Bart Klem

Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka

This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka’s war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the ethnic, religious and political dimensions of “Muslimness” differently and this leads to intra-Muslim contradictions. The case study thus helps resolve the puzzle of Sri Lankan Muslims: they are surrounded by hostility, but they continue to be internally divided. Akkaraipattu’s Muslims jockey between principled politics, pragmatic politics and anti-politics, because they have to navigate different trajectories. This article thus corroborates recent studies on Islam elsewhere that argue for contextualized and nuanced approaches to the variegated interface between Islam and politics.

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to the LTTE case: the movement created de facto state institutions to mimic governance, but simultaneously deployed an elaborate transcendental register of sacrifice, meaning, and intractable power wielded by a mythical leader. To capture this paradox, we connect the literature on rebel governance with anthropological debates about divine kingship. We conceptualize sovereignty as a citational practice that involves the adaptation, imitation, and mutation of different idioms of authority: political and religious, modern and traditional, rational and mythical. Understanding sovereignty in this way debunks the idea that insurgent movements are merely lagging behind established states. As sites of mimicry, bricolage, and innovation, they transform the way sovereignty is practiced and understood, thus affecting the frame that sovereignty is.

Showing one's colours: the political work of elections in post-war Sri Lanka

This article analyses Sri Lankas April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

Mediating the margins: the role of brokers and the Eastern Provincial Council in Sri Lanka’s post-war transition

Abstract This article explores the political dynamics surrounding the Eastern Provincial Council during Sri Lanka’s post-war transition. We show that decentralisation constituted an intervention in conflict, rather than a solution to it. It creates new institutional arenas to re-negotiate centre-periphery relations, resulting in new forms of political mobilisation. There are crucial spatial dimensions to these contentions: it involves contested territorialisation of power, scalar manoeuvring, and boundary drawing. These are explored in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, with particular reference to the role performed by brokers in mediating centre-periphery relations, through and alongside the Provincial Council.

Battlefields of Method. Evaluating Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka

1. Introduction, Ole Winckler Andersen and Megan Kennedy-Chouane 2. Evaluation approaches in situations of conflict and fragility, Eva Broegaard, Beate Bull and Jens Kovsted 3. Critical reflections on the South Sudan evaluation of conflict and peacebuilding activities, Chris Barnett and Jon Bennett 4. Battlefields of method: Evaluating Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, Jonathan Goodhand, Bart Klem and Gunnar M. Sorbo 5. The Case of Congo: An Evaluation Approach Focusing on Context, Emery Brusset and Ivo Hooghe 6. Assessing Development Co-operation in North East Afghanistan with repeated mixed-method surveys, Jan R. Bohnke, Jan Koehler and Christoph Zurcher 7. Impact Evaluation for Peacebuilding: challenging preconceptions, Marie Gaarder and Jeannie Annan 8. Evaluating Statebuilding Support: Learning from Experience or Judging from Assumptions?, Jorn Gravingholt and Julia Leininger 9. Systems Thinking in Peacebuilding Evaluations: Applications in Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Kosovo, Diana Chigas and Peter Woodrow1. Introduction, Ole Winckler Andersen and Megan Kennedy-Chouane 2. Evaluation approaches in situations of conflict and fragility, Eva Broegaard, Beate Bull and Jens Kovsted 3. Critical reflections on the South Sudan evaluation of conflict and peacebuilding activities, Chris Barnett and Jon Bennett 4. Battlefields of method: Evaluating Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, Jonathan Goodhand, Bart Klem and Gunnar M. Sorbo 5. The Case of Congo: An Evaluation Approach Focusing on Context, Emery Brusset and Ivo Hooghe 6. Assessing Development Co-operation in North East Afghanistan with repeated mixed-method surveys, Jan R. Bohnke, Jan Koehler and Christoph Zurcher 7. Impact Evaluation for Peacebuilding: challenging preconceptions, Marie Gaarder and Jeannie Annan 8. Evaluating Statebuilding Support: Learning from Experience or Judging from Assumptions?, Jorn Gravingholt and Julia Leininger 9. Systems Thinking in Peacebuilding Evaluations: Applications in Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Kosovo, Diana Chigas and Peter Woodrow

The problem of peace and the meaning of ‘post-war’

Abstract The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not be understood as a temporal breakpoint: a definitive after. Rather, it signals an ambition to address and move beyond, analogous to the term post-colonialism. I subsequently draw on the post-colonial literature to further elaborate my conceptualisation of post-war transition with three propositions, respectively concerning: the discursive politics of retrospectivity; the assertion of sovereignty as the foundational referent of law and political order; and the concept of articulation to juxtapose contingent change and constrained agency. I then apply these ideas to the Sri Lankan case to illustrate what angles and insights my conceptualisation of post-war transition could offer.