Demos at War: Revisiting the Democratic Boundary Problem With a Performative Lens

Abstract

This essay takes revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. Congruent with this theoretical problem, the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state – pertains to the legal and political fundamentals of constitutional democracy in Sri Lanka. Democratic theory struggles to conceive of the possibility to contest the bounds and foundations of democracy in a democratic manner – after all, any such effort would need a prior demos which then conjures new boundary problems, thus prompting an infinite regression. Empirically speaking, however, Sri Lanka’s conflict protagonists have explored myriad ways to challenge, shift or circumvent this theoretical roadblock. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, re-enacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: constitution, election, court, checkpoint and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed.