Performing sovereign aspirations: Tamil insurgency and postwar transition in Sri Lanka

The scholarship of civil wars and insurgencies struggles to confront the self-referential nature of sovereignty and the resultant interpretation of law, order and legitimate government. This work-in-progress book addresses this scholarship with an account of the lived realities of Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka. During the war, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) acted like a state but was not recognised as one. The resulting to-be-or-not-to-be dilemmas around the interpretation of aspirant institutions are not confined to the LTTE and they persisted when the movement was militarily defeated in 2009. After the war, Tamil nationalists continued to project their sovereign aspirations from within Sri Lanka’s democratic order, even if this required them to turn the institutions of the state against itself. To address this analytical puzzle, this book embraces a performative conception of politics. It explores separatist contestation as an institutionalised form of sovereign experimentation. Rather than assuming institutions are constructed on legal foundations, we must consider them as aspirational enactments capable of establishing legitimacy, which may grow legal roots afterwards. Questions around the veracity and authenticity of insurgent institutions remain unadjudicated because of the violent contingencies around these performative efforts. Empirically, this book draws on data gathered over the period 2000 to 2019, including field work across towns and villages in northeastern Sri Lanka, ethnography within Sri Lanka’s civil service, fieldwork on elections and insights gained from privileged access to the internationalized echelons of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process.