Micro-level experiences, understandings and visions of peace in Sri Lanka’s war victory

ABSTRACT

It is widely recognised in contemporary peace and conflict scholarship that exploring micro-level experiences is important for a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the forms of peace that emerge post-war. In this article, we argue that such inquiry might be particularly urgent in the context of a victor’s peace. Much research on victor’s peace focus on the state and macro level and seldom account for the outcome across local contexts. Based on focus group discussions conducted across communities and geographical localities in Sri Lanka, we explore and compare narratives of peace in order to elucidate plural understandings, experiences and visions. The study moves beyond the dichotomous peace conceptions often associated with the notion of victor’s peace and provides insights into varieties of peace at the local and everyday level, and into challenges and possibilities for transforming conflict relationships post-war.

KEYWORDS:

• Micro-level peace
• varieties of peace
• victor’s peace
• Sri Lanka
• sub-state level comparisons
• peace conceptualisations

Introduction

It is widely recognised in contemporary peace and conflict scholarship that exploring micro-level experiences is important for a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the forms of peace that emerge post-war. Several scholarly works aiming to advance studies of peace beyond the absence of war and beyond dichotomous peace conceptions (such as negative and positive peace), stress the need to consider micro-level experiences of citizens living in post-war societies.¹ The ‘local turn’ in peace research and literature on everyday peace has played a pivotal role in this regard, stressing the diversity in how people at the local level understand and experience peace in their everyday lives.² Arguably, exploring how people experience and understand the world around them in relation to the concept of peace is important, because this also comes to shape people’s actions and processes of change.³ For instance, it has been argued that the prospects for transforming a post-war society after a peace settlement largely depend on ordinary peoples’ perceptions of, and support for, that settlement.⁴ Moreover, scholars have argued that the diverse – and sometimes competing – ideas and visions of peace in post-war societies are critical to identify, since such differences are oftentimes at the heart of new conflicts.⁵ Thus, how people experience and make sense of peace is important as this can shape both intergroup and intragroup relationships, and in the end affect the prospects for transforming relationships in divided societies⁶ and prevent a relapse to war.⁷

Inquiring into micro-level understandings of peace might be particularly urgent in the context of a victor’s peace. Previous research stresses how peace that evolves after a war victory is inherently founded upon the victor’s position to dominate post-war developments.⁸ Consequently, peace after a military victory is commonly expected to be unevenly experienced by people on the ‘victorious’ and the ‘defeated’ side.⁹ However, knowledge about the forms of peace that emerge after civil war victories is scarce.¹⁰ Given the predominant state-centric focus of the existing research on victor’s peace, we argue that the research and knowledge gap is particularly critical when it comes to the micro-level perspective.

This article aims to contribute to filling the gap by exploring and comparing micro-level narratives of peace across community groups and geographical localities in post-victory Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been described as a ‘paradigmatic case of victor’s peace’¹¹ following the government’s military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. In order to elucidate plural, and possibly competing, experiences, understandings and visions of peace, we conducted nine focus group discussions (FGDs) with different community groups in Sri Lanka, including Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim communities, in selected geographical localities across the island (including in total 52 individuals). Rather than assuming a binary victor’s peace conception based on a ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ dichotomy, we set out to explore ideas about peace beyond the notion of two main warring parties, recognising that conflict and violence in Sri Lanka has historically occurred along multiple dividing lines.¹² We organised FGDs in five provinces across the country with different socio-cultural features, histories of war, and post-war developments: Northern, Eastern, Central, Southern and Western provinces. This allowed us to explore how people from different community groups experience, understand and envision peace in different parts of the country, including in parts that were less directly affected by the war, such as the Southern and Western provinces.

Through the FGDs, we identify key themes in how peace is experienced and understood across community groups in Sri Lanka beyond dichotomous ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ conceptions. By paying attention to narratives to identify key themes, we also depict nuances within similar conceptualisations. The study contributes with a contextual analysis of the variety and plurality of micro-level experiences and understandings of peace in a victor’s peace setting. We argue that recognising plural narratives of peace is an important step to understand what is needed for peaceful change. The study points to the risk of presuming particular winner-loser narratives, as this might lead analysis to exclude important actors and fail to analyse diversity within community groups along other lines such as geography, urban/rural divides, or class.

The article is organised as follows: Next, we review previous research and outline theoretical points of departure. Thereafter, we discuss the research design and methods, focusing on the FGDs we conducted in Sri Lanka. In the empirical analysis section, we explore narratives of peace that emerged from the FGDs and identify, discuss and compare key themes across community group. Finally, we discuss our findings and conclusions.

Peace conceptualisations and the micro-level

The importance of micro-level experiences and understandings of peace has been stressed in a range of scholarly works aimed at grasping peace in its plurality. One strand of research has explored how micro-level (bottom-up) understandings of peace differ from dominant international or domestic (top-down) peace narratives. For instance, Mac Ginty and Firchow compare bottom-up understandings of peace in a range of African contexts to the top-down narratives underpinning the work of international peacebuilders, and identify differences both in terms of which issues are raised in relation to the concept of peace, and how they are raised and discussed.¹³ Zooming in on the domestic sphere, Çelik shows how dominant narratives fostered by national elites in Türkiye have worked to exclude and foreclose alternative understandings of peace in society.¹⁴ The dominance of particular peace narratives fostered by national elites resonates well with the context of the victor’s peace, such as in Sri Lanka, where peacebuilding practices are predominantly domestically driven by national elites.¹⁵ As Lewis stress, in Sri Lanka the victor’s peace is upheld by a particular discourse of history and war that supports, and is sustained by, a dominant peace narrative favourable to powerful national elites.¹⁶ Some previous studies address memorialisation and victimisation in relation to these dominant elite narratives in Sri Lanka with focus on the Tamil population in the contested and war-affected areas in the North and East of the country.¹⁷ However, research on micro-level variation across groups and geographies in Sri Lanka is surprisingly limited. Without such knowledge and understanding, we cannot fully understand how micro-level experiences and understandings of peace resonate with, or contradict, dominant peace narratives; what the key lines of conflict and tension are between different narratives (both vertically and horizontally); and, by extension, what is needed for more comprehensive and nation-wide conflict transformation.

There are some recent exceptions that do address micro-level variations in Sri Lanka. Carey et al survey perceptions of peace in order to capture micro-level attitudes among Sinhala and Tamils towards the quality of peace in relation to the war-victory.¹⁸ They found divergent perceptions of peace: Tamils (referred to as the ‘defeated’ side) generally assessed improvements in the quality of peace post-war more negatively compared to Sinhala (the ‘victorious’ side). At the same time, Sinhala respondents were generally more pessimistic about the future prospects for peace and political stability. This pessimism among Sinhala, the authors argue, is grounded in contemporary political concerns around ‘threats to stability’, rather than by a concern along war-time ethnic cleavages (since this is not seen as a threat from a ‘victor’s’ position).¹⁹ Thus, the results from this study indicate variation in micro-level perceptions, but also that conventional assumptions about how peace is expected to be perceived from the ‘defeated’ versus the ‘victorious’ side are not so straight forward. A study by Premaratna, tracing understanding of peace in Sri Lanka through documentary film, also suggest variation in micro-level perceptions of peace. Likewise, Lonergan shows variation in micro-level perceptions of reconciliation based on everyday indicators collected in Sri Lanka’s war-affected areas.²⁰ Studies like these point to the importance of further investigating how people understand and make sense of peace in the context of war victory. We argue that such analysis merit moving beyond ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ binary assessments of peace as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and beyond exploring attitudes towards a peace settlement, to instead explore plurality of understanding and probing what individual and collective ideas, experiences and structures are underpinning these understandings.

Exploring micro-level narratives of peace

In order to grasp narratives of peace at the micro-level, scholarly exploration of conceptual development and meaning-making around peace at the individual and societal level have proved to be fruitful strategies.²¹ Like Bachleitner theorise about the legacies of wars, we assume that individuals narrate their experiences of peace both as individuals and groups, and these narratives form collective legacies and understandings.²² Narratives at the individual and society levels can be expected to differ from the narratives driven by political elites since micro-level narratives often do not serve the same purpose as elite narratives of ‘forg[ing] loyalty or solidarity to the nation’.²³ Thus, exploring micro-level narratives can help us get a fuller picture of the plurality of peace beyond dominant elite level narratives. Moreover, as Stanley and Jackson argue, such ‘everyday narratives’ are important for the prospects of broader conflict transformation, as they also play a role in legitimising, or challenging, elite-driven narratives and discourses.²⁴ Bachleitner likewise stress the importance of individual and group narratives for conflict transformation.²⁵ Focusing on narratives of war and peace in Syria, she emphasises how in this context legacies of war influenced the reconstruction and transformation of collective identity. In this way, the legacies and trauma of war also comes to shape the future formation of peace, she argues, since it ‘demands people revisit and reinvent communal meanings and boundaries’.²⁶ How people narrate both war and peace influence social identity construction, and in turn, can shape conflict transformation and the future formation of peace, but also the formation of new conflict lines. This last point we can see in Sri Lanka post-war with increased alienation, prejudice and violence instigated against the Muslim minority.

Micro-level experiences and understandings of peace may be shaped both by historical legacies of war, socio-cultural features of local contexts, and post-war developments. Post-war landscapes are inherently dynamic, and ideas of peace may be variously constructed and interpreted differently across local contexts.²⁷ Mac Ginty and Firchow show for instance how proximity to violence shapes people’s experiences of peace at the micro-level.²⁸ Experience of violence closer in time correlated with security-related indicators to define peace, such as feeling safe to walk in the streets and going to the shop, while violence further away in time correlated with more ‘positive peace indicators’ relating to social/community cohesion and relationships.²⁹ This underscores the dynamic character of post-war landscapes, as well as how people’s experiences (in this case of violence) may be reflected in their conceptions of peace. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that perceptions might be just as influential in forming peace conceptions as ‘realities on the ground’.³⁰ For example, based on ongoing data collection in Sri Lanka, Firchow reflect on how perceptions of favouritism of a particular ethnic group, rather than an individual’s own experience of such favouritism, informed some of the peace indicators that were articulated in their surveys.³¹ Again, this underscores how both individual and group experiences inform interpretations and meaning-making around the concept of peace.

However, the focus on micro-level narratives has also received criticism for ignoring power relationships. To remedy this, it is important to contextualise individual narratives in the socio-political setting. We suggest that micro-level narratives of peace may have a strong geographical connection, especially in contexts such as Sri Lanka where the regions carry the legacy of particular conflict narratives. In Sri Lanka, ethnic and religious conflict divides manifest in spatial segregation, so that geographical differences in peace both reflect histories of conflict and post-war inequalities and power relations. Social and political processes and struggles related to historical processes of state formation aimed at consolidating the Sri Lankan state have formed violent conflict and war in different parts of the country and continue to shape developments in Sri Lanka post-war. Given this, rather than expecting a neat winner-loser binary, we expect differences in how peace is experienced, understood and envisioned may exist along various ethnic, social, economic, cultural and religious lines shaped by the respondents’ positions in relation to overarching processes such as state formation and majority–minority relationships. While the scope of this particular article is more limited to exploring varieties in peace conceptions, we try to be attentive to these dynamics in our analysis.

Research design and methods

Context

When the Sri Lankan government militarily defeated the LTTE in 2009, many observers noted that this marked the end of war but not an end of conflict in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s long-drawn war can be traced to the post-colonial state formation process which consolidated the Sinhala majority state at the expense of minorities and provoked violent confronting Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms and ethnicised identity politics.³² While scholarly work on conflict in Sri Lanka has largely centred on the government and the LTTE and the demands for a Tamil state, others have stressed that the conflict concerns broader issues of state-society relationships in Sri Lanka. Violence has historically also gone beyond the Sinhala dominated state and Tamil militancy, as exemplified by the LTTE’s discriminatory violence against Muslims in the North in the 1990s, and the Sinhala Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP) insurgency towards the state in the South in the 1970s and 1980s. The post-war period has seen increasing Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism and structural violence against minorities.³³

To grasp divergent narratives of peace in post-war Sri Lanka, we selected five provinces with different histories and legacies of the war and identified localities within each of them for FGDs with participants from different community groups that have been differently positioned during the war (Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim). The Northern Province includes the main contested territories during the war, being the Tamil majority base and the heartland of Tamil politics and separatist claim. We focused our FGDs in the Jaffna peninsula, which was severely war-affected and still faces socio-political and economic challenges post-war.³⁴ We organised one FGD with Tamil and Muslim communities, respectively. Like Tamil communities, Muslim communities in the North also suffered during the war from the state-sponsored warfare, as well as from violence by the LTTE. Post-war, issues of development and resettlement in Jaffna also affect the returning Muslims who were expelled from the North by the LTTE in the 1990s.³⁵

The Eastern Province also include territories that were contested during the war. The province is home to large Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala populations, including areas with Muslim majority and home to one-third of all the Muslims in Sri Lanka. We selected Trincomalee for our FGDs, which is geographically situated in a politically strategic location ensconced between the Northern and Eastern provinces, and was the site of violence instigated from both the government and LTTE.³⁶ Two FGDs were held in Trincomalee, one with Tamil community in Kataparichan, and one with Muslim community in Arafanagar, both located in Muttur in the Trincomalee district in the dry zone along the Eastern coastline.

The Central Province is home to an often-neglected community in relation to the conflict narrative: the Upcountry/Malaiyagam Tamil community. The province is populated mainly with a large number of Sinhala, followed by Tamils and Muslims. The upcountry Tamils are descendants from indentured labourers brought from India in the 1820s to work in the tea and coffee plantations.³⁷ Their history is steeped in physical toil, discrimination, denial citizenship and disfranchisement. The FGD with Malaiyagam Tamil community was held in Hatton, a major town in the Nuwara-Eliya district.

The Southern Province is a Sinhala majority base and heartland of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. This was also the main site of the JVP insurrections that attempted to implement a Maoist revolutionary agenda by creating a new socialist state in the 1970s and 1980s, which were dealt by the armed forces with equal brutality.³⁸ We organised one Sinhala community FGD in the Galle district.

In the Western Province, we organised FGDs with Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala communities in the capital city district of Colombo. The conflict history of the Colombo groups predominantly revolved around bombings, securitisation issues and discrimination due to their ethnicities both during the war (particularly during the mid-1990s) as well as post-war. One FGD was held in Kotahena, a predominantly Tamil urban neighbourhood; one in Colombo city with Muslim community; and one in the suburb of Kelaniya with a Sinhala community.

Probing peace conceptions through focus group discussions (FGDs)

FGDs were deemed particularly useful for the purpose of this study, as such forums can stimulate conversations and elaborations on the meaning of abstract concepts such as peace.³⁹ We organised nine FGDs, and each included 5–6 participants (52 participants in total). The FGDs were organised based on the ethnic communities in Sri Lanka that the participants identify with, aiming to create a safe place for discussions⁴⁰ on sensitive issues related to war and peace in a context where ethnicity has been a key dividing line in the conflict discourse and for different positions during the war. We then strived for diversity across the FGDs in terms of communities and geographical locality. Structuring the FGDs and the analysis based on ethnic communities may involve a risk of reifying ethnic positions that have been central in the conflict discourse. We recognise social identities as complex, fluid and intersectional, where ethnicity is one of the multiple identities that shape people’s experiences, opportunities and inequalities. In a post-war context where the position of ethnic majority and minority communities have clearly been shaped by the war, and where such positions are continuously reinforced by political and social forces that use ethnicity for political mobilisation, we argue that there are advantages of exploring micro-level narratives of peace within this socio-political context.

The FGDs were conducted by one of the authors, Thurairajah. Six (out of nine) were held in Tamil, two in Sinhalese and one in English, and the recordings were transcribed directly into English. Having a trilingual facilitator for the FGDs was useful since simultaneous translations would have affected the flow of the discussions. This also connects to questions around the positionality of Thurairajah as an ‘insider-outsider’,⁴¹ being a female from the Tamil minority community who grew up in Sri Lanka’s war context she has over a decade’s experience working on conflict issues across communities in the country. These experiences facilitated the unpacking of local nuances in the analysis and contributed context-sensitive insights into the selection of localities and participants for the FGDs.

Questions of power hierarchies are always important to consider for the internal composition of focus groups, where in Sri Lanka aspects, such as gender, age, class, caste, and education tend to influence people’s possibility to raise a voice. Of the 52 participants in our FGDs, 35 were female and 17 males. Two of the FGDs were solely with female participants. Among the others, the groups with the highest female representation had five out of six participants being female, and in the lowest one two out of six were female. Most of the FGDs were diverse in terms of age, with a majority of participants being in their 30s, 40s and 50s (the youngest was 22 and the oldest 68). Two groups were with youths in their 20s and early 30s. Most groups were diverse in terms of occupation, including e.g. housewife, teacher, labourer and businessman. One group was solely with housewives, and one group was with research assistants and university students. The process of recruiting participants was guided by a snowball sampling using diverse first contacts to purposely recruit participants away from power hierarchies.

The location of an FGD is important as for the participants to feel comfortable and to ensure their safety, and a neutral, private and easily accessible location is desirable.⁴² In order to protect the identity of participants and enable trusting relationships to develop, we organised the FGDs in safe spaces such as a school, community centre and private homes. This was an inconspicuous approach during a period of increased surveillance, particularly affecting the Muslim population as the FGDs took place in the later parts of 2019, the same year as a series of bomb attacks shook Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. The attacks were orchestrated by Muslim militants targeting Christian churches and a number of hotels in Colombo and killed close to 270 persons and left hundreds injured. The effects of the attacks were severe on Muslim communities in particular, but also Tamil and Sinhala participants of the FGDs frequently referenced the attacks in their discussions about peace.

As we wanted to explore peace from a micro-level everyday perspective, we set out to engage citizens without specific political or civil society engagement. Approaching individuals to discuss about ideas of peace in a context of continuing militarisation is a complicated process. The political environment did significantly open up for a period of time from 2015 and until a regime shift in November 2019 (soon after the FGDs were conducted), which created opportunities for both activism and research. Still, especially among people from the war-affected communities, there are issues of mistrust and a ‘fatigue’ in the constant sharing of experiences and ideas. Furthermore, given our approach to talk to everyday citizens from various walks of life, the process of identifying participants was at times challenging. It can be an issue when people see no monetary value in their participation but also of finding it genuinely difficult to allocate time due to work or family obligations. We tried to be flexible by allowing people to pick a convenient time slot during the day and by providing a travel allowance in remote areas.

The FGDs were guided by a semi-structured format centred around a number of broader open-ended questions. Since we were interested in how participants conceptualise and made sense of peace, we did not ask detailed questions about their view on e.g. particular government policies during or after war, but wanted to keep the questions broader to make room for what would come up in their conversation. Our methods were inspired by the Everyday Peace Indicators project’s methodology, and by the work of Olivius and Hedström using FGDs in a similar way to elicit understandings of peace in Myanmar.⁴³ We started off the FGDs by asking the participants to come up with words they associated with peace that would symbolise what peace meant to them. This exercise is intended to facilitate a deeper discussion based on experiences. Drawing on Olivius and Hedström,⁴⁴ we had also prepared coloured A4 sheets with word associations of peace identified as commonly used in the theoretical literature, and they were written in either Tamil or Sinhalese and placed in the middle of the group whenever someone shared the same word or phrase that matched it closely. This prompted a more elaborated discussion related to that particular word.⁴⁵ Talking about the meaning of peace almost always made the participants share individual and collective past experiences of war, marginalisation and other economic hardships. Such reflections were followed up with more specific questions related to past experiences and the present situation. Below, we discuss key themes that emerged from the FGD.

Experiences, understandings and visions of peace across Sri Lanka

Amongst our interlocutors across community groups and localities, when initially asked to describe the current situation some ten years after the war-ending and whether and to what extent there is peace today, we received a quite unison negative peace conception, i.e. a description of the current situation as an absence of war, but not more. The general sentiment was that the war had ended, but also that people did not experience peace today in their lives. When probing deeper into the discussion about peace, of what it means and their own experiences, more nuances emerged. Below we discuss how our interlocutors from Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala communities reflected upon what peace means for them. We identify key themes within each community but also explore differences within the groups to derive broader understandings of peace amongst communities that have been differently positioned during the war.

Tamil communities FGDs: peace as equality

We organised FGDs with Tamil communities in four provinces: Northern, Eastern, Central and Western. A key theme that emerged across all these FGDs concerned equality as a fundamental dimension of peace, such as equal rights, equal distribution of resources, and equal treatment. The putting forth of equality as a key dimension of peace can be linked to the historical and enduring discrimination and marginalisation of the Tamil minority by the majority Sinhala state. In the FGDs, equality was also often connected to issues of rights, which has been central to the discourse amongst many Tamil communities both during the war and post-war. However, there was also variation amongst the FGDs with Tamil communities across geographical areas of the country in how they narrated in what way equality is an essential component of peace.

In the FGDs with Tamil communities in the Northern and Eastern provinces that were the central stage of the war and separatist struggle, equality was in their peace conception narrated primarily in terms of equal right to development, livelihoods, and distribution of resources. This peace conception reflected both the past collective and individual experience of war and displacement for citizens in these areas, as well as pressing contemporary issues related to poverty and underdevelopment. The FGD with a Tamil group in the Northern Province was held on the island of Velanai, an arid, coastal village southwest of Jaffna town that has seen limited development efforts post-war, except for the rehabilitation of the main roads, and where the biggest issue is the lack of regular water supply. It has a large population of Tamils (predominantly Hindu, with some Christians) and a very small number of Muslims. In their reflections of what peace is and should be, they stressed lingering issues of inequality post-war, related to underdevelopment, livelihoods issues, and unfair distribution of resources. There was a clear connection in their narrative between peace and the right to fulfil one’s basic needs, including material needs. As one participant put it: ‘There is a lack of fundamental rights – there are no toilets, drinking water, roads, housing schemes – it’s been ten years now [since the war ended]’.

While issues of poverty and underdevelopment were similarly emphasised by the Malaiyagam Tamil group in Hatton in the Up-Country region, for this group equality reflected their individual and collective experience of discrimination and marginalisation and of being denied citizenship rights as Malaiyagam Tamils. Based on this experience, equal right to education and labour was important aspects stressed their understanding of what peace implies. The Malaiyaga Tamil community suffer due to marginalisation on many levels, from education to imbalanced wages, basic sanitary needs, housing and citizenship. In contrast to the Northern and Eastern provinces FGDs with Tamil communities where participants emphasised suffering predominantly as an ethnic minority population, the discussions of peace among the Up-Country Tamils revolved around issues of class and caste. This reflects the position this community group holds also in relation to Tamil communities in the North and East who hardly ever addressed their plight.

In the Western Province FGD held with Tamil community in the capital city of Colombo, participants stressed equal respect and treatment as key to their conception of peace. Emphasis on equality was comparatively less related to material issues and the distribution of resources but more to the experience of how one is viewed upon and treated. In their narration of peace, and the lack thereof, participants associated with issues such as being stopped by the police and being disproportionally questioned on the basis of the place of birth put on your identity card or issues of language in official documents. Key to their experiences was how they were treated unequally as Tamils by the state through state officials. But beyond that, their narratives also reflected a sentiment in everyday interactions in society. As one of our interlocutors put it: it concerns the experience of having ‘someone looking at me weirdly when I speak in Tamil’, followed by the statement: ‘The day there is equal treatment of all ethnicities is the day we will have peace’.

Thus, while equality emerged as a key theme in all the FGDs with Tamil communities, differences across regional areas related to social and political processes, minority–majority relationships and legacies of the war also shaped nuances as to what content and meaning FGD participants from different parts of the country put into the word.

Moreover, while equality emerged as the most prevalent theme among these FGDs, it was also clear from our interlocutors that the kind of peace they were envisioning was largely lacking in Sri Lanka today. Before probing deeper into the question of what peace means for them, the initial account of the current situation was ‘a kind of peace’ grounded in their experience of war. As for instance put by a participant in the Northern Province:

We have had fighting and now that is no more. This is what we feel is peace. Now we don’t live under gunpoint, there are no shells being hurled at us …

This notion was particularly prevalent in the Northern and Eastern provinces, which are the areas most heavily affected by the war and where the Tamil population in particular experienced a lot of suffering from violence, discrimination and displacement. Departing from a negative peace conception, the absence of war was thus perceived ‘to an extent as peace’. However, throughout the conversation the initial negative peace conception was also being challenged and qualified:

We are living in a state of peace, but our mental state, our suffering has not ended.

An end of the war is not peace. Everyone should get equal assistance and rights; only then can we accept it as peace. Fundamental rights have not been addressed. Therefore, this cannot be peace.

Furthermore, in one of the FGDs, different temporal references than the post-war period were used when participants narrated when they had experienced peace, and discourses around war came through in these discussions. The FGD in the Eastern Province was arranged in Kataparichan along the Trincomalee coastline, an area that was in the midst of violence during the war. The FGD mostly consisted of older women with a long experience of war and displacement. Their conversation reflected diverse temporal perspectives on notions of peace: ‘I would consider that what we have now could be considered to an extent as “peace”, but not like the peace we had before [the war first started]’.⁴⁶ Another participant added:

Also, before 2006, the ceasefire, the peace we knew. People consider it as a period of terrorism, but we don’t consider it as terrorism. Our rights were safeguarded by them [the LTTE]; therefore, it cannot be considered as terrorism. We had their support and even though we cannot consider it as holistic peace, there was a kind of peace. This belonged to the Tamils.⁴⁷

This last quote illustrates how narratives of peace are also be shaped by memories and discourses of past war experiences, reflecting positions during the war.

Developments following the Easter Sunday attacks of 2019 were referenced several times in the conversations about peace. In the FGDs with Tamil communities in former war-affected areas in the Northern and Eastern provinces, although far away from the site of the Easter Sunday attacks in Colombo, it was clear how developments after the attacks were reflected upon and interpreted through the lens of having experienced the government-LTTE war from within, including fear of increased intrusion in their personal lives by the state and army, causing yet again growing insecurity and circumvention of their freedom. Moreover, this also shaped how our interlocutors narrated peace in terms of which relationships were referred to in the discussion about peace.⁴⁸ Notably, there was a shift in Tamil perspectives, particularly voiced through the Northern and Eastern groups that expressed wariness towards the Muslims. A perspective that generalises Muslims as being fundamentalists with references to ‘terrorism’ intensified after the Easter Sunday attacks, including reflections of increasing mutual suspicion between groups and fear. These developments were also interpreted in relation to the war, as for instance in the Northern province FGD:

If we talk about peace now it concerns all three communities! Now we have a new issue, which is connected to the Muslims. Even though we don’t know who is doing it – there is some terrorism issue because of them. Though there is some peace now, because of their actions this peace is being disturbed a bit. We are being asked for our identity cards, we have issues during travel etc. The situation is once again starting to change.

Muslim communities FGDs: peace as coexistence

We organised FGDs with Muslim communities in the Northern, Eastern and Western provinces. A key theme that we identified is peace as being about coexistence between ethnicities and religions. This peace depiction included an emphasis on respecting each other’s differences and was reflected as ‘people coming together despite differences’, ‘mutual understanding’ and ‘unity between groups’. As expressed by a participant in the Northern Province FGD:

[…] Peace is something that could be within an ethnicity or between two ethnicities, without opposition, without problems, a life in unity. This is how we would define peace, this is, what we imagine as peace. The unity could be within different groups of a certain ethnicity, or between different ethnicities.

Thus, the key theme in the FGDs with Muslim communities revolved around peace as concerning issues of relationships and social cohesion.⁴⁹ The focus on coexistence and of coming together despite (and with respect of) differences can be understood against the backdrop of war and post-war experiences of the Muslim group being in an ‘in-between position’ between the Tamil and the Sinhala, and in a position sometimes referred to as a ‘second-order minority’.⁵⁰ At times, the LTTE proclaimed the Muslims as belonging to the LTTE’s nationalist project as part of the ‘Tamil speaking people’. At other times, Muslims were violently oppressed by the LTTE and forcefully displaced from the North. This prompted a majority of Muslim leaders to side with the Sinhala majority government during the war. The post-war experience of the Muslims, in turn, involves being under the attack of Sinhala Buddhist instigated violence, largely without any reaction or interference by the state, and of being collectively targeted by surveillance measures of state authorities as well as measures to restrict mobility. From our FGDs, it was clear that the continuous feeling amongst the interlocutors from Muslim communities of being excluded by other groups (Sinhala and Tamil) travelled across geographical contexts. In the Northern Province where the Tamil population are a majority, it was reflected upon how ‘Tamils do not accept us’, while a participant in the Muslim FGD in Colombo argued that ‘the Sinhala majority wants us out’. Again, this also reflects the relational dimension of the peace conceptualisation in these FGDs.⁵¹

The Easter Sunday attacks of 2019, and how they shaped the way people narrated peace, came across clearly in all the FGDs, but it was most evident in the FGDs with Muslim communities. For instance, one participant from the Eastern Province FGD described how before the Easter Sunday attack, there was peace ‘to a certain extent’, but now ‘[it] looks like it will be another couple of years before peace comes back’. Another participant similarly noted how the immediate post-war period was more peaceful than the present situation:

We feel that the period after the end of the war was peaceful. We were able to go about freely, up to Jaffna. This was in 2010. […] Now we feel that this has slipped away.

Against the backdrop of violence instigated against Muslims in Sri Lanka post-war, in combination with increased state surveillance, the participants in the Eastern Province FGD also expressed a great deal of uncertainty about the future and fear of a possible return to the previous war time situation. This uncertainty was echoed in the other FGDs with Muslim communities, as, for example, one participant in the Northern Province FGD put it: ‘Peace has still not come. […] There is calmness right now, but anything can happen at any moment’. The difficult situation for Muslims minorities in Sri Lanka post-war, and post-Eastern attacks in particular, was also clearly demonstrated in our efforts at organising the Northern Province FGD with the Muslim community in the heart of Jaffna. The site of the FGD was carefully selected due to increased surveillance and the risk of the FGD arrangement causing surveillance issues for the participants.

Another key theme in the FGDs with Muslim communities was peace as being associated to freedom – e.g. ‘[freedom] to be ourselves and express ourselves’. Such state of peace, it was further argued, is conditioned by democracy and the upholding of rights, which was ultimately found lacking today. As expressed by a participant in the Northern Province FGD:

We would have achieved peace if we had the freedom to do anything, to speak freely, or engage in any activity. We don’t have such a freedom at the moment.

This freedom should be experienced not only by us but also by all communities.

This peace conception was largely based on everyday experiences, including people being able to dress in whatever way they want to. This became evident by the government circulars that followed the Easter Sunday bombings, banning hijabs and abayas while insisting that Muslim women wear sarees to work if employed in the government sector. In the FGD in Trincomalee in the Eastern Province, the participants were all female, and among them there was a strong feeling of policing of their bodies post-war and in particular in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings:

… we don’t have any faith anymore. They have touched upon our fundamental rights. They have touched upon our right to wear what we want.

One aspect of the changing situation for Muslim communities after the Easter Sunday attacks, affecting people’s everyday life, is the frequency of security checks, including the scrutinising of identity card, being maintained at checkpoints, as well as restrictions put on peoples’ mobility:

If we are travelling far, there is a form we need to fill in and get the Grama Sevaka/Niladhari’s (GS) signature.⁵² Even if we are going to visit our parents, we have to inform the police and then visit. This is only for the Eastern region. The Tamils also face this issue. In the town area, even when you move to a neighbouring place you need to inform the police. [Eastern community FGD]

Thus, the peace conceptions that we identified in the FGDs with Muslim communities illustrate how understandings of peace are shaped both by historical legacies of war but also by post-war events and developments. Reflections upon relationships and polarisation related in particular to Muslim communities in Sri Lanka also point to ongoing identity formation post-war.

When we asked our interlocutors from both Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala communities whether or not they think that there is a common goal of peace across communities in Sri Lanka, the conversation revealed a sense of polarisation between and within groups, particularly along majority-minority lines, grounded in ideas that being only one community in the country would ensure the absence of conflict. For instance, in the FGD with the Muslim community in Colombo, this perception of polarisation between groups was evident, as one participant stated:

If you take Sri Lanka, the majority people want only their community to be in Sri Lanka. This is peace for them. They don’t want Tamils, they don’t want Muslims … The peace that they want is not what I or the Muslims want. They want us all out and they want the country for themselves. […] They have this concept – you guys go to your countries! We want peace!

Sinhala communities FGDs: peace as security

We organised two FGDs with Sinhala communities in the Southern and Western Provinces. The narratives of peace identified in these two FGDs is closest to a negative peace conception, relating peace to security, including issues of personal safety and a lack of war. In the FGD that we arranged in the capital city Colombo, their descriptions of peace included aspects such as ‘the lack of war and ability to live in freedom’; ‘the ability to travel everywhere without any fear’; and ‘not to be controlled’. This peace conception also echoes the immediate recollection of experiences of the war amongst the FGD participants, including the memory of bombs exploding in Colombo during the war and the fear that these violent attacks caused. Still, when asking about the current situation and whether the participant felt that they are living in a peaceful situation, the answer was ‘no’:

No. Well, if you think only of the end of the war, then there is peace. But when we think of our lives, there’s really not much peace.

When probing deeper into the discussion about peace, the narratives in the Colombo group largely reflected collective experiences and issues. For instance, there were detailed discussion about soldiers disabled in the war and the hardship that soldiers are experiencing today, including issues related to welfare payments and the isolation of soldiers who were abandoned by their spouses. The general sentiment was that the soldiers had ‘done their duty to the nation’ but now remain an ignored community. The concern for soldiers and the role soldiers play in narratives of peace echoes findings by Premaratna from FGDs with participants from Sinhala communities.⁵³

Moreover, in their wider discussions of peace, the FGD in Colombo to larger extent reflected a collective and political rather than individual narrative, relating to public discourse in Sri Lanka on e.g. issues of nation building:

We were people who lived with a King. We did not ask for democracy. That is why we are not able to create and sustain a people’s movement. Our king was removed by force. So, we are still living until he returns. There is a trauma that hasn’t healed. It has not evolved to a better place. The colonial force has created a rupture.

This perspective of a ‘historical rupture’ seems to perpetuate the conflict and cripple the imagination of the larger Sri Lankan society and their understanding of conflict and peace in the country.

The group of Sinhala women we met in the Southern Province belonged to a resettlement scheme constructed with tsunami aid inland of Galle. Galle was hit heavily by the tsunami in 2004. While the area is not war-affected, it was entangled in overarching controversies over disaster aid as part of broader conflict dynamics. The Southern Province FGD was the least vocal one of the FGDs that we organised, and it was at times difficult to encourage conversation about peace, partly because of the abstraction of conceptual discussions and partly related to their own experiences in comparison to the other groups. In an effort to start probing issues of peace and conflict, we therefore took the starting point in asking about more concrete events that have affected them in relation to conflict and peace, in an effort to explore how the participants related to peace. Here, the perspectives were quite different compared to other community groups and localities:

When we think about major events the Tsunami was one of the more recent issues that we faced, but that is not related to conflict. In terms of conflict we can think of the JVP insurgency that happened in the 80s maybe around 87. In the 90s maybe also Prabhakaran’s [former LTTE leader] war …

Thus, in contrast to the previously discussed FGDs, the war between the government and the LTTE was not the immediate focal point when the participants began reflecting upon peace based on their own experiences. This underscores how there are multiple conflict legacies and dividing lines that shape the understanding of peace. Recollections of how war affected them revolved around feelings of fear that bombs would also explode in their area, and in particular incidents related to the JVP insurgency. At the same time, when asked whether and how the end of the war between the government and the LTTE had affected them, the shared view was that it had brought about change, in particular to their everyday feelings of safety and security. This also reflected their associations to the concept of peace and what it means to them, for instance:

The feeling to be able to go out in the night without fear, and also to send our children out.

The word unity comes to my mind. If we can live without conflict, in freedom, that to me is peace.

The recollection of past war experiences through the Easter Sunday attacks of 2019 also came forth in these less directly war-affected areas in the South. For instance, when reflecting upon whether and how their lives were affected by the end of the war, the changing situation post-Easter Sunday attacks was raised:

After the end of the war, we were very happy and our lives became better. [Previously] we were in a situation where we feared to walk out on the streets. But now, I think this situation has changed again. […] We are now scared after the Easter Bombings. We feel that there is again an environment of fear. We are scared to send our children to school. There is talk that there might become a situation of difficulty soon. Parents talk about this fear a lot these days.

When probing more into the notions of peace, unity was also put forth as a precondition for development and economic stability which was overall stressed in the conversation. These understandings of peace articulated among participants in this FGD reflected their own individual experiences and hardship, where access to water was described as the biggest issue they were facing in the community and issues related to land deeds which affected the ability to send children to school. As previous research also holds, socio-economic aspects are key to understanding the relationship between the Sri Lankan state and the majority Sinhala population,⁵⁴ and this was also a key factor that prompted the JVP insurgency in the 1970s which is still vivid in the mind of some in the area, especially among people who are still looking for their lost loved ones.

Conclusions

The purpose of this article was to explore and compare how peace is experienced, understood and envisioned across groups and geographical localities in post-war victory Sri Lanka. Firstly, the study shows that how peace is narrated in our FGDs differs across groups that were differently positioned during the war. In the FGDs with Tamil communities, equality emerged as a key theme in the conversation about peace, both in terms of their own experiences (including of shortcomings of the present) and how peace is envisioned. Equality was in the discussions also closely linked to issues of rights. This theme reflects key issues of the protracted Tamil struggle grounded in individual and collective experiences of mistreatment and discrimination by the Sinhala majority state. The emphasis on equality speaks to similar findings from how peace is narrated among ethnic minorities in Myanmar with long experience of conflict with the ethnic majority state.⁵⁵ The FGDs with Muslim communities primarily stressed relational aspects of coexistence, which can be understood against the backdrop of the in-between position of the Muslim minority vis-á-vis Sinhala and Tamil positions in Sri Lanka’s conflict. With reference in particular to the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks, freedom was also stressed as a key dimension of peace. Our FGDs with Sinhala communities indicate a more security related peace conception, with emphasis on peace as the absence of war and absence of fear. This peace conception is similar to findings by Lonergan on perceptions of reconciliation among Sinhala communities in the war-affected areas.⁵⁶ But peace was also narrated amongst our interlocutors from Sinhala communities as economic development. This speaks to the importance of socio-economic factors for understanding the legitimacy of the state held by majority Sinhala communities, which previous research stress has been central to the evolution of conflict in Sri Lanka.⁵⁷ It can also give insights into the pessimistic outlook for the future amongst Sinhala respondents as found in the study by Carey et al.,⁵⁸ as well as to the widespread protests, aragalaya, of 2022 in response to the economic mismanagement by the government. By considering understandings of peace also among Sinhala communities in the southern parts of the country, which is oftentimes neglected in studies of peace post-war, we can gain a fuller understanding of the plurality of peace and hence enrich knowledge on post-war developments and the prospects for conflict transformation.

Secondly, we found variation and nuances of particular peace conceptualisations within community groups across geographies. While equality was a theme that emerged as important in all FGDs with Tamil communities, what meaning was put into the concept was more context dependent and differed across regional areas with different histories of state formation and majority–minority relationships. Here, it was evident how aspects such as class and caste played a role. Analysing the materials from different vantage points may thus allow for a more nuanced understanding and help avert pitfalls in the dichotomous approach to peace as between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ often associated with post-war victory settings. This points to the importance of approaching the micro-level as society and to consider how multiple forms of differences and power relations shape experiences of peace such as ethnicity, class, caste, religion, gender etc. By paying attention to narratives to identify key themes, and not delimit our analysis to the ranking of particular concepts, we were thus able to depict nuances within similar conceptualisations.

Thirdly, while some of the key conceptualisations emerging from the FGDs reflected the history of war and enduring conflict divides, the study also demonstrates how understandings of peace are not static but are (re)formed in a dynamic post-war landscape. For instance, the putting forth of freedom as key to peace in the FGDs with Muslim communities was largely given reason against the backdrop of discrimination against Muslims in Sri Lanka post-war and often with reference to the Easter Sunday attacks. The narratives also revealed how, for most (if not all) groups, developments related to the Easter Sunday attacks were interpreted against the backdrop of past war experiences.

In conclusion, this article contributes to the literature on varieties of peace by demonstrating the plurality of micro-level narratives of peace across groups and localities in Sri Lanka. In particular, we contribute to the knowledge of peace in the victor’s peace context, since this literature has tended to be state-centric and based on a winner-loser binary. Turning attention to the plurality of peace at the micro-level, we argue, can broaden the knowledge of the types of peace that emerges after military victories, and in turn inform policy in such contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under Grant numbers M16-0297:1 and P19-1494:1; and the Swedish Research Council under Grant number 2022-02094.

Notes on contributors

Malin Åkebo

Malin Åkebo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University. Her research interests concern post-war transitions and forms of peace in the context of war victory, with an empirical focus on Sri Lanka. She is the author of Ceasefire Agreements and Peace Processes: A Comparative Study (Routledge 2016) and co-editor of Relational Peace Practices (Manchester University Press 2023).

Tanuja Thurairajah

Tanuja Thurairajah holds a PhD from the Human Geography Unit, Department of Geography of the University of Zurich. Her research interests include diasporas, migration and conflict. Thurairajah has over a decade of experience working in the development and humanitarian sector in Sri Lanka. She is currently the Executive Director for the Centre for Historical Dialogue and Memory in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Notes

¹ e.g. R. Mac Ginty and P. Firchow, ‘Top-Down and Bottom-up Narratives of Peace and Conflict’, Politics 36, no. 3 (2016): 308–323; and J. Söderström, M. Åkebo, and A. Jarstad, ‘Friends, Fellows and Foes: A New Framework for Studying Relational Peace’, International Studies Review 23, no. 3 (2021): 484–508. See also the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development special issue ‘Exploring Varieties of Peace’ (2021).

² e.g. R. Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies’, Security Dialogue 45, no. 6 (2014): 548–564; P. Firchow and R. Mac Ginty, ‘Measuring Peace: Comparability, Commensurability, and Complementarity Using Bottom-Up Indicators’, International Studies Review 19, no. 1 (2017): 6–27; and S. Lee, ‘Understanding Everyday Peace in Cambodia: Plurality, Subtlety, and Connectivity’, Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 24–38.

³ A. Jarstad et al., ‘Three Approaches to Peace: A Framework for Describing and Exploring Varieties of Peace,‘ Umeå Working Papers in Peace and Conflict Studies No. 12 (Umeå: Working paper, Department of Political Science, Umeå University, 2019), 13.

⁴ K. Dyrstad, H.M. Binningsbø, and K.M. Bakke, ‘Wartime Experiences and Popular Support for Peace Agreements: Comparative Evidence from Three Cases’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 9 (2022): 1562–1588.

⁵ e.g. B. Klem, ‘The Problem of Peace and the Meaning of “Post-War”’, Conflict, Security & Development 18, no. 3 (2018): 233–255; N. Premaratna, ‘Dealing with Sri Lanka’s Demons: Using Documentary Film for Peacebuilding’, Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 39–54; and E. Olivius and J. Hedström, ‘Spatial Struggles and the Politics of Peace. The Aung San Statue as a Site for Post-War Conflict in Myanmar’s Kayah State’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 16, no. 3 (2021): 275–288.

⁶ A.B. Çelik, ‘Agonistic Peace and Confronting the Past: An Analysis of a Failed Peace Process and the Role of Narratives’, Cooperation and Conflict 56, no. 1 (2021): 26–43, 27.

⁷ Dyrstad et al., ’Wartime Experiences’.

⁸ e.g. O.P. Richmond, Peace: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁹ S.C. Carey, B. González, and C. Gläßel, ‘Divergent Perceptions of Peace in Post-Conflict Societies: Insights from Sri Lanka’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 66, no. 9 (2022): 1589–1618.

¹⁰ G. Piccolino, ‘Winning Wars, Building (Illiberal) Peace? The Rise (and Possible Fall) of a Victor’s Peace in Rwanda and Sri Lanka’, Review essay. Third World Quarterly 36, no. 9 (2015): 1770–1785; and P. Wallensteen, Quality Peace: Peacebuilding, Victory, and World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

¹¹ C.Q. Smith, L. Waldorf, R. Venugopal and G. McCarthy, ‘Illiberal Peace-Building in Asia: A Comparative Overview’, Conflict, Security & Development 20, no. 1 (2020): 5.

¹² e.g. M. Åkebo and S. Bastian, ‘Beyond Liberal Peace in Sri Lanka: Victory, Politics and State Formation’, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 16, no. 1 (2021): 70–84.

¹³ Mac Ginty and Firchow, ‘Top-Down and Bottom-up Narratives’.

¹⁴ Çelik, ’Agonistic Peace’.

¹⁵ Smith et al., ‘Illiberal Peace-Building in Asia’.

¹⁶ D.G. Lewis, ‘Sri Lanka’s Schmittian peace: Sovereignty, Enmity and Illiberal Order’, Conflict, Security & Development 20, no. 1 (2020): 15–37; see also Klem, ‘The Problem of Peace’.

¹⁷ e.g. D. McCargo and D. Senaratne, ‘Victor’s Memory: Sri Lanka’s Post-War Memoryscape in Comparative Perspective’, Conflict, Security & Development 20, no. 1(2020): 97–113; and R. Seoighe, ‘Inscribing the Victor’s Land: Nationalistic Authorship in Sri Lanka’s Post-War Northeast’, Conflict, Security & Development 16, no. 5 (2016): 443–471.

¹⁸ Carey et al., ‘Divergent Perceptions of Peace’.

¹⁹ Ibid., 1611.

²⁰ K. Lonergan, ‘Roads to Repair: Extraordinary and Everyday Pathways to Reconciliation after Civil War’ (Doctoral diss., Department of Peace Research, Uppsala University, 2023). See also the Everyday Peace Indicators’ project in Sri Lanka.

²¹ P. Firchow, ‘World Peace is Local Peace’, Ethics & International Affairs 34, no. 1 (2020): 57–65, 59.

²² K. Bachleitner, ‘Legacies of War: Syrian Narratives of Conflict and Visions of Peace’, Cooperation and Conflict 57, no. 1 (2021): 43–64.

²³ Bachleitner, ‘Legacies of War’, 5.

²⁴ L. Stanley and R. Jackson, ‘Introduction: Everyday Narratives in World Politics’, Politics 36, no. 3 (2016): 223–235.

²⁵ Bachleitner, ‘Legacies of War’.

²⁶ Ibid., 6.

²⁷ F. McConnell, N. Megoran, and P. Williams (Eds.), Geographies of Peace (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

²⁸ See note 13 above.

²⁹ Ibid., 7–8.

³⁰ Firchow, ‘World Peace is Local Peace’, 61.

³¹ Ibid.

³² e.g. S. Bastian, ‘The Failure of State Formation, Identity Conflict and Civil Society Responses – The Case of Sri Lanka’ (Working Paper 2, Centre for Conflict Resolution, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, September 1999).

³³ e.g. A. Amarasingam and D. Bass, eds. Sri Lanka: The Struggle for Peace in the Aftermath of War (London: Hurst publishers, 2016); and P. Saravanamuttu, ‘Victory Celebration and the Unmaking of Diversity in Post-War Sri Lanka’, in The Shadow of Transitional Justice (Routledge, 2021), 51–63.

³⁴ P. Athukorala, ‘Sri Lanka’s Post-Civil War Development Challenge: Learning from the Past’, Contemporary South Asia 24, no. 1 (2016): 19–35.

³⁵ F. Haniffa, ‘Competing for Victim Status: Northern Muslims and the Ironies of Sri Lanka’s Post-war Transition‘, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4, no. 1 (2015): Art. 21.

³⁶ B. Korf, ‘War, Livelihoods and Vulnerability in Sri Lanka’, Development and Change 35 (2004): 275–295.

³⁷ R. Ramasamy, ‘Sri Lanka’s Plantation Communities: Public Service Delivery, Ethnic Minorities and Citizenship Rights’, South Asia Research 38, no. 3_suppl (2018): 43S-60S.

³⁸ D. Rajasingham-Senanayake, ‘Dysfunctional Democracy and Dirty War in Sri Lanka’ (East – West Centre Asia Pacific Issues Paper, 52, Honolulu, HI: East – West Centre, 2001).

³⁹ J. Söderström, ‘Focus Groups: Safety in Numbers?’ in Understanding Peace Research: Methods and Challenges, eds. K. Höglund and M. Öberg (London: Routledge, 2011); and M.M. Hennink, Focus Group Discussions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Ethical approval for this research was obtained from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (no. 2019–00024).

⁴⁰ Söderström, ‘Focus Groups’, 152.

⁴¹ N. Halstead, ‘Ethnographic Encounters. Positionings within and Outside the Insider Frame’, Social Anthropology 9, no. 3 (2001): 307–321.

⁴² Söderström, ‘Focus Groups’, 155.

⁴³ Olivius and Hedström, ‘Spatial Struggles’. Both our studies were initiated within the framework of the Varieties of Peace research program: https://www.varietiesofpeace.com/.

⁴⁴ Olivius and Hedström, ‘Spatial Struggles’.

⁴⁵ The pre-identified phrases that were mentioned include security, lack of war, no fear, freedom, sustainability, equitable distribution, development, respect, and co-existence.

⁴⁶ The participant clarified that she was referring to the period before 1986. While war in Sri Lanka is conventionally considered to have started in 1983, the year of significant increased violence in the North and East was 1986.

⁴⁷ A historical timeline of important events created during this FGD reveals that it was in 2006 people from this area, including participants of the FGD, were displaced due to the war, before returning to the area some years later.

⁴⁸ See Söderström et al., ‘Friends, Fellows and Foes’.

⁴⁹ See Söderström et al., ‘Friends, Fellows and Foes’ on peace as relational.

⁵⁰ J.C. Espesor, ‘Perpetual Exclusion and Second-Order Minorities in Theaters of Civil Wars’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. S. Ratuva (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 967–992.

⁵¹ See note 48 above.

⁵² Village officer belonging to a sub-unit of a Divisional Secretariat.

⁵³ Premaratna, ’Dealing with Sri Lanka’s Demons’.

⁵⁴ Åkebo and Bastian, ‘Beyond Liberal Peace’.

⁵⁵ Olivius and Hedström, ’Spatial Struggles’.

⁵⁶ Lonergan, 'Roads to Repair'.

⁵⁷ See note 54 above.

⁵⁸ See note 18 above.