The system of correctional education in Russia

We are coming full circle in the closing paragraph of this chapter. Keeping in mind the above thoughts of conceptualising post-war transition in a non-teleological way (sections 2.6 and 2.7), we will return to the four pillars of a political

geography perspective (sections 2.2 - 2.5). Identity, politics, the state and space provided us with different angles on the political geography of war. These

perspectives do not lose their relevance when a war ends. On the contrary: I posit that we can understand the end of a war as the re-articulation of political geography in all its four dimensions. This chapter will close with a brief

elaboration on what such a re-articulation of political geography may entail.

Reshuffling identity struggles

Section 2.2 discussed the mutual relations between armed conflict and group identities, such as ethnicity and nationalism: the mobilisation of identity is a common ingredient of war’s causative cocktail; political violence in turn

re-articulates identities. War tends to harden certain fault lines and give prominence to certain kinds of identity, while other boundaries and identities move to the background. One kind of rivalry may come forward as the “master cleavage”

(Kalyvas’ aforementioned term), but that does not mean that other identities and lines of content cease to exist. This becomes particularly relevant in a post-war context. Societies emerging from a protracted armed conflict are typically implicated by the legacy of rifts and enmity. Years of boundary-making and othering, military surveillance, and the glorification of genealogical myths leave marks that may last generations. Yet, on the other hand, many of these

reproductive cycles and practices of dramatising identity and guarding boundaries are affected when a military victory or a peace agreement puts an end to large-scale organised violence. As elaborated in article 4, circulation intensifies when checkpoints are lifted and roads are opened. And when the military landscape changes, so does the state of siege that communities experience. For example, the demise of the LTTE eased a major source or threat for Sri Lanka’s Muslim community. Their existential anxieties increasing gravitated towards the triumphant victory mood of the Sinhalese majority. And it opened up space for intra-Muslim divides – competing religious sects, town-based rivalries – to play a more salient role (see article 1 and 2). These examples illustrate that struggles over identity get reshuffled in the post-war context. Turf battles over genealogy and belonging and the forging of identity boundaries do not simply mould with

54

war-time trenches. Neither do they start on a clean slate or revert to pre-war conditions. Longer-histories of identity construction and subsequent legacies of the war play out in different ways, with differences of emphasis, adjusted forms of loyalty and new forms of rupture.

Reconfiguring the political

These observations resonate with the conceptualisation of the political in section 2.3. Rather than emphasizing public policy – ideally the privileged sphere of rational deliberation and consensus-seeking – the section referred to the work of Jonathan Spencer, Chantal Mouffe, and Carl Schmitt to suggest that politics is fundamentally antagonistic. Rather then a disruption or manifestation of politics, these authors argue that antagonism between “us” and “them” – “friends” and

“foes” – is constitutive of politics itself. If such dynamics are indeed fundamental and inevitable, “the political” will logically continue to play a central role in a post-war society. For one thing, war endings often create winners and losers. This reminds us of Schmitt’s cynical suggestion – echoed by Mouffe – that every

consensus in fact comprises a new form of exclusion. What is presented as consensus in their view really constitutes the declaration of a new us, and therefore it is an expression of just another us-them divide. Peace lends itself to an equally cynical reading and it does not take much fantasy to project these views on the victory speech of the Sri Lankan president in 2009. Mahinda Rajapakse declared there were no longer any ethnic minorities in the country, only those who love Sri Lanka and those who don’t (for critical discussion, see Jazeel and Ruwanpura 2009; Wickramasinghe 2009). Rather than a harmonious compromise, Sri Lanka’s victor’s peace thus projected a divide between supposed patriots and traitors.

“The post-war political”, as we may call it, thus propels triumph and humiliation, celebration and anxiety, and – perhaps more than anything else – continued antagonism. Yet, we have taken Mouffe’s rigid scheme of us and them with a grain of salt in section 2.3 by underlining that there is more than one form of antagonism – spurred by different ways of defining us and them – and that opens up some scope for change and, perhaps, a glimmer of hope. There is a risk of clinging on to an eerie kind of conflict nostalgia, that foes will always be foes (and friends perhaps will always remain friends). If different ways of defining “us”

connect us with people who would otherwise just be “them”, perhaps we are not condemned to group enmity after all. Group identities are not static, antagonism

55

is subject to change, and the emphasis between different forms of antagonism may shift. Notwithstanding my criticism on overly teleological interpretations, post-war transition is a time of change and reconfiguration. If violence is the heightened form of politics, to reiterate Jonathan Spencer’s phrase, decreasing levels of violence may open up space for different kinds of political dynamics.

Ceremonial declarations that the war is over, the easing of surveillance and the cessation of gunfire and shelling expectably do make a political difference. We thus need to look how the political gets reconfigured: how symbols and practices remake or soften group boundaries; what collective identities get reified or glorified and which ones may wither; and what new us-them divides are emerging, generating new forms of antagonism within or across previous formations.

Recalibrating public authority

Section 2.4 underlined the flaws of equating war with state collapse, and the corresponding suggestion that it can be overcome through “state-building”. I discussed a sequence of political sociologists and anthropologists to underline three points. First, state practices are often at loggerheads with the discourse of a coherent and rational actor that hangs above the fray of society. Second, this discourse is nonetheless important provides state institutions with an aura of naturalness, legitimacy, perseverance and indispensability. It is through these discourses and associated practices that the state gets enacted. Third, this “state-trick” is not easily monopolised: non-governmental actors like insurgencies may adapt very similar postures. War-torn areas are thus characterised by more convoluted claims to sovereign rule, which overlap, contradict or compromise each other.

These unruly practices may take an extreme form in the context of war, but the basic principle is not altogether abnormal. The myth of a coherent and rational state does not materialise as an actual practice in any context, and neither does it in post-war context. There are important differences between a wartime- and post-war state functioning, but they have little to do with a complete breakdown of public administration during the war or a reconstitution of uniform rule after the war ends. Contestation and bargaining continue throughout. Public authority and the enactment of the state are recalibrated. The playing field of public authority changes when a rebel movement gets defeated, or agrees to convert itself into a democratic party within the sovereign state it used to fight (to name

56

two common scenarios). This will change the actual dynamics of rule, the cast of brokers, and their relative bargaining positions. But this does not erase all war-time relations of power, lines of affinity and forms of subjectivation. And it does not make all actors – politicians, ex-militants, civil servants, community

authorities – converge in one homogeneous form of sovereign rule. In fact, post-war transition may open up new spaces of transgression, corruption, political interference, and violent coercion. Some of these feature saliently in article 3, which reviews the way post-war transition affected Sri Lanka’s civil servants.

Re-territorialisation

Finally, we may conceive of post-war transition as a process of

re-territorialisation. The end of a war, I suggest, heralds changes in the lay of the land, which are both influenced by and impact on the previous three forms of re-articulation. Section 2.5 juxtaposed a whole set of geographical terms – place, movement, territory – with questions of identity, belonging and forms of rule. It reviewed the work of political ecologists like Nancy Peluso, Peter Vandergeest, and Michael Watts on the nexus between the state formation and

territorialisation, and the counter-forces to this historical trajectory. I invoked recent work in critical geopolitics in section 2.5 on the way spaces and times are produced as “war” and “peace” and mutually constitute post-war political

landscapes. These analyses were particularly relevant for so-called warscapes.

Armed conflicts are often underpinned by spatially grounded claims like homeland or holy land, and the onslaught of organised armed violence produces its own spatial orderings through displacement, checkpoints, settlement politics, or symbolic apportionment of space. This may result in a state of equilibrium with fairly sedimented practices, as was the case in the late 1990s in Sri Lanka.

A war ending, however, is far from an equilibrium. The re-articulations to do with identity, politics and the state (discussed above) have spatial dimensions, but post-war re-territorialisation is more fundamental. Roads may be re-opened or newly built, checkpoints and other restrictions on the circulation of goods and people may be lifted, access to telecommunication may improve, and so on. Post-war re-territorialisation thus involves a whole set of opening and closing spaces, a re-articulation of connections and disconnections. Article 4 zooms in on some of these processes. Displaced people are being resettled or relocated, militaries cordon off strategic areas (or release them), new infrastructure re-links people and places, victors post their flags and icons to claim important sites. Previously

57

forlorn regions get reconnected to the world, possibly easing hardships, but also increasing their exposure to new influences and people. Post-war transition involves a recalibration of the lay of the land, and that causes all kinds of predictable and unpredictable changes, opportunities and anxieties.

In sum, this chapter has argued for a non-teleological perspective by conceiving of post-war transition as re-articulation of political geography. This involves the reshuffling of identity struggles, reconfiguring the political, recalibrating public authority and re-territorialisation. While war endings often comprise a moment of dramatic change, these concepts allude to longer-term patterns in the

constitution and reproduction of human society. It is therefore important to ground post-war transition in a thorough understanding of context and history.

Before we turn to the specific arguments that I make about the current transition in eastern Sri Lanka (the articles in Part II), chapter 3 will thus provide us with contextual background on the region.

58

59

Chapter 3