Category Archives: power politics

Abstract: The ethnicity and violence in Sri Lanka have many root causes and consequences that are closely interconnected. Given the nature and the complexity of root causes and consequences of these highly contested concepts, it should not be treated as a part of linear historical processes where one event led to another. Sri Lanka presents case of how intersecting not only ethnicity and violence but also religion, caste, class, linguistic, and cultural mosaics have been and might be billeted within the borders of a nation-state. However, state building in Sri Lanka has been riddled with paradoxes. The curious notion of numerically dominant ethnic group, Sinhala manifesting a “minority complex” or anxieties about minority groups, Tamil and Muslims, is evident in the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism during the nineteenth and the twentieth century of the country. Since state building has often meant ……….