The subject of return: land and livelihood struggles for place and citizenship

Abstract

With the end of Sri Lanka's war in 2009 and even before, as the Sri Lankan Armed Forces captured and cleared Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-controlled areas in the country's North and East, displaced families returned ‘home’ to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. However, the substantive reality of return shows that displacement does not end upon returning ‘home’. I demonstrate how the physical inability to access houses, land and resources renders return incomplete, how that ‘incompleteness’ is a constitutive part of how the returned create place and a sense of belonging, and negotiate their sense of self as Sri Lankan citizens. The subject of return is political; it is process and personhood. Through an examination of the subject of return and the claims and losses of the returned in the North and East, I show how displacement raises the question of the politics of return, the politics of which a postwar process of reconciliation must grapple with.

Keywords:

• displacement
• resettlement and return
• land
• conflict-affected environments
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Gayatri Menon for suggesting the trope, ‘the subject of return’. The Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) with a grant from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Sri Lanka supported the Trincomalee fieldwork. The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) provided logistical support in Trincomalee and Jaffna. I thank my fieldwork assistants from the UNOPS Applied Research Unit (ARU) for their careful note taking and close listening to the displaced. I received valuable feedback from Lauren Kuritz, Gayatri Menon, Kanchana Ruwanpura, and three anonymous reviewers on earlier iterations of this paper. All errors, however, remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Cynthia Caron http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1990-6529

Notes

1 Administratively, provinces are divided into districts, districts into divisional secretariat divisions (DSDs) and DSDs into GN divisions. Any number of adjacent villages makes up a GN division.

2 Many humanitarian actors accused the Sri Lankan Government of forcefully returning displaced persons from camps in Batticaloa back to Muttur and Eechilampattu DS divisions, which violates the international principle of voluntary return (Human Rights Watch 2007).

3 With the release of land from HSZs that started in 2015, this 18% figure has decreased. At the time of writing, I cannot find an authoritative figure that states the current amount of land under HSZ status on the Jaffna peninsula.

4 To protect respondents’ identities, Parakulam is a pseudonym. As Amirthalingam and Lakshman note ‘dangerous ground conditions' characterized field research in Sri Lanka's North and East in 2007–2008 (2015, 144). In order to protect informants and the NGOs' staff who accompanied the research team to this site, I do not provide any additional location details.

5 A detailed discussion of the literature on suffering for land/territory is beyond the scope of this article (see Moore 1998; Cons 2012).

6 Economic development activities within an HSZ have significant impacts for local livelihoods. Satellite imagery of the Vilikamam HSZ, the number of structures built within the zone between 2009 and 2014, increased from 3215 to 4731 units with associated removal tropical vegetation. http://www.aaas.org/page/monitoring-change-sri-lankas-valikamam-high-security-zone-2009-2014 (last accessed 2 January 2015). Satellite imagery of the Vilikamam HSZ shows the change that continued to occur after this 2011 declaration. For an analysis of these dynamics in tsunami-affected areas of Colombo, see Caron (2009).