Analyses of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) overwhelmingly represent it as an ethnonationalist contest, prolonging postcolonial arguments on the creation and dissolution of the incipient nation-state since independence in 1948. While colonial divide-and-rule policies, the rise of ethnonationalist lobbies, structural discrimination and majoritarian democracy have been established as grounds for inter-ethnic hostility, there are other significant transformative forces that remain largely unacknowledged in postcolonial analyses. This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways. Based around three themes – normative spaces, human mobilities and exilic states – it is organised into ten comprehensive, chapter-based explorations of a range of spatial units, including homes, cities, routes, camps and experiences of ruin that were irrevocably politicised by protracted conflict. Focusing on their material transformations over a thirty-seven-year period, the book explores what can be known of the war if we look beyond ethnicity to other salient, shared geographical features of this embattled history. The book uncovers how fealty to exclusionary cultures of political sovereignty aligns us with their violence, limiting our capacity for empathy, a boundary seemingly exacerbated by neoliberal opportunities. Making use of Sri Lanka as a case study to test geographic, architectural and urban methodologies for understanding violence, this book acts as a provocation to rethink current readings of the particular case study while reflecting on the more general impact of marketisation and militarisation in Asia. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including those scholars interested in South Asian history, politics and civil war, South Asian studies, border studies, geography and architecture and urban studies.

In addition to providing an account of the development of the Tamil nationalist movement and civil war in Sri Lanka , this book also explores the relationship between state power and national consciousness more generally. The author, a doctoral candidate at Colombia University, New York, contends that if the worldwide confrontation between judicial states and national self- determination movements is to be resolved or at least eased, a radical restructuring of unitary states is needed. Demands for national self- determination can be seen, in a sense, as struggles for higher forms of democracy. When radical Tamil nationalists, regarded officially as separatist terrorists, propose voluntary pooling of sovereignties between Sinhalese and Tamils, they are articulating a new political vision of statehood where two diverse and sovereign peoples agree to cooperate in certain vital spheres of common concern. The author suggests that such innovative models could well have validity beyond Sri Lanka.

Analytical study of the seventeen-year old civil war and the Indo-Sri Lanka relations during the period; account by a journalist.

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.

Architecture on the Borderline interrogates space and territory in a turbulent present where nation-state borders are porous to a few but impermeable to many. It asks how these uneven and conflicted social realities are embodied in the physical and material conditions imagined, produced or experienced through architecture and urbanism. Drawing on historical, global examples, this rich collection of essays illustrates how empires, nations and cities expand their frontiers and contest boundaries, but equally how borderline identities of people and places influence or expose these processes. Empirical chapters covering Central Asia, the Asia Pacific region, the American continent, Europe and the Middle East offer multiple critical insights into the ways in which our spatial imagination is contingent on ‘border-thinking’; on the ways of being and navigating frontiers, boundaries and margins, the three themes used to organise their content. The underlying premise of the book is that sensitisation to border conditions can alter our understanding of the static physical spaces that service political or cultural ideologies, and that the view from the periphery opens up new ways of understanding sovereignty. In exploring these various spaces and their transformative subjectivities, this book also reveals the unrelenting precarity of contesting and living on the margins, and related spaces and discourses that are neglected or suppressed.