LIBERAL PEACE IN QUESTION: THE SRI LANKAN CASE

Kristian Stokke

Sri Lanka has repeatedly gained international attention among scholars of politics and development as an illustrative case of development theory and practice. This was initiated with Sri Lanka's strong emphasis on import-substitution industrialisation and social welfare in the 1960s and 70s, but the country also gained critical attention for its shift to economic liberalisation in 1977 as well as the subsequent coexistence of neoliberalism, authoritarianism and armed insurgencies in the 1980s. The last decade has seen a new focus on Sri Lanka as a test case for internationalised conflict resolution and liberal peacebuilding in protracted intrastate conflicts. The final attempt at negotiating an end to the armed conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was characterised by active involvement by a range of international actors as facilitators, donors and monitors of liberal peace. From being an intrastate conflict that was of little relevance beyond the South Asian sub-continent, Sri Lanka became a test for liberal peacebuilding facilitated and funded by the US-led 'international community' (Goodhand and Klem 2005, Liyanage 2008, Lunstead 2007). As the peace process broke down and was replaced by an intense and successful military campaign by the government, Sri Lanka has been seen by some as providing evidence of the possibility of defeating 'terrorism' and creating peace by military means. Other observers emphasise that the final stage of the conflict demonstrates the changing geopolitics of the Indian Ocean and an emerging new politics of security and order as well as the injustice and humanitarian costs of a victor's peace.

The present book is placed within this tradition of using Sri Lanka as a critical case to address broader questions about politics and development. The objective is to examine the internationally facilitated peace process between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in order to provide critical insights on contemporary attempts at crafting liberal peace in intrastate conflicts. The internationalisation of conflict resolution and liberal peacebuilding that has characterised Sri Lanka in recent years reflects changing international discourses and practices in regard to the links between security, development and peace. During the Cold War, international aid was to a large extent subsumed under the global rivalry between US-dominated capitalism and Soviet-led socialism. Concerns about human rights and democracy were thus downplayed by the donors. This changed from the late 1980s when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumphalism of Western liberalism provided a space for liberal concerns about governance and the links between neoliberal development, liberal democracy and liberal peace. In the 1990s it was increasingly recognised that conflicts pose obstacles to successful development, but also that development could be an instrument for crafting liberal peace (Jarstad and Sisk 2008, Paris 2004, Richmond 2007). Furthermore, the fear of transnational impacts of localised wars made the resolution of intrastate conflicts a matter of global security. Following from this, international development cooperation has undergone a general shift from being conflict-blind in the sense that development aid was offered without taking conflicts into consideration, to offering aid in a conflict-sensitive manner, and increasingly also using development assistance as a tool for transforming conflicts and building liberal peace (Anderson 1999, Goodhand 2006).

The Sri Lankan conflict situation in the late 1990s was conducive for this kind of liberal peacebuilding. Sri Lanka was characterised by a protracted intrastate conflict that had reached a mutually hurting stalemate and produced a humanitarian and development crisis that made both the GOSL and the LTTE willing to sign a Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), enter into political negotiations and address humanitarian and developmental needs. At the same time, Sri Lanka's aid donors were committed to making Sri Lanka a showcase for liberal peacebuilding and found like-minded partners in the market-friendly United National Front government led by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and, to some extent, in the Political Wing of LTTE and the network around LTTE's chief negotiator, Anton Balasingham. Thus, domestic and international stakeholders converged around an internationally facilitated negotiation process between GOSL and LTTE supported by aid-funded liberal peacebuilding.

Against this background of internationalised liberal peacebuilding the purpose of the present book is to broaden the perspective on conflict resolution from elitist peace negotiations to the contextual politics of rights, representation and welfare. The aim is to extend the focus from technocratic concerns with formal negotiations and delivery of humanitarian and development aid, to the politics of state reforms for liberal democracy, minority rights and power-sharing and the associated politics of market reforms for neoliberal development. In examining the contextual politics of state and market reforms in Sri Lanka, the contributing authors highlight the tensions between liberal peace and Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms, manifested as contestations over international facilitation vs. local ownership of peace, exclusion vs. inclusion in peace negotiations, individual human rights vs. group rights, territorial power sharing vs. state sovereignty and neoliberal development vs. social welfare. In general terms, the book highlights the conflict producing consequences of social and political exclusion and the centrality of political and social inclusivity to ensure sustainable and just peace. The Sri Lankan case raises a number of critical questions about whether the present model of internationally supported elite-crafted liberal peace can ensure this kind of social and political inclusion.

As a point of departure, the present chapter provides a general introduction to the Sri Lankan conflict and outlines the arguments that are developed in the subsequent chapters. The chapter is organised in three sections, where the first section provides a basic overview of the character and political dynamics of the conflict. This is followed by a section that examines the framing of intrastate conflicts within international development and security discourse and the practical geopolitics of crafting transitions from intrastate conflict to liberal peace. The third section shifts the focus from international relations to the contextual politics of liberal peace, with a special emphasis on the politics of building 'peace through development' in Sri Lanka. The chapter concludes with some key lessons from the Sri Lankan case with broader relevance to attempts at crafting liberal peace in intrastate conflicts.

The Making of Intrastate Conflict in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka was for 26 years – from the anti-Tamil riots in July 1983 to the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009 – locked in a protracted intrastate conflict between the Sinhalese-dominated Government of Sri Lanka and a militant Tamil nationalist movement demanding recognition and self-determination for the Tamil nation and homeland (Tamil Eelam) in North-East Sri Lanka. Tamil nationalism can be traced back to the discursive construction and institutionalization of ethnic identities and representation under British colonial rule and the subsequent demands for communal political representation in the late colonial period. After Independence in 1948, Tamil nationalism took the form of a non-violent and democratic movement for power sharing based on federalism, but was later radicalized into a separatist movement in the 1970s that came to be dominated by militant organizations in the 1980s (Balasingham 2004, Cheran 2009, Gunasingam 1999, Manogaran and Pfaffenberger 1994, Stokke and Ryntveit 2000, Vaitheespara 2006, Wilson 2000). This militant separatist movement consisted initially of a plethora of groups and five major organizations: Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS) and People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). These five were initially united within the Eelam National Liberation Front (ENLF), but internal clashes in the late 1980s left LTTE in a dominant position and claiming to be the 'sole representative' of the Tamil nation (Hellmann-Rajanayagam 1994, Swamy 1994). The period of protracted conflict between the LTTE and the GOSL from 1983 to 2009 was also marked by armed confrontations between LTTE and an Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) that came to Sri Lanka under the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987, between LTTE and Muslims, and between LTTE and a breakaway faction in the Eastern Province. The Sri Lankan state was also brought close to a collapse in an armed conflict with the Sinhalese nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna ( JVP) in the 'South' (i.e. the Sinhalese-dominated areas) in the late 1980s. This means that the period from 1983 to 2009 was marked by an armed ethnonationalist conflict between the Sinhalese-dominated Government of Sri Lanka and Tamil militant separatism, but also intra-ethnic violence as well as political alliances across ethnic divides.

The complexity of this conflict defies simplistic explanations, whether they emphasize primordial ethnic identities and historical animosities, ethnic stratification and internal colonialism, or insurgency greed and terrorism. The common point of departure for this book is that the authors give a certain primacy to the political sphere, which means that they emphasize the role of domestic political dynamics in the making of the conflict while also placing these political dynamics within a political economic and geopolitical context. Seen from this perspective, the conflict in Sri Lanka is politically produced and perpetuated through the interplay between institutional arrangements for human rights, democratic representation and governance, and political practices around rights, identities and interests (Luckham, Goetz and Kaldor 2003). While institutional arrangements may provide political spaces for accommodating difference through inclusive democratic politics, they may also be marked by democracy deficits that yield divisive identity politics and ethnic outbidding leading to further institutional decay and armed conflict (Miall 2007, Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall 2005). Unpacking this complex relationship between political institutions and practices may produce a more nuanced understanding of when and how democracy accommodates difference or aggravates grievances and triggers armed conflicts. This adds causal and contextual complexity to the democratic peace thesis, which simply states that democracies are more peaceful than non-democratic regimes both in intrastate and international affairs (Paris 2004, Richmond 2007).

The chosen focus on the positive or negative links between democratic institutions, political practices and intrastate conflicts is inspired by our contextual knowledge of Sri Lanka as well as recent experiences and debates regarding transitions to liberal democracy. Democratic transitions within the so-called 3rd wave of democratization have focused on elitist crafting of the basic institutional requirements and procedures of liberal democracy, most notably a liberal state with rule of law, individual citizenship rights and free and fair multi-party elections, under the assumption that democratic politics will follow from liberal democratic institutions. Several observers have pointed out that recent democratic transitions have established the formal institutional requirements for democracy, but also demonstrated that there is no guarantee that such institutional reforms will yield comprehensive political transformations towards substantive democracy (Beetham 1999, Carothers 2004, Harriss, Törnquist and Stokke 2004, Törnquist, Webster and Stokke 2010). This has made some scholars talk about formal and minimalist democracy rather than real and substantive democratization, drawing attention to the fact that real world democracies contain a complex mix of democratic and non-democratic institutions and politics, and that these define democracy's effectiveness in accommodation difference and managing conflict (Bastian and Luckham 2003, Snyder 2000). The Sri Lankan experience with a protracted intrastate conflict in the context of a consolidated liberal democracy is hence not a unique exception to the liberal peace thesis, but an exemplary case of how democratic spaces and deficits offer possibilities and constraints for inclusive politics and conflict resolution.

De Votta observes that political representation in polyethnic societies like Sri Lanka may either promote ethnic coexistence or outbidding, where "ethnic coexistence is most likely when the political structure encourages polyethnic coalitions, and ethnic outbidding is most likely when the political structure encourages competition among ethnic parties" (De Votta 2004, 11). Ethnic identities, territoriality and socioeconomic grievances constitute preconditions for ethnonationalist politics in Sri Lanka. De Votta observes, however, that the key mechanisms behind postcolonial Sinhalese and Tamil nationalism are to be found in the way political opportunity structures have facilitated Sinhalese and Tamil ethnonationalist mobilisation and outbidding, yielding ethnic majoritarianism, minority resistance and decaying democratic institutions. This history of escalating ethnonationalist politics and institutional decay has evolved as an accumulative process through four distinct periods, characterised by: (i) institutionalisation of liberal democracy without communal rights and representation (1948–1956); (ii) elite-led ethnonationalist political incorporation combined with state expansion and welfarism (1956–1970); (iii) institutionalisation of majority domination with radicalised minority resistance (1970–1977), and; (iv) political centralisation and mutually (iv) reinforcing militarisation of Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms (1977–2009). The argument is thus, in brief, that the chosen institutional design for liberal democracy have framed politics in an ethnonationalist manner that have ensured a degree of popular political inclusion, but also produced institutional decay, undemocratic political practices, uneven development and protracted intrastate conflict. Subsequent chapters will demonstrate the strong influence of these institutional-political dynamics for Sri Lanka's 5th peace process, when ethnonationalist institutional arrangements and political practices defined the space for conflict resolution and in the end undermined the attempt at elitist crafting of liberal peace.

Institutionalisation of Liberal Democracy (1948–1956)

In Sri Lanka, the transition from British colonial rule was an elite affair with heated debates within the elite about the form of political representation, but little popular mobilisation for sovereignty and democracy. The first constitution of Sri Lanka (1948) was characterised by a unitary state with Parliament as the supreme political authority. It granted universal suffrage and introduced a first-past-the-post electoral system in a Westminster model of centralised government, but without a bill of rights, a strong independent judiciary or other arrangements to ensure communal rights, representation and power-sharing (Coomaraswamy 2003, Wriggins 1960). This constitution was designed to ensure governmental efficiency and worked under the assumption that only an individualistic liberal model of democracy could provide safeguards against communalism. However, this followed after a period when British colonialism had already introduced discourses on identities as fixed and stable entities, institutionalised ethnic categories through diverse technologies of rule and linked ethnic identities to political rights and communal representation (Gunasingam 1990, Hellman-Rajanayagam 1994, Wickramasinghe 2006).