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Book review by Alex Argenti-Pillen, American Ethnologist, July 2006
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The debate on economics and interethnic warfare thereby becomes triangulated and developed as a tension between adaptation to open economic policies, wartime economic survival strategies, and participation in civil warfare itself. Violence continues to emerge at this articulation between a further developing open economy and a war economy on the ground. The chilling predictive quality of this work is based on a comparison of the economic direction taken since 1977 and its role in fueling ethnic violence, on the one hand, and current planning documents by the government of Sri Lanka and the World Bank (the Country Assistance Strategy), on the other hand... The aid packages used to lubricate current peace negotiations, however, reveal striking similarities precisely with the post-1977 economic policies linked to the emergence of ethnic warfare in Sri Lanka. |
American Ethnologist Volume 33 Number 3 Aug 2006
posted July 2006
Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka. Deborah Winslow and Michael D. Woost, eds.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. xiv + 242pp. , map, tables, references, index.
Alex Argenti-Pillen
University College London
This is an exceptional collection of essays that makes a major contribution to the anthropology of war and conflict. The volume emerged from a multidisciplinary workshop held at the New England Center, University of New Hampshire in 2000, at which the links between developments in the post-1977 Sri Lankan economy and interethnic conflict were explored. The debate is articulated around Newton Gunasinghe’s seminal article “The Open Economy and Its Impact on Ethnic Relations in Sri Lanka” (Lanka Guardian, 1984). Gunasinghe’s piece, published in the aftermath of the anti-Tamil riots of 1983, maps the complex connections between open economic policies and the increase in interethnic violence. Multiple perspectives on the economy are the entry point for this study, which the editors define as a postethnicity argument. The originality of this study lies in its lack of dependence on discourses about ethnicity and nationalism and its focus on the new socioeconomic formation that developed under conditions of liberalization and chronic civil war.
Deborah Winslow and Michael D. Woost clearly mark this move toward an economic analysis of Sri Lanka’s civil war as differing from the stereotypical focus on conflict entrepreneurs and greed as a sustaining principle of civil war. In fact, they denounce the policy recommendations of Paul Collier, director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, as “dangerous, possibly leading to more conflict rather than less” (p. 16). Such recommendations fail to take political grievances or human rights into account and instead focus on economic liberalization and growth to reduce poverty and placate greedy rebels without a cause. Contributors to this volume provide a nuanced antidote to such discourses, which circulate within a World Bank and IMF keen to reintegrate war-ravaged economies into the global market.
What is most striking about this volume is its predictive value, a rare commodity in social-science research. Contributors define the new socioeconomic formation of violence that emerged during three decades of civil war in terms of people’s everyday survival strategies. The debate on economics and interethnic warfare thereby becomes triangulated and developed as a tension between adaptation to open economic policies, wartime economic survival strategies, and participation in civil warfare itself. Violence continues to emerge at this articulation between a further developing open economy and a war economy on the ground. The chilling predictive quality of this work is based on a comparison of the economic direction taken since 1977 and its role in fueling ethnic violence, on the one hand, and current planning documents by the government of Sri Lanka and the World Bank (the Country Assistance Strategy), on the other hand. As liberalization and privatization played a crucial role in the articulation of spaces of death and atrocity in Sri Lanka, a social formation of “No War/No Peace” emerged (a term the editors borrow from Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu). The aid packages used to lubricate current peace negotiations, however, reveal striking similarities precisely with the post-1977 economic policies linked to the emergence of ethnic warfare in Sri Lanka. The authors conclude, “A peace pact and concomitant influx of aid may make the formations of violence invisible but not inactive” (p. 202). They thereby challenge a key cornerstone of World Bank and IMF views on the role of development and opening up markets in war-torn societies: “Peace is not a matter of promoting forgiveness or reconciliation and then making it possible to get on with economic growth” (p. 204).
Contributors collaborate to highlight that economic growth and the format in which it is prescribed by global institutions was not only a root cause of interethnic war in Sri Lanka but also continues to fuel violence in its current format of postwar international development initiatives. Moreover, the authors make the reader seriously consider that the situation of “No War/No Peace” might have no end in sight. Such work challenges the current optimism that many social scientists project into texts about resistance, experiences of violence, suffering, and coping, and reconciliation and conflict resolution. Such a critical stance is made possible on the basis of this volume’s exceptional multidisciplinary grounding: a macroview of the relationship between policy and conflict (by political scientists John M. Richardson Jr. and Amita Shastri), a consideration of the class- and ethnicity-based experience of open economic policies (by sociologists Gunasinghe and Siri T. Hettige), and, finally, an extremely engaging view from below (by anthropologists Francesca Bremner, Michele Ruth Gamburd, and Caitrin Lynch).
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