Liberal Peace/ Ethno-Theocratic War: a Biopolitical Perspective on Western Policy in the Eelam War
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Liberal Peace/ Ethno-theocratic War: A Biopolitical Perspective on Western Policy in the Eelam War A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ayshwarya Rajith Sriskanda Rajah Department of Politics and History, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University. March 2014 Abstract This thesis develops a biopolitical perspective on Western states’ longstanding opposition to the formation of a Tamil state (Tamil Eelam) in the northeastern parts of the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). It does so by adopting and applying the concept of biopolitics as developed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s. Foucault used the idea of biopolitics to explain power relations and to consider peace through the matrix of war. He was especially interested in using this to understand power relations that emerged in the eighteenth century and especially in terms of the tensions between military confrontation and commercial expansion. This thesis adopts and applies the idea of biopolitics to the concept of liberal peace and its core principle, the security of global commerce, to offer a new interpretation of the rationale behind the opposition of Western states to the Tamil demand for political independence and their collaboration in Sri Lanka’s biopolitical transformation of the island into a Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-theocracy. As practitioners of the biopolitics of liberal peace, Western states have waged wars and collaborated in the wars of their Southern counterparts, allowing populations, including liberalised ones, to be killed, condoning the subversion of civil liberties, human rights and other democratic freedoms, including the right to self- determination of nations, that they simultaneously promote. The thesis explores the extent to which the collaboration of the West with the Sri Lankan state’s racist policies and counter- insurgency efforts is a continuation of the colonial policies of the British Empire in Ceylon. In developing a biopolitical perspective on the liberal state-building practices of the British Empire in colonial Ceylon, Sri Lanka’s adoption of the same practices, and the West’s own efforts to neutralise the Tamils’ armed struggle, the thesis explores the ways that power relations produce the effects of battle, and thus the way that peace becomes a means of waging war. When the power relations of law, finance, politics, and diplomacy produce the effects of battle, they become ways of waging war by other means. As well as being a thesis on Western policy in the war in Sri Lanka, the work is therefore also to some extent an attempt to see how far Foucault’s work on biopolitics might be pushed and developed and thus, at the same time, an attempt to turn the Foucauldian focus to an area thus far unexplored by those who have sought to engage with Foucault’s work. 1 Table of Contents Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 4 Chapter I Foucault, war, and biopolitics 43 Conceptualising war 43 Grasping biopolitics 58 The biopolitics of liberal peace 67 The biopolitics of the Sri Lankan state 77 Chapter II Liberal peace in theory 82 Normative operations 82 Institutional operations 89 Towards a liberal empire? 98 Chapter III Liberal peace in practice 108 Containment and development 108 Post-Cold War manifestations 114 Chapter IV Liberal state-building and ethno-theocratic ambitions 123 The fight for the control of Ceylon 124 Liberal state-building in colonial Ceylon 128 The dynamics of Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-theocratic nationalism 135 Waging war through law 150 Turning a blind-eye to ethno-theocratic ambitions 156 Chapter V “Anything is fair”: liberal emergency in Sri Lanka 165 The liberal origins of martial law 166 Martial law in colonial Ceylon 169 Continuity of martial law in contemporary Sri Lanka 176 The commercial dynamics of Western endorsement 184 Chapter VI Fighting the ‘Indira Doctrine’ 191 The ideological dynamics of Tamils’ armed struggle 193 Western military assistance and the Indian response 204 Chapter VII The build-up to the West’s war on the LTTE 212 Enticing towards negotiations 212 Sri Lanka’s ‘war for peace’ 216 Chapter VIII The West’s war on the LTTE 226 Converging with Sri Lanka’s ‘war for peace’ 227 War through ‘peace’ 239 Towards the annihilation of the LTTE 253 Conclusion 260 References 267 2 Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to my supervisors, Dr. David Scott and Professor Mark Neocleous. Although in theory Dr. Scott was my first supervisor and Professor Neocleous was my second supervisor, in practice both of them acted as my first supervisors. I thank them for their unwavering support, wise advice, guidance, and most of all for their patience. I am grateful to Brunel University for appointing them to supervise my doctoral research. I would also like to thank all of my independent reviewers and other members of staff at the Department of Politics and History who provided feedback on my research at PhD presentation days and during annual reviews. I am also grateful to the School of Social Sciences for providing me with an in-year studentship in 2012 to support my research. Finally, I would like to thank my loving father, my sisters Mala and Divya, my nephews, aunt Rajes and aunt Adele, and my friends Sutha and Sathees for their support. 3 Introduction The post-colonial history of Sri Lanka (Ceylon)1 is full of state violence, marked by racist policies, discriminatory laws, and large scale human rights abuses and war crimes against the island’s Tamil population. Initially, when Tamils resisted state-aggression through non- violent means, Western states largely turned a blind-eye to their plight. However, when the Tamils’ non-violent mode of resistance transformed into an armed struggle in 1972 to establish their own state (Tamil Eelam2) in the northeastern parts of the island under the principles of the right to self-determination of nations, Western states initially responded by aiding the Sri Lankan state’s counter insurgency efforts, and later, as the armed conflict intensified, took a parallel initiative to neutralise the Tamils’ armed struggle. Why did Western states, which have since the end of the Second World War promoted, under the banner of liberal peace, civil liberties, human rights and other democratic freedoms, including the right to self-determination of nations, first ignore the plight of Tamils, then aid Sri Lanka’s counter-insurgency efforts, and later took a parallel initiative to neutralise the Tamils’ armed struggle? Was it because the concept of liberal peace metamorphosised in practice into the power calculations of political realism, or is there a deeper contradiction within the concept itself? This is the key question of my doctoral research. In this thesis, expanding on a number of key concepts and ideas that the French philosopher Michel Foucault developed in the 1970s to explain power relations, I trace the 1 The island‐state of Sri Lanka is a colonial contruction of the British Empire. For many centuries, the Tamils and the Sinhalese divided the island between themselves, with the Tamils having their kingdoms and principalities in the northeastern parts, and the Sinhalese in the southern and central parts. Under British rule, these kingdoms and principalities were unified into a single administrative unit, which on 4 February 1948 became the newly contructed state of Ceylon, renamed in 1972 as Sri Lanka (see Chapter IV). In this thesis, I use the names Ceylon and Sri Lanka interchangeably to refer to the island, depending on the historical periods. 2 The island of Ceylon was referred to as Eelam in ancient Tamil literatures and as Lanka in Sinhala chronicles. In 1922, with the rise of Tamil nationalism, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, a Tamil politician, coined the name Tamil Eelam to refer to the Tamil homeland in the northeastern parts of Ceylon, meaning the Tamil part of Eelam (Wilson, 1988:8). However, in the later years, the name Eelam began to be misconceived as the acronym for Tamil Eelam, resulting in the use of the term ‘Eelam War’ to denote only the Tamils’ armed struggle. In this thesis, conceptualising war beyond military action, I use the term to refer to the Tamil – Sinhala conflict from the day the island‐state was created: it includes Sri Lanka’s ethno‐theocratic practices before the emergence of the armed conflict, Tamils’ non‐violent mode of resistance, and the armed conflict. 4 rationale behind Western policy in the Eelam War to the biopolitics of liberal peace. In the biopolitics of liberal peace, commercial globalisation is understood to be the key to making life live by bringing an end to the miseries that military confrontations between states can bring upon populations. It is as practitioners of this biopolitics that Western states have since the end of the Second World War waged wars and collaborated in the wars of their Southern counterparts to eliminate non-liberal actors who are considered to be a threat to global commerce and thus global populations. It is in these biopolitical wars to make life live by eliminating threats to life that Western states allow populations, including liberalised ones, to be killed, and condone the subversion of civil liberties, human rights and other democratic freedoms, including the right to self-determination of nations, that they simultaneously promote. These wars are waged not only in the form of military action, but through all power relations, i.e., law, finance, politics, and diplomacy, that produce the effects of battle. Foucault first coined the term biopolitics in 1976, in Volume I of The History of Sexuality. Later, in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered at the College de France in 1979, Foucault provided an alternative account of liberal peace as a concept that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century for ending military confrontations between European powers through commercial globalisation (2008: 54-58).