Sri Lanka’s Schmittian peace: sovereignty, enmity and illiberal order

ABSTRACT

The dominant discourses and practices of post-Cold War liberal peace-building are increasingly challenged by illiberal and authoritarian alternatives. This article adds to the emerging literature on ‘authoritarian conflict management’ and ‘illiberal peace’ using the work of the controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt, the foremost theoretician of anti-liberal thought in the twentieth-century. I use the case of Sri Lanka to illustrate how Schmitt can be useful in understanding illiberal peace, not merely as an aberration from liberal norms of conflict resolution, but as an alternative paradigm that has an increasing global resonance beyond particular case studies. The Schmittian framework suggests that the most likely trend for post-liberal peace is not towards an emancipatory model of hybridity and compromise, but a retrograde ‘illiberal turn’ towards authoritarian political order and highly illiberal practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Illiberal peace
• post-liberal
• Schmitt
• sovereignty
• spatial politics
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

I presented an earlier version of this paper at a conference at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS), Colombo, Sri Lanka, 29 June 2017. I would like to thank Rajesh Venugopal, Nicholas Farrelly, Claire Smith, and the other conference organisers for an invitation and funding to attend the conference. I would also like to thank Lars Waldorf and Gerard McCarthy for all their work in bringing this Special Issue to publication, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lewis, ‘The Failure’; Goodhand, Korf and Spencer, Conflict and Peace-building; Piccolino, ‘Winning Wars’; Russell, ‘Ramzan Kadyrov’s “Illiberal Peace”’; Smith, ‘Illiberal Peace-building’; Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’.

2. See Smith et al., ‘Illiberal peace-building in Asia’, and Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’.

3. Sørbø et al., Pawns of Peace.

4. ICG, War Crimes; ICG, Reconciliation in Sri Lanka; Goodhand, ‘Stabilising a Victor’s Peace?; Höglund and Orjuela, ‘Winning the Peace; Höglund and Orjuela, ‘Hybrid Peace Governance’; Lewis, ‘Counterinsurgency in Sri Lanka’; Weiss, The Cage.

5. Jarstad and Sisk, From War to Democracy; Paris, At War’s End; Toft, Securing the Peace; Zürcher et al., Costly Democracy.

6. Paris, At War’s End.

7. Kovacs and Svensson, ‘The Return of Victories?’.

8. Cooley, ‘Countering Democratic Norms’; Wolff and Zimmermann, ‘Between Banyans and Battle Scenes’.

9. Stuenkel, ‘The BRICS’; Rotmann et al., ‘Major Powers’.

10. Paris, At War’s End.

11. Lewis, ‘The Myopic Foucauldian Gaze’.

12. Soares de Oliveira, ‘Illiberal Peace-building in Angola’; Piccolino, ‘Winning Wars’; Russell, ‘Ramzan Kadyrov’s “Illiberal Peace”’; Smith, ‘Illiberal Peace-building’; Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’.

13. Smith, ‘Illiberal Peace-building’.

14. Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’.

15. Bluhm and Varga, New Conservatives.

16. There are several biographical works in English on Carl Schmitt, of which Bendersky, Carl Schmitt remains the most readable and sympathetic, and Mehring, Carl Schmitt, the most comprehensive.

17. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique; Müller, A Dangerous Mind.

18. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.

19. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 53.

20. Ibid., 26.

21. Ibid., 32.

22. Ibid., 33.

23. Legg, Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt; Minca and Rowan, On Schmitt and Space.

24. Schmitt, Nomos.

25. Schmitt, ‘The Großraum Order’, 87.

26. Ibid.

27. Schmitt, Political Theology, 13.

28. Schmitt, On the Three Types, 74.

29. Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’; Smith, ‘Illiberal Peace-building’.

30. Glasius, ‘What Authoritarianism Is’; Koch, ‘Orientalizing Authoritarianism.’

31. Schmitt, Political Theology, 13.

32. ICG, Sri Lanka’s Authoritarian Turn.

33. Jayewardene and other previous presidents had also attempted to revive this monarchical lineage in an attempt to legitimise their aspirations for extensive presidential powers.

34. Coomaraswamy and de los Reyes, ‘Rule by Emergency’; Satkunanathan, ‘The Executive and the Shadow State’.

35. Coomaraswamy and de los Reyes, ‘Rule by Emergency’, 283.

36. Schmitt, On Dictatorship.

37. UN Secretary General, Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts, 17.

38. ICG, War Crimes; University Teachers for Human Rights, ‘Slow Strangulation of Jaffna’; HRW, Recurring Nightmare; UN, Report of the OHCHR Investigation.

39. Agamben, State of Exception, 32–35; Head, Emergency Powers; Hagmann & Korf, ‘Agamben in the Ogaden’, 210; Keen, ‘The Camp’.

40. Agamben, State of Exception, 51, 40.

41. Schmitt, Political Theology, 12.

42. ICG, War Crimes; UN Secretary General, Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts, 23–30.

43. ICG, War Crimes, 14.

44. UN Secretary General, Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts, 17.

45. Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’; Lewis and Sagnayeva, ‘Corruption, Patronage and Illiberal Peace’.

46. HRW, Funding the ‘Final War’, 1–2.

47. UTHR(J), ‘“In the Name of ‘Peace”’.

48. DeVotta, ‘Sri Lanka: From Turmoil to Dynasty’, 142; US Department of State, ‘Sri Lanka’.

49. Roberts, ‘The Superficiality of Statebuilding’; Soares de Oliveira, ‘Illiberal Peace-building in Angola’; Zabyelina, ‘Buying Peace’.

50. Cheng and Zaum, Corruption; Lewis and Sagnayeva, ‘Corruption, Patronage and Illiberal Peace’; Lewis et al., ‘Illiberal Peace?’; Zabyelina and Arsovska, ‘Rediscovering Corruption’s Other Side’.

51. Abi-Habib, ‘How China Got Sri Lanka’.

52. Reuters, ‘Sri Lanka Court’.

53. Al-Jazeerah, ‘Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa Swears in Brother’.

54. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 19.

55. Ibid., 45.

56. Rajapaksa, ‘Address by Pres. Rajapaksa to Los Angeles World Affairs Council’.

57. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’; Collier et al. ‘Beyond Greed and Grievance’. See Keen, ‘Greed and Grievance’, for a critique.

58. Spencer, Anthropology; Spencer, ‘A Nationalism without Politics’.

59. Spencer, Anthropology, 180.

60. Venugopal, ‘The Making of Sri Lanka’s Post-Conflict Economic Package’.

61. Ismail, Abiding by Sri Lanka; see also Stepan, ‘India, Sri Lanka, and the Majoritarian Danger’.

62. Ismail, Abiding by Sri Lanka, 34.

63. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 14.

64. Ibid., 9.

65. Mouffe, The Challenge, 41.

66. Rajapaksa, ‘President Rajapaksa’s Speech to Parliament’.

67. Wallace, ‘Confronting Wrongs, Affirming Difference’, 202–203.

68. Moore, ‘The Ideological History’, 190.

69. Rajapaksa, ‘President Rajapaksa’s Speech to Parliament’.

70. De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 21.

71. DeVotta, ‘Sri Lanka: From Turmoil to Dynasty’, 130.

72. ODI, Humanitarian Space, 3; Keen, ‘“The Camp”’, 11.

73. Walton, ‘Conflict, Peace-building and NGO Legitimacy’.

74. Seoighe, War, Denial and Nation-Building, 22.

75. Peterson, ‘Creating Space’.

76. Peterson, ‘Creating Space’, 325.

77. ICG, Sri Lanka: The Failure; Lewis, ‘Sri Lanka’.

78. Schmitt, The Leviathan, 74.

79. Jurkevics, ‘Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt’, 350.

80. Spencer, ‘Performing Democracy’, 729.

81. ICG, Sri Lanka’s Potemkin Peace, ii.

82. Ramachandran, ‘Sri Lanka’s Anti-Muslim Violence’.

83. Klem, ‘The Problem of Peace’.

84. Al Maeena, ‘Neo-Fascism on the Rise’.

85. There is, of course, an alternative perspective on liberal international order, which emphasises its assertion of state spaces and its securitisation of state boundaries against transnational mobility, including the physical movement of refugees. For an argument that the essentially state-centric model of international relations that underpins the liberal international order contributed to the failure of peace in Sri Lanka, see Rampton and Nadarajah, ‘A Long View’. See also Nadarajah, ‘The Tamil Proscriptions’, for a wide-ranging critique of ‘global liberal order-making’ and its impact on the Sri Lankan conflict.

86. Galli, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Golden Age’, 20.

87. Rampton, ‘A Game of Mirrors’.

88. Wijeyeratne, ‘Galactic Polities’, 222.

89. Rampton, ‘A Game of Mirrors’, 375.

90. Wijeyeratne, ‘Galactic Polities’, 217.

91. Schmitt, Nomos, 42.

92. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 92.

93. Moore, ‘The Ideological History’, 180.

94. Rampton, ‘A Game of Mirrors’, 378.

95. Ibid., 379.

96. Ibid., 379.

97. Wilson, Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism.

98. Mampilly, Rebel Rulers; Staniland, Networks of Rebellion.

99. Brenner, ‘Authority in Rebel Groups’, 409.

100. Terpstra and Frerks, ‘Rebel Governance and Legitimacy’.

101. Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination.

102. DeVotta, ‘Sri Lanka: From Turmoil to Dynasty’, 141.

103. Pieris, ‘Arterial Blockages’, 210.

104. Seoighe, War, Denial and Nation-Building, 158; Satkunathan, ‘The Executive and the Shadow State’; Spencer, ‘Securitization and its Discontents’.

105. According to an ICG report, ‘There are no public, trusted figures for how much land, public or private, the military holds and no transparency regarding often contradictory government claims’. ICG calls for ‘a government baseline study of such land, preferably with the northern and eastern provincial councils and the UN or another international body’, an initiative which they claim ‘would build trust and capacity’. ICG, Sri Lanka’s Transition, 18, fn 69.

106. ICG, Sri Lanka’s Transition, 18; Seoighe, ‘Inscribing the Victor’s Land’; Seoighe, War, Denial and Nation-Building, 168.

107. Klem, ‘The Problem of Peace’, 245.

108. On the concept of the multi-layered state space, see Lewis, ‘The Contested State’.

109. Goodhand et al., ‘Mediating the Margins’, 818.

110. Seoighe, War, Denial and Nation-Building, 165.

111. Perera, ‘Rebuilding Lives’, 190.

112. Klem, ‘The Political Geography of War’s End’, 44.

113. Spencer, ‘Securitization’, 107.

114. Burke and Perera, ‘Sri Lanka’s New President’.

115. For a more detailed account, see Lewis, Russia’s New Authoritarianism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David G. Lewis

David G. Lewis is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on comparative authoritarianism and peace and conflict studies. He previously worked for the International Crisis Group in Central Asia and Sri Lanka, and as Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford.