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This article examines the nationalistic authorship of space in Sri Lanka’s post-conflict Northeast as part of the state’s nation-building strategy and as a continuation of a post-colonial process of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalistic revival. Exploring issues of historiography, conflict resolution, physical vehicles of ideology and collective memory, the article demonstrates how land policies, development and the tourism industry in a post-conflict context can go hand-in-hand with dispossession, militarisation and the humiliation of a ‘defeated’ minority community.

This article explores the availability of discourses of victimhood to political actors who aim to justify violence and mass atrocity in the name of those victims. Arguing that the label of the ‘victim’ is equally available for distortion and political capitalization as the label of the ‘criminal’ or the ‘terrorist’, this article reflects on the role of the victim in violence and processes of criminalization. Examining the rhetorical tendencies and strategies of both the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan civil war, this article describes how the victim was categorized by both sides. This article argues that these categorizations, which simultaneously draw on respective collective memories of victimization are crucial to the manner in which the state’s purported process of post-war ‘reconciliation’ is created and politicized and how victims are included in such a process. Interrogating the post-war landscape of militarization and repression in the country’s Tamil-dominated Northeast, this article also examines new configurations of Tamil victim discourses and their potential as a tool of political agency.

Post-war Sri Lanka is defined by the logic of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, glorification and expansion of the military, and the exponential growth of state-corporate economic projects. This article examines the performative politics of the state in mass ritual discourse and spatial domination while acknowledging the various ways in which elements of the Northeastern Tamil community in Sri Lanka are mobilising as an activist community in the post-war period, including political agitation and emancipatory initiatives that respond to social justice issues, such as land grabs. Offering an analysis premised on the concept of performative politics, this article interrogates the process by which the state defines itself, while the Tamil community has used performative politics to communicate the unacceptability of the post-war performance of power. A framework of performative politics in post-war Sri Lanka, I argue, introduces a new grammar of politics more responsive to the nationalistic Sinhala-Buddhist settler-colonial tendencies of the state and to the polyvalent nature of Tamil resistance. On the international level, the state performatively complies with international demands for accountability and reconciliation while continuing to oppress the Tamil minority and undertake nationalistic authorship of post-war space.

This chapter turns to an examination of institutionalised responses to the End and the Sri Lankan state’s management of the ‘transition’ from war to peace. In the aftermath of the violence of Sri Lanka’s war, particularly the horror and trauma of the End, a struggle over the meaning and memory of that violence is underway. It is a site of contestation, denial and resistance, generating further conflicts between the Tamils and the state and local and international advocacy initiatives for justice and accountability. The ways in which different actors seek to draw meaning from the war, and impose order on that meaning, have implications for the prospect of peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. In Chap. 6, I demonstrate that Sri Lanka’s victor’s peace is a project of conflict transformation by political pacification and securitisation. Efforts to both institutionalise and contest that form of transformation, both locally and internationally, are addressed here. International demands for liberal reform are explicit, insistent and increasingly work in support of local Tamil claims. This chapter asks, in light of the current Tamil demands for justice and accountability in the face of erasure and persistent violence, what kind of ‘reconciliation’ can be generated?

This book has examined the production of Sri Lanka’s ‘national story,’ the exclusionary and repressive nature of that story, and how it was designed to politically benefit the Rajapaksa government and facilitate the terrible violence inflicted on the Tamils at the End. It has analysed the authorship of the national story as a professionalised form of denial, designed to avoid accountability for war crimes at the End. Interrogating this story—a story built on a genealogy of Sinhala-Buddhist power and incorporating international discourses of counter-terrorism and humanitarianism—reveals state political performativity as a method of state crime denial, one that aligned with the ethnicisation of power in Sri Lanka. This performativity was designed to reproduce the hierarchy of power with the Rajapaksa family at the apex. That power did not hold steady under Rajapaksa, due to his government’s corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement, but its implications are still unfolding as the new President Sirisena attempts to balance his investment in Sinhala-Buddhist power against the calls of the ‘international community’ for liberal transition, including institutional reforms, a truth commission and, most controversially, war crimes trials.

Sri Lanka’s history of warfare is one of post-colonial political antagonism and majoritarian repression, political violence in pursuit of Tamil self-determination and a subsequent escalation in violence over the course of three decades that significantly transformed the relations between the state and the Tamils. That escalation was marked by the militarisation of the state and armed actors and an internationalisation of the conflict (Rasaratnam 2016, p. 5). The militarisation of the state and of the socio-political culture has had particular consequences in shaping the conflict and social relations, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is examined here as a majoritarian nationalism that has been entwined with the very constitutional and political existence of the Sri Lankan state. That nationalism continuously reproduces the socio-political field along the lines of Sinhala supremacy and the marginalisation of minorities.