Trajectories of radicalization in post-war Sri Lanka

Assistant professor
Assistant Professor in Conflict and Peace Studies
Date
Thursday 22 Apr 2021, 13:00 - 14:00
Type
Seminar
Spoken Language
English
Room
Zoom
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Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits
Dr Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits

In this Research in Progress Seminar, DrJayasundara-Smits tries to situate Sri Lanka’s post-war radicalization in the wider debates on state transformation in international political sociology (IPS) and Mbembé’s work on necropolitics.

Recent research on radicalization and violent extremism largely focus on Jihadi inspired radicalization. Sri Lanka has been added as an interesting case study, following the Easter bombing incident in 2019, carried out by a radicalized local Muslim group who drew inspiration from global Jihadist movement and the Islamic State.

The evolving scholarship on post-war radicalization in the Sri Lankan context  is eager to point to  the same internal dynamics that led to the civil war ( 1983-2009), including simmering tensions between majority and minority communities (majority Sinhalese  and minority Muslims), autocratic and populist politics (alluded to the two post-war Rajapaksa presidencies) and troubled economic development (debt ridden economy).

Whilst recognizing the importance of these factors for understanding Sri Lanka’s recent trajectories of radicalization, in this seminar Dr Jayasundara-Smits tries to situate Sri Lanka’s post-war radicalization in the wider debates on state transformation in international political sociology (IPS) and Mbembé’s work on necropolitics.

The main contributions that she hopes to make are to broaden the current research agenda on radicalization research by linking the internal political and economic dynamics with the external political, economic and geo-strategic dynamics in the Indian ocean region and to introduce a new set of conceptual and theoretical tools to the study of radicalization, through the case of post-war Sri Lanka.

The presentation will be based on secondary resources and 20 in-depth interviews recently conducted in Sri Lanka, as part of ISS-funded RIF project; ‘Radicalisation and violent extremism in post-war contexts.’

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The Research in Progress seminars are intended to provide an informal venue for presentations of ongoing research by ISS scholars and other scholars from the wider development studies community.

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