Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka

Caught in the Peace Trap?

Jonathan Goodhand, Benedikt Korf, Jonathan Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415466042
• eBook ISBN: 9781136876264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The period between 2001 and 2006 saw the rise and fall of an internationally supported effort to bring a protracted violent conflict in Sri Lanka to a peaceful resolution. A ceasefire agreement, signed in February 2002, was followed by six rounds of peace talks, but growing political violence, disagreements over core issues and a fragmentation of the constituencies of the key parties led to an eventual breakdown. In the wake of the failed peace process a new government pursued a highly effective 'war for peace' leading to the military defeat of the LTTE on the battlefields of the north east in May 2009. This book brings together a unique range of perspectives on this problematic and ultimately unsuccessful peace process.

The contributions are based upon extensive field research and written by leading Sri Lankan and international researchers and practitioners. The framework of 'liberal peacebuilding' provides an analytical starting point for exploring the complex and unpredictable interactions between international and domestic players during the war-peace-war period. The lessons drawn from the Sri Lankan case have important implications in the context of wider debates on the 'liberal peace' and post conflict peacebuilding – particularly as these debates have largely been shaped by the 'high profile' cases such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. This book is of interest not only to Sri Lanka specialists but also to the wider policy/practitioner audience, and is a useful contribution to South Asian studies.

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Caught in the peace trap?

On the illiberal consequences of liberal peace in Sri Lanka

Jonathan Goodhand and Benedikt Korf

Introduction

On 18 May 2009, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Velupillai Prabhakaran died on the battlefields of Mullaitivu. This appeared to signify both the end of the LTTE as a military force, and the termination of a three-decades-long civil war. At a victory parade at Galle Face Green in Colombo on 3 June, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared that ‘the war against the terrorists is now over’. At the time of writing this introduction (October 2009), it is unclear whether the end of large-scale military confrontations will lead to a lasting and just peace or simply the mutation of the civil war into a new form of conflict. The subsequent triumphalism of government-orchestrated victory celebrations, the continuation of a militarized approach and the strong resistance to devolution, all indicate that an inclusive and just political settlement remains a distant prospect.

Yet, paradoxically this military victory came on the back of the most internationalized, systematic and sustained peace negotiations to have occurred during the history of the civil war. As talks facilitated by Norway were held in various foreign capitals in 2002 and 2003 between representatives of Ranil Wickremasinghe’s government and the LTTE, Sri Lanka was viewed on the international stage as a likely peacebuilding success story. The high-water mark of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, as we characterize it in this volume, was perhaps the Oslo declaration of December 2002, in which both sides agreed to explore a political settlement within the framework of a federated, but united Sri Lanka. However, when it came to negotiating the details of such a political settlement, the peace process began to stall and ultimately unravel.

When the LTTE withdrew from official talks in June 2003, Anton Balasingham, the LTTE chief negotiator and spokesman, explained the need to break free of the ‘peace trap’, as the movement felt increasingly ensnared by a peace process that had failed to meet their political aspirations. More specifically, according to the LTTE, the ‘trap’ had been sprung by international actors, whose bias towards the government had led to new power asymmetries between the two sides. These criticisms were not confined to one side of the conflict; the Norwegian facilitators and their international partners were equally criticized by nationalist Sinhalese groups such as Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) who argued that liberal peace-builders violated the country’s sovereignty, appeased the LTTE, and were intent on imposing an unjust political settlement. The election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as President in 2005 marked the beginning of a shift from a period of no war to no peace, back to full-scale war, with both sides seeing a return to the battlefield as a way of breaking free of the ‘peace trap’. To this end, Rajapaksa consciously diluted the influence of Western international actors by strengthening alliances with regional players such as India, China and Pakistan, who were less attached to an interventionist, liberal model of peacebuilding.

Therefore, the Wickremasinghe and Rajapaksa regimes sought to end the long-running civil war in radically different ways, leading to a remarkable shift in how the country was perceived on the international stage. In 2003 Sri Lanka was viewed by international actors as an exemplar of liberal peacebuilding, whereas by 2009 it had become a model for successful counterinsurgency and regime stabilization. The Rajapaksa government may have thrown off the shackles of the ‘peace trap’, and successfully, in its own terms, pursued a war for peace, but escaping the ‘war trap’ may be more difficult, as the coalitions and alliances constructed to pursue the war may impede its ability to forge a new broad-based political settlement for lasting peace (Spencer, this volume).

Given the extremely extroverted nature of the post-2002 peace negotiations and their apparently paradoxical effects, several questions may be posed and are addressed in this volume: why, given the initial domestic demand for international engagement, was there such a strong backlash against external involvement? What were the interests and agendas of the various international and domestic players who were directly or indirectly involved in negotiations? Why were those supporting negotiations so keen to leverage international support? Why did so-called ‘spoilers’ channel so much of their ire against external actors? Why ultimately did the talks break down and international efforts to support their revival fail? What are the broader lessons of the Sri Lankan case for peacebuilding theory and practice?

It may perhaps be more accurate to characterize the post-2002 period as peace negotiations rather than a fully fledged peace process (Bastian, this volume). In the course of these ‘negotiations’, a fundamental clash of ideas between international and domestic peacebuilding projects developed, which was captured in the term ‘peace trap’. The internationalization of the Sri Lankan peace negotiations after 2002 was shaped by the logic of ‘liberal peacebuilding’, as described below. The swing back to a domestic ‘war for peace’ agenda was based on a very different diagnosis of root causes and solutions to the ‘ethnic conflict’ and it envisaged a very different role for external actors. The Rajapaksa government essentially redefined the ‘ethnic question’ as an internal security problem with the LTTE becoming the overarching threat and enemy to the Sri Lankan polity and society. The contradictions between, and limitations of, these two peacebuilding projects – peace through liberal engineering and peace through military victory – are explored throughout this volume.

In this introductory chapter, we aim to outline some of the intellectual background of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ and how its rationale permeated various aspects of the post-2002 peace negotiations. We will then briefly recount the different phases of the war–peace–war transition (Richards 2005) and explain how the different contributions in this volume address the various dimensions of the ‘peace trap’ that emerged from the liberal peacebuilding project.

Liberal peacebuilding and the ‘Sri Lankan model’

Sri Lanka’s post-2002 peace negotiations constituted a very specific, perhaps unique example of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ – understood here as both a normative and policy framework adopted by, and pursued through, alliances of international and domestic actors and organizations intervening in conflict-affected countries in the developing world. Liberal peacebuilding involves the implementation of a broad package of measures, with the aim of simultaneously pursuing the goals of conflict management, liberal democracy and market sovereignty (Pugh and Cooper 2004).

The liberal peacebuilding framework can be traced back to two interlocking strands within the liberal tradition, one political, the other economic (Howard 2008). Both tackle questions about how to prevent war and build peace. The political strand rests upon conceptions of liberal internationalist thought, the democratic peace hypothesis, international law and the liberal social contract (Richmond 2009: 559). The economic strand rests upon notions of free trade and development and the related idea that societies become more peaceable when power shifts from the military class to an economic class (Howard 2008: 11–12). Free trade would lead to a more prosperous, interdependent and therefore peaceable world, whilst planned or intentional development would ameliorate the disordered faults of progress (Cowen and Shenton 1996). The idea that planned development in its various guises could somehow provide a ‘way out’ from the so-called ‘conflict trap’ has been a persistent strand in liberal thinking (Paris 2004; Cramer 2006).

Liberal peace is always framed by the state and the market, and when faced with instability or resistance, liberal peacebuilders frequently resort to illiberal means in order to pursue purportedly liberal goals (Paris 2004) as evidenced most prominently in the US interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. From a Foucauldian perspective, liberal peacebuilding can be understood as technology or apparatus of power (Richmond 2006; Duffield 2007; Heathershaw 2008). It is a mode of governance through which hegemonic Western players deal with threats to their security and economic power. The coming of age of liberal peacebuilding coincided with the end of the Cold War, which saw the development of a new interventionist doctrine that challenged the postcolonial codification of the rights of state sovereignty (Chandler 2008: 337). The state’s sovereignty has become increasingly conditional; if it cannot protect the ‘human security’ of its citizens, then it forfeits the right of non-intervention. Liberal peacebuilders justify their interventions through the tropes of failed states, extremism and so forth, setting a standard by which ‘failed states’ and ‘bad civil societies’ are judged (Heathershaw 2008: 597).

The operationalization of the liberal peace involves a complex mix of actors, processes and technologies, including security sector reform, institution building, rule of law, human rights, reconstruction and development and free market reforms (Richmond 2009: 559). Arguably, the project of liberal peacebuilding has involved a narrowing of the ends– in terms of a highly circumscribed and functionalist view of what a ‘legitimate’ modern state should look like – and a widening of the means– in terms of a proliferation of new tools, instruments and institutional adaptations and the emergence of epistemic communities composed of practitioners, policy makers and academics dedicated to implementing or interpreting the post-conflict agenda (Richmond 2006). ¹

Peacebuilding can also be understood as a mobilizing metaphor – like ‘participation’ – which is sufficiently opaque as to allow many actors with diverse interests to sign up to it (Barnett et al. 2007; Mosse 2005). In this sense liberal peace-building constitutes ‘a kind of virtual peace, mainly visible to those observing from outside the conflict zone rather than those upon whom peace is being visited’ (Heathershaw 2008: 620–1). Because of its extroverted and top-down character, liberal peacebuilding may work rather like a monopoly, that prevents the emergence of other more indigenous forms of peacebuilding or reconstruction (MacGinty 2007).

The scholarly discourse on liberal peace has focused primarily on high-profile international interventions into Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, but has discussed much less peripheral, internationally marginal conflict cases, such as Sri Lanka, where great power interests are limited and where there is a relatively robust, functioning state. This volume focuses on Sri Lanka as a less studied example of liberal peacebuilding at the periphery, which has its own dynamics, discourses and practices that diverge in significant ways from those characteristics of more high-profile cases.

One can perhaps trace some of the antecedents of liberal peacebuilding in Sri Lanka, back to the importation of the institutional forms of Westminster-style democracy at the end of the colonial period, through to President Jayewardene’s post-1977 economic liberalization programme, and President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s attempts at political reform and peacemaking during the mid-1990s. However, what was unique about the post-2002 period was the direct engagement of Western actors in peace negotiations – which hitherto had been resisted by the regime in power and societal groups, as a transgression of national sovereignty. Therefore Sri Lanka in some respects conforms to the classical model of liberal peacebuilding as international actors simultaneously pressed for, and were directly involved in conflict resolution measures, alongside economic and political reforms, the most overt manifestation of this being the deployment of peace conditionalities (at the Tokyo Conference of 2003), to add to earlier generations of economic and political conditionalities (cf. Boyce 2002; Frerks and Klem 2006).

However, as explored below and in later chapters, Sri Lanka diverged in important respects from ‘the model’ of liberal peacebuilding and in order to understand why and how this occurred one needs to turn the analytical focus to domestic political processes and the interface between external liberal peacebuilders and domestic political agents. A persistent theme in this volume is the agency of domestic constituencies vis-à-vis the international community and the acts of translation, composition and resistance, through which a policy idea is shaped and translated in the domestic political arena, contra more Foucauldian readings of liberal peacebuilding as technology of power that tends to downplay this kind of agency. Exogenous policies may look very different when they ‘hit the ground’.

The contributions to this volume show that Sri Lanka diverged from an orthodox model of liberal peacebuilding (if such a thing exists in practice), both in terms of the policy framework adopted and its outcomes. The fate of liberal peace thereby resonated with other liberal reforms in Sri Lanka, which were implemented unevenly and tended to produce paradoxical effects: ostensibly liberal reforms have had surprisingly illiberal consequences (Spencer 2008; Bastian 1999; Gunasinghe 2004; Herring 2003; Moore 1990; Woost and Wilson 2004).

Sri Lanka’s peace process after 2002

Broadly, one can identify five phases, which span the period from the lead up to peace talks through to the military defeat of the LTTE in the north in 2009:

Lead up to talks (January 2000–February 2002)

By 2000 a military stalemate between the government forces and the LTTE had developed and in February of that year President Kumaratunga and Prabhakaran formally requested Norwegian government assistance in facilitating peace talks. However, fighting continued and, in May, the LTTE launched an offensive to reconquer Jaffna taking the strategically important Elephant Pass. The LTTE advance to the outskirts of the city was only halted after the government mobilized international military support, primarily from India, Pakistan and China. This offensive was followed in June 2001 by an LTTE attack on Sri Lanka’s only international airport. These developments had significant political and economic impacts. On the one hand the LTTE felt that it was in a position of strength to initiate negotiations, whilst on the other, the government realized that its war for peace strategy was no longer tenable in the face of a military stalemate, a shrinking economy and growing domestic dissatisfaction. Political support for the President crumbled with the defection of Muslim MPs and in spite of efforts to shore up the government through an alliance with the JVP, a no-confidence motion led to parliamentary elections on 5 December 2001. The UNP under the leadership of Ranil Wickremasinghe triumphed on an agenda for peace and economic prosperity, forming the United National Front (UNF) coalition.

Ceasefire Agreement and UNF-led negotiations (February 2002– April 2003)

Within a month of coming to power, Wickremasinghe and the LTTE had agreed on a one-month ceasefire starting on 24 December 2001, and on 22 February 2002, with Norwegian facilitation, the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed. The Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) was formed to monitor ceasefire violations and six rounds of negotiations were embarked upon by the two parties with the support of the international community, and co-chaired by Norway, Japan, the EU and the US.

The negotiation model was underpinned by two core assumptions: first, peace talks were based upon a bipolar model of the conflict, focusing almost exclusively on the leadership of the two-armed protagonists, the GoSL and the LTTE. Second, a phased approach was adopted with the aim initially of building trust by addressing immediate humanitarian and economic issues, and deliberately leaving substantive political questions until later (Sriskandarajah 2003). As explored in more detail in later chapters, these assumptions proved to be ill-founded. The bipolar approach ignored the multipolar nature of the conflict and the peace process itself acted as...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Acronyms
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Caught in the peace trap?
• 2 Government–LTTE peace negotiations in 2002–2005 and the clash of state formation projects
• 3 The Indian factor in the peace process and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka1
• 4 Superpowers and small conflicts
• 5 The military dynamics of the peace process and its aftermath
• 6 Would the real Dutugemunu please stand up?
• 7 Whose war? Whose peace?
• 8 The genealogy of Muslim political voices in Sri Lanka
• 9 Politics of market reforms and the UNF-led negotiations1
• 10 An insider’s view of donor support for the Sri Lankan peace process, 2000–2005
• 11 Muddling the peace process
• 12 In the balance?
• 13 Reflections on an illiberal peace
• References
• Index