Search

Despite the implementation of progressive national policies and the adherence to numerous international conventions aimed at eradicating gender‐based violence and violence against women, incidents of violence against women in post‐war Sri Lanka are on the rise. This research delves into the intersection of post‐war populist politics supported by religious extremists and the resulting violence perpetrated against women, as well as its repercussions on women's well‐being. We are interested in locating the specific mechanisms through which religious extremism, authoritarian populism, and violence against women are connected. Our findings indicate that post‐war populist politics, backed by Buddhist religious extremists and the post‐war Sinhalese‐Buddhist hegemonic state's re‐building project, have generated dialectical relationships with Sri Lanka's minorities—Tamils and Muslims. These relationships are partially enacted through different forms of gender violence. This has consequences for all women. As successive confrontations deepen, the deterioration of these relationships exacerbates the likelihood of violence and reinforces a culture of impunity.

This article is a contribution to the current debates in conflict and peace studies that examines the contributions of creative approaches to postwar peacebuilding. It mainly asks how post-conflict peacebuilding can be achieved and promoted through the use of creative approaches and what the potential challenges and limitations are in realizing postwar peacebuilding through creative approaches. We relied on primary qualitative visual data and interview data generated on the photographic exhibition of ‘War of Memories’ curated in 2017 by the Centre for Non-Violent Action, a civil society organization working on the theme of postwar peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Serbia. Findings suggest the creative initiatives can play a positive role at individual level, but their translation into macro-level sustainable social peace is challenging, as long as the structural impediments to peace, prevailing unequal ethnic power relations and ethnicised social and political ordering of the society remain unaddressed.

Diasporas play a key role in universal norm transfer processes, mainly through transnational political activism. For decades, Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora activists have been drawing attention to injustices in the home country by and applying liberal, cosmopolitan normative frameworks. The use of these frameworks helps these actors to advance their transnational political goals and to cultivate transnational political networks that aid in advancing their struggles to influence positive change in Sri Lanka. In the current post-liberal phase of international politics, the main architects of the liberal, cosmopolitan international norms, who previously supported their implementation, have started to abandon them. This turnaround has tragically coincided with an increasingly hostile reception to these norms in Sri Lanka, home of the Tamil diaspora. This article examines how the recent retraction of and reaction to international norms in international and national politics is reshaping Tamil diasporic transnational political activism and transnational-national political relationships. KEYWORDS: Tamil diaspora activism, liberal, cosmopolitan, norms, transnational politics, post-liberalism

This article is a contribution to critical International Relations scholarship on European Union foreign and security policy and to the debates on “Normative Europe”. It focuses on the ways in which the EU engages with their own gender equality policies in external Security Sector Reform (SSR) missions. By analysing visual materials of the European Union Advisory Mission-Ukraine (EUAM Ukraine) and European Union Capacity Building Mission in Sahel Mali (EUCAP Sahel Mali) missions, this article identifies the discrepancies between the EU’s proclaimed policy goals about gender equality and visual representations of women and men in the missions’ newsletter photos. These representations reflect a lacklustre approach and suggest a lack of commitment to practices of gender equality and positive role modelling in SSR’s day-to-day activities. This article suggests the EU-SSR missions overhaul their public communication strategies to focus first on “how” to communicate gender equality norms and only then on “what” to communicate. This study shows one concrete opportunity and space where this can be achieved.

Scholars continue to draw attention to the link between the war economy and post-war crime. The majority of these studies are about cases of civil war that ended with peace agreements. Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with a military victory for the state armed forces; thus, it can help shed new light on the above link. Situated in the war economy perspective, this article investigates the dominant types of crimes reported from post-war Sri Lanka and the mechanisms linking them with the war economy. The culture of impunity, continued militarisation and enduring corruption are identified as key mechanisms through which the war economy and post-war bodily and material crime are linked. It suggests, although the ‘victors’ peace’ achieved by state armed forces was able to successfully dismantle the extra-legal war economy run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, it was responsible for promoting criminality in the post-war period. Overall, this points to the urgency of breaking away from legacies of the state war economy in the post-war period, before introducing programs of longer term political and economic reform.

The Dutch Senate recently passed a new Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP). The SEP highlights the importance of social impact for research. The new Protocol was developed by the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), VSNU (Association of Dutch universities) and NWO (Dutch Science Council) and is to be used to evaluate academic research from 2015-2021. Based on recent discussions and publications, Peter A.G. van Bergeijk, Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits, and Linda Johnson discuss some of the implications of the Protocol’s new criterion, using Development Studies as an example.