Between the local and the diasporic: the shifting centre of gravity in war-torn Sri Lanka's transnational politics

Abstract

In May 2009, Sri Lankan government armed forces defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after more than a quarter of a century of civil war. With the elimination of most of the LTTE leadership and the waning of its hold over Tamils in Sri Lanka and abroad, the scene was set for a transformation of relations between the diaspora and those at home. It is the dynamics of this transformation that we explore in this article, which traces the shifting centre of gravity in Tamil politics between actors in the homeland and those in the diaspora. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of a ‘political field', we characterise what we call the local, diasporic and transnational political fields in the Sri Lankan setting. This article shows how the LTTE's power derived largely from its control of the transnational political field, including in places that were otherwise isolated from diasporic connections. The defeat in 2009 fundamentally changed the dynamics of transnational politics by greatly weakening the LTTE's grip over the transnational political field, and this article explores the new dispensation that is now unfolding.

Keywords:

• Sri Lanka
• civil war
• diaspora
• transnationalism
• political field

Acknowledgements

As well as at the British Association for South Asian Studies conference on which this special issue is based, parts of this article have been aired at various seminars, workshops and conferences in the UK and elsewhere. We are grateful for all the useful comments offered in those meetings. We also thank the editors of this special issue and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments. The article develops and elaborates work which first appeared as `Shifting between the local and transnational: space, power and politics in war-torn Sri Lanka', in Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, edited by Stig Toft-Madsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Uwe Skoda, 239–257. London: Anthem Press (2011).

Notes

1. Department of Census and Statistics: http://www.statistics.gov.lk/home.asp (accessed 25 May 2010).

2. ‘Muslim’ is considered an ethnic group in Sri Lanka. ‘Indian Tamils’ were brought by the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work in plantations or estates and are a group distinct from much longer settled ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cathrine Brun

The authors contributed equally to this manuscript.