Travails of State Reform in the Context of Protracted Civil War in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Introduction Sixty years of Sri Lanka's existence as a post-colonial nation-state has seen a number of failed and incomplete state reform projects. Some of these attempts were made when the island nation in South Asia enjoyed the reputation of being a model of democracy with relative social peace. Others were made after Sri Lankan politics had taken a decisive turn towards civil war and violence. State reform in the Sri Lankan context has meant re-constitution of the state structure in order to create arrangements for power-sharing between the majority and minority ethnic communities through regional autonomy. The earliest reform attempts were in 1958 and 1966. On both occasions, leaders of the ruling Sinhalese political elite and the Tamil political elite agreed to implement limited arrangements for regional autonomy. Those were attempts made during Sri Lanka's ‘peace times,’ before the ethnic conflict developed itself into a civil war. Amidst opposition from Sinhalese nationalist constituencies, both attempts were abandoned. The others came up later, in the new context of a violent and protracted ethnic civil war – 1987, 1994–1995, 2000, 2002 and 2007–2008 being the crucial years in a continuing process of state reform failure. The details of these episodes are quite well-known and many of them are adequately documented in the literature on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict (Coomaraswamy 1996, Loganathan 1996, Thiruchelvam 2000, Uyangoda 1999, 2007).