Women in the Local/Global Fields of War and Displacement in Sri Lanka

Abstract

War and displacement create specific local/global relationships. This article explores how globalization is not a universal, but a highly contested and contingent experience by analyzing local/global fields of war and displacement in the Sri Lankan civil war. The different involvement with globalization of two different groups of women—the women cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and internally displaced Muslim women working as migrant laborers in the oil-rich Gulf States—is explored. Intersecting spaces of gender, ethnicity and class are analyzed in order to show how specific actors with different social locations make use of their symbolic capital to deal with war and displacement and how these intersections in the local/global fields of war and displacement consolidate and contest social divisions and inequalities.