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London’s Holloway Prison, the largest women’s prison in western Europe, closed in 2016. The impact of the closure on the women incarcerated in Holloway, and the prison’s place in the local community, is the focus of a project led by Islington Museum. Here, we develop an innovation, emotion-led methodology to explore photographs of the decommissioned Holloway, asking what they communicate about experiences of imprisonment and practices of punishment. The images illustrate the strategies of control, mechanisms of punishment and tactics of resistance that operate through the carceral space. From a feminist, anti-carceral perspective, we emphasise the importance of seeing prison spaces and attending to the emotional responses generated. We offer a creative intervention into dominant government and media narratives of Holloway’s closure and suggest that considering what it is that feels familiar and strange about carceral spaces has the potential to operate as a form of anti-carceral work.

Court interpreters have seldom been featured in studies on the criminal courts. Until recently, cases requiring court interpreters were rare and marginal. The peculiarity and historical rarity of these cases may explain the lack of academic consideration of the work of court interpreters in the criminal justice literature. Rapid demographic changes brought about by mass migration, however, are changing the make-up of criminal justice proceedings, rendering court interpreters key participants and inexorable aides for the everyday running of the criminal justice system. This article examines the increased reliance on interpreters and the nature of their involvement in criminal justice proceedings. It will explore the relationship between interpreters and defendants, on the one hand, and between interpreters, counsels, and judges, on the other. Drawing on empirical data stemming from a research project on foreign national defendants conducted in Birmingham’s criminal courts, we explore issues of trust and reliability underpinning the intervention of court interpreters and the implications of these interventions for the defendant’s case. The use of interpreters aims first and foremost to ensure the defendant’s right to defense. Yet, as we show, their intervention is often propelled or hindered by instrumental, procedural, or logistical reasons, intimately linked to the rapid transformation of the demography of defendants and the privatization of services related to the criminal justice system.

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 uses the framework of collective memory to interrogate the manner in which the end of the war is being written into the constituent narrative of Tamil nationalism. Describing the historical development of the Tamil separatist movement and the LTTE’s nation-building project—with a particular focus on discourses of victimisation—this chapter acknowledges and explores the organisation’s reliance on commemorative rituals as cultural repertoires of resistance. In the context of the state’s attempted ideological domination of the Northeast, examples serve to illustrate how the suppression of Tamil memory practices and discourses of martyrdom in the post-war period is a central aspect of that domination. While describing the forms of commemoration relied upon by the Tamil people post-war, and the manner in which the state exercises violence and repressive practices to subjugate narratives that contest its official account of the End, it becomes clear that memory is an important site of contestation and power. Archival records of atrocity at the End are few and contested, primarily stored online in images and mobile phone videos archived by journalists, activists and human rights documentary sources. As it fades into the past, the End exists also in the individual and group memory of the Tamil survivors. Here, I make an argument for the effect that memory work can have on the forms of political agency that can now emerge, post-war, post-atrocity and without the LTTE.

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?

The Sri Lankan state’s official conflict narrative of the End was designed to deflect and deny responsibility for mass atrocity. It relied on a number of inter-relating discourses that were generated in the context of embedded, antagonistic social relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, the ‘internationalisaton’ of the conflict and its resolution, and the global paradigm of the ‘war on terror’ that allowed for easy depoliticisation and denigration of the LTTE. The overarching effect of these discourses was to facilitate the construction and consolidation of a national security state under the Rajapaksa government, which was characterised by techniques of denial and misrepresentation. This chapter sets out an analysis of Sri Lanka’s national security exceptionalism under Rajapaksa and examines the concentration of power under his Executive Presidency. At the End, the state relied heavily on techniques of denial to avoid external investigations, interventions and condemnation. These techniques were part of a carefully crafted discursive framework developed throughout the years of war and augmented at the End to facilitate and conceal the violence required to finish the war militarily. Domestically, the establishment of this conflict narrative necessitated a reliance on practices of state terror, to suppress dissent and induce support from the wider population. The national security state built by Rajapaksa relied on the state-sanctioned lexicon of war, which was perpetuated and consolidated by non-state actors.

This chapter explores the post-war landscape, from mid-2009 to the beginnings of Maithripala Sirisena’s governance, and highlights the realities of ‘conflict transformation’ that Tamils have experienced in their daily lives. Beginning with the initial post-war ‘screening’ process, where Tamil victim-survivors of the End were detained in ‘welfare camps’ by the state, this chapter relies on interviewee descriptions of the militarised environment inhabited by the Tamil population in the post-war Northeastern Provinces. The state is, I argue, re-marketing the armed forces in the post-war phase as a benevolent, positive presence in the Northeast. The military is involved in a range of practices that embed and naturalise its presence, including infrastructure development, economic growth and the ‘rehabilitation’ of ex-LTTE cadres (Satkunanathan 2013). This chapter draws on narratives that describe post-war life as a military occupation designed to suppress and destroy Tamil political and cultural life. Tamil political and civil society actors, the Tamil diaspora and the global actors entwined with the liberal peace project (including international human rights organisations) argue that genuine reconciliation can only arise from accountability: justice must be achieved for the Tamil people killed in their thousands by the state forces at the End. The state’s post-war reconciliation and investigative initiatives, discussed in Chap. 7, can be regarded as a performance—both in discourse and praxis—that conceals the institutionalisation of militarisation. Adopting a view ‘from below’ through the narrative of the Tamil population, this chapter argues that post-war developments indicate the evolution of a national security state. Post-war, the hierarchy of power has been reconfigured and reproduced with Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism at its peak, reinforced by a new logic of triumph over terrorism. The marriage of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and militarism continues, borrowing heavily from discourses of reconciliation and development designed to pacify the ‘international community’ and extending the naturalisation of the war economy by appealing to tourists interested in ‘war tourism.’

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.

The war in Sri Lanka has largely been understood internationally through the framework provided by the state: a ‘terrorist problem’ rather than a war of self-defence by an aggrieved and persecuted minority. In the final phase of the war, the hegemonic framework of understanding applied to ‘Eelam war IV’ was one of a humanitarian rescue mission, necessary to liberate the Tamil population from the LTTE terrorists. This chapter examines the lexicon developed, adapted and adopted by the Sri Lankan state: a lexicon that borrowed heavily from global discourses formed by world powers and originating in international political institutions. Describing the sources, content and linear development of the conflict ‘script,’ I interrogate its effectiveness in mobilising the majority population and deterring international pressure as the violence of the ‘final war’ reached catastrophic levels. Beginning with an analysis of the construction of international discourses and their propensity for adoption and appropriation, this chapter offers a critique of the “portability” of these discourses (Khalili 2007, p. 12). The Sri Lankan example illustrates the legitimising effect of global discourses as they spread across national boundaries, largely insusceptible to the particularities of each conflict situation. Transnational discourses are available to states as narrative building blocks. In Sri Lanka, relying strategically on the lexicon popular within the ‘international community’ itself allowed the state to seek global sympathy, solidarity and the space to finish the war by using enormous violence against the Tamil people.

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.