Expecting the sea: The nature of uncertainty on Sri Lanka's East coast

Abstract

The residents of Sri Lanka’s East coast face a highly uncertain future following three decades of armed conflict, the devastating 2004 tsunami, and the shifting regimes of policies and aid practices that have followed. Furthermore, livelihoods in coastal areas in Sri Lanka are vulnerable to imminent yet uncertain climatic changes. Accounting for this indeterminacy requires going beyond a dichotomy in scholarship that understands uncertainty as either instrumentalized by hegemonic forces or independently troubling policy at all levels. Therefore, I closely examine the how uncertainty works in networks of conflict, disaster, and climate change, uniting them materially and discursively, albeit highly unevenly. To do so, I build on a relational approach that considers networks and assemblages as ways to approach heterogeneous social formations. In particular, I draw on Hetherington and Lee’s (2000) concept of the blank figure, that which is precisely not an actor but formatively influences social order by enacting presence or absence across difference, with the immanent ability to drastically change outcomes. I find this formation useful in interpreting a field inquiry in Batticaloa, a coastal district in Sri Lanka’s Eastern region, where I spoke with fisherfolk and other coastal actors about changes to the ocean that cut across the boundaries of armed conflict, natural disaster, and climate change. I argue that uncertainty permeates the coastal network in both co-optable and uncontainable ways, causing conflict, disaster, and climate change to co-constitute one another at the same time as they are unbound.