceeds to explore the limits of modernity. I suggest that Reef demonstrates how island-ness is an inescapable yet problematic dimension of contemporary Sri Lankan geography. This is an ambivalent contradiction that fuels a civil war in Sri Lanka which relentlessly and sanguinely contests the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness. The paper emphasizes how Romesh Gunesekera's hybrid position, as an author born in Sri Lanka and now writing from England, constitutes a post-colonial intervention which allows us to ask new questions about Sri Lanka's ‘natural’ insularity. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.     

The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

Philanthronationalism: Junctures at the Business–Charity Nexus in Post‐war Sri Lanka

Over the past few years, the role of private sector organizations as actors and investors in development processes has received increased attention. This article explores the rise of ‘philanthronationalism’ in Sri Lanka: the co‐development of business and philanthropy methods as a response to patronage, nationalization and militarization in the post‐war environment. Drawing on ethnographic research into indigenous forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the article identifies four kinds of philanthronationalist practice — passive, assimilative, reactive and collaborative — that provide a logic, mechanism and ethic for private sector development initiatives in the island whilst promoting a vision of the ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ nation state. Noting the emergence of similar philanthronationalist practices in Myanmar, the article concludes by arguing that the Sri Lankan case is unlikely to be unique and calls for further research into the partnerships that emerge between private philanthropy and nationalist movements in conflict/post‐conflict processes around the world.     

Unsettled peace? The territorial politics of roadbuilding in post-war Sri Lanka

This paper analyses the role of roadbuilding as a process of state territorialisation in post-war Sri Lanka. In the aftermath of a brutal civil war (1983–2009), and in lieu of a broader peace and reconciliation process between Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities, road infrastructure has been promoted by the state as essential to the region's recovery and nation's sovereignty. Roads were to bring national unity and political integration. We interrogate such claims, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jaffna and neighbouring areas to cast doubt on the prospects of new roads to ameliorate ethnic tensions. Rather, as militarised security discourses and policies continue to dominate the Sri Lankan public sphere, such schemes can be understood as part of broader Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist project to consolidate territorial control in restive parts of the country. Our research suggests that, rather than facilitating rehabilitation and recovery, road networks mirror pre-existing fault lines and entrench the privileged position of the military in Sri Lankan society. Such shifts do little to avail persistent minority sentiments of political marginalisation, aggravating social fractures and re-constituting the hegemony of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.     

Intimate Extractions: Demand Dowry and Neoliberal Development in Dhaka,Bangladesh

Based on qualitative research on marital problems in Dhaka, this article uses the term ‘intimate extractions’ as a lens to explain the relationship between escalating levels of demand dowry and neoliberal development in Bangladesh. Evidence from across Bangladesh shows that demands for cash made by husbands, accompanied by threats of violence or divorce, are on the rise. Building on gendered theories of contemporary capitalist development and feminist analysis of microcredit, the article argues that demand dowry should be understood within the current context of rapid economic development in Bangladesh. High levels of precarity, lack of state welfare and the need for cash for businesses, labour migration, education and healthcare mean that people from all social classes are in perpetual need of money. Marriage problems and the practice of demand dowry present opportunities for husbands to extract money from wives and their families. Embedded in the intimate relationship of marriage, demand dowry can therefore be understood as a ‘conversion’, a process in which intimate relationships are converted into projects of capital accumulation, thus becoming an ‘intimate extraction’.     

Time and space in the Sri Lanka‐Tamil diaspora

Based upon fieldwork in Sri Lanka and among Tamil migrants in Norway, this article discusses the relationship between space, time and national identity. The author argues that in the Sri Lanka‐Tamil diaspora one finds two different conceptions of Tamil culture, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘revolutionary’. The first expresses a space‐time relationship that is nomadic and grounded in heritage; the second one is sedentary and historicist. The latter serves as a basis for Tamil separatism, the first does not. By propagating the ‘revolutionary’ model of culture, with its particular understanding of space and time, the Tamil separatist movement Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has adopted viewpoints that throughout this century have fuelled the nationalism of the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka. The author argues that instead of explaining social change historically, which is one trend within anthropological theory today, anthropologists should concentrate on exploring under which conditions historical explanations are seen as more valid than their alternatives.     

Occupying the Margins: Labour Integration and Social Exclusion in Artisanal Mining in Tanzania

This article examines the marginal position of artisanal miners in sub‐Saharan Africa, and considers how they are incorporated into mineral sector change in the context of institutional and legal integration. Taking the case of diamond and gold mining in Tanzania, the concept of social exclusion is used to explore the consequences of marginalization on people's access to mineral resources and ability to make a living from artisanal mining. Because existing inequalities and forms of discrimination are ignored by the Tanzanian state, the institutionalization of mineral titles conceals social and power relations that perpetuate highly unequal access to resources. The article highlights the complexity of these processes, and shows that while legal integration can benefit certain wealthier categories of people, who fit into the model of an ‘entrepreneurial small‐scale miner’, for others adverse incorporation contributes to socio‐economic dependence, exploitation and insecurity. For the issue of marginality to be addressed within integration processes, the existence of local forms of organization, institutions and relationships, which underpin inequalities and discrimination, need to be recognized.     

Not Sustainable: India's Trade and Current Account Deficits

India's trade balance and current account have shown persistent deficits for a major part of its post‐independence period. Since the mid‐2000s, trade deficits have increased perilously, with a sharp rise in both oil and non‐oil imports. India has relied on services exports, remittances and capital inflows to offset trade deficits and sustain the current account deficit. This article examines the sustainability of relying on capital inflows, remittances and services exports to sustain these persistent trade and current account deficits. It argues that all three sources entail elements of fragility. The recent global economic slowdown, economic recessions in the United States and Europe, slow economic recovery, low growth forecasts and possibility of a secular slowdown in the United States and Europe raise questions about whether services exports and remittances can continue to generate sufficient earnings to offset trade deficits. Relying on capital inflows also carries risks of financial fragility, with short‐term capital inflows and external commercial borrowings becoming more prominent in the Indian economy.     

The Economic Logic of Persistent Informality: Artisanal and Small‐Scale Mining in the Southern Philippines

This article critically evaluates existing causal explanations for the persistence of informality in artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM). These explanations share a legalistic focus on entry barriers and political impediments that prevent or discourage the formalization of poverty‐driven ASM operators: however, they fail to fully explain cases such as that of the Philippines, where ASM is characterized by differentiation between a poverty‐driven workforce and a dominant stratum of ASM entrepreneurs. Even where limited formalization frameworks provide ASM with a degree of legal recognition, this recognition is usually restricted to these more powerful ASM interests, while excluding the workforce at large. This article therefore proposes an integrative approach to analysing informality in ASM, which complements the existing legalistic focus on entry barriers with a structuralist concern over the exploitation of informal labour. Seen from this perspective, the massive expansion of ASM in the Philippines can be seen as the product of a transition away from capital‐intensive large‐scale mining to a flexible regime of accumulation built around the exploitation of informal ASM labour. This observation highlights the need to pay more critical attention to the economic logic and the vested interests underlying the (selective) persistence of informality in the workforce.     

War,Livelihoods and Vulnerability in Sri Lanka

As the number of de‐stabilized regions of warfare or post‐war conditions worldwide continues to grow, this article investigates how civilians survive in the context of a civil war. It analyses livelihood strategies of farmers in the war‐torn areas of Sri Lanka, using an analytical framework based on a revised form of DFID's sustainable rural livelihoods approach, placing particular attention on the institutional reproduction of household capital assets in the war economy. The author delineates a three pillar model of household livelihood strategies focusing on how households (1) cope with the increased level of risk and uncertainty; (2) adjust their economic and social household assets for economic survival; and (3) use their social and political assets as livelihood strategies. Empirical evidence comes from four case study villages in the east of Sri Lanka. Although the four case studies were very close together geographically, their livelihood outcomes differed considerably depending on the very specific local political geography. The role of social and political assets is essential: while social assets (extended family networks) were important to absorb migrants, political assets (alliances with power holders) were instrumental in enabling individuals, households or economic actors to stabilize or even expand their livelihood options and opportunities. The author concludes that civilians in conflict situations are not all victims (some may also be culprits in the political economy of warfare), and that war can be both a threat and an opportunity, often at the same time.