Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
71
result(s) for
"Group identity Sri Lanka."
Sort by:
Religious change in a minority context: transforming Islam in Sri Lanka
Scholarly work exists on how Muslim minority positioning affects identity and politics, but what is less known is its impact on religion. Sri Lanka's 9% Muslim population, the country's second largest minority, has undergone a series of recent changes to religious identity, thinking and practice, which have been shaped by its relationship to the dominant and warring 'ethnic others'. As Sri Lanka plunged deeper into armed conflict in the 1990s, Muslims experienced significant shifts in religious thinking and practice, identifying strictly with a more 'authentic' Islam. After the war ended in 2009, Muslims became the target of majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist violence, resulting in a reinterpretation of Islam and a counter process of change. Using the Sri Lankan Muslim case study to engage with scholarly critiques of majority-minority binaries, this article analyses how religious change is brought about through the interjection of minority status with ethno-nationalisms and conflict. Its focus on Islam in Sri Lanka contributes to area studies and to Islamic studies, the latter through a rare analysis of Islamic reform in a Muslim minority context.
Journal Article
“Who are we without the war?”: The evolution of the Tamil ethnic identity in post-conflict Sri Lanka
Studies of post-conflict societies have often focused on inter-ethnic group dynamics following the end of conflict, specifically the process of reconciliation between groups, or resurgence of violence across groups. This paper focuses on intra-ethnic differences with respect to defining ethnic identity. This paper will examine how the end of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict created cleavages amongst Sri Lankan Tamils with respect to how they define their ethnic identity and their ethnic group. Drawing upon 66 semi-structured interviews conducted in three regions of Sri Lanka, this paper presents three perspectives that were held among Tamils in post-conflict Sri Lanka. The first perspective was that the end of the ethnic conflict led to a loss in the fundamental tenets of the Tamil ethnic identity. The second perspective considered the promotion of a distinct Tamil ethnic identity to be a gateway to conflict. The third perspective articulated that the end of the ethnic conflict meant that the Tamil ethnic identity could move forward in a more cosmopolitan direction. The findings of this study demonstrate the importance of considering the social construction of ethnic identities, and their implications on post-conflict reconstruction.
Journal Article
The handbook of diasporas, media, and culture
A multidisciplinary, authoritative outline of the current intellectual landscape of the field.
Over the past three decades, the term 'diaspora' has been featured in many research studies and in wider theoretical debates in areas such as communications, the humanities, social sciences, politics, and international relations. The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture explores new dimensions of human mobility and connectivity—presenting state-of-the-art research and key debates on the intersection of media, cultural, and diasporic studies
This innovative and timely book helps readers to understand diasporic cultures and their impact on the globalized world.
The Handbook presents contributions from internationally-recognized scholars and researchers to strengthen understanding of diasporas and diasporic cultures, diasporic media and cultural resources, and the various forms of diasporic organization, expression, production, distribution, and consumption. Divided into seven sections, this wide-ranging volume covers topics such as methodological challenges and innovations in diasporic research, the construction of diasporic identity, the politics of diasporic integration, the intersection of gender and generation with the diasporic condition, new technologies in media, and many others. A much-needed resource for anyone with interest diasporic studies, this book:
* Presents new and original theory, research, and essays
* Employs unique methodological and conceptual debates
* Offers contributions from a multidisciplinary team of scholars and researchers
* Explores new and emerging trends in the study of diasporas and media
* Applies a wide-ranging, international perspective to the subject
Due to its international perspective, interdisciplinary approach, and wide range of authors from around the world, The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, lecturers, and researchers in areas that focus on the relationship of media and society, ethnic identity, race, class and gender, globalization and immigration, and other relevant fields.
eBook
Buddhist Civilisational Populism in Sri Lanka: Colonial Identity Formation, Post-War Othering, and Present Crises
In this paper, I discuss the evolution of Buddhist civilisational populism in modern Sri Lankan politics and civil society. I do this by historicising early forms of Buddhist civilisational populism in the country, during its occupation by the British Empire (1815–1945). As I discuss in this paper, some of the key concepts of “civilisationism” central to leading social and political movements in British Ceylon were a result of the disruptions caused by centuries of European colonial rule. Consequently, issues of identity and belonging have carried on to the post-independence context. In this paper, I discuss what these dynamics could possibly mean for the future of Sri Lankan politics and society, in the wake of the nation’s debilitating economic crisis last year.
Journal Article
India in South Asia
South Asia is one of the most volatile regions of the world, and India's complex democratic political system impinges on its relations with its South Asian neighbours. Focusing on this relationship, this book explores the extent to which domestic politics affect a country's foreign policy.
The book argues that particular continuities and disjunctures in Indian foreign policy are linked to the way in which Indian elites articulated Indian identity in response to the needs of domestic politics. The manner in which these state elites conceive India's region and regional role depends on their need to stay in tune with domestic identity politics. Such exigencies have important implications for Indian foreign policy in South Asia.
Analysing India's foreign policy through the lens of competing domestic visions at three different historical eras in India's independent history, the book provides a framework for studying India's developing nationhood on the basis of these idea(s) of 'India'. This approach allows for a deeper and a more nuanced interpretation of the motives for India's foreign policy choices than the traditional realist or neo-liberal framework, and provides a useful contribution to South Asian Studies, Politics and International Studies.
eBook
Post-war Sri Lanka: exploring the path not taken
The notion of 'races' divided by such fundamental and immutable differences that they cannot live together has long been rejected as unscientific and ideological. The notions of 'nationalities' and 'ethnic groups' at first seem more acceptable, yet they too are increasingly being used to refer to supposedly monolithic entities that are permanently divided from each other. When used by those who are trying to establish the supremacy of their own nationality or ethnic group in a given territory, they can be a pretext for persecution of minorities and ethnic cleansing, but all too often, the very same notions are used by those who see themselves as fighting against such policies. Sri Lanka offers a striking illustration of the impossibility of resolving the problem of persecution of minorities while using the same racist ideological framework that was used to create it in the first place. A completely different framework, acknowledging multilayered, multifaceted identities and multiple belongings, in combination with the politics of solidarity rather than segregation, has proved to be far more promising.
Journal Article
How Many Languages Do We Need?
In the global economy, linguistic diversity influences economic and political development as well as public policies in positive and negative ways. It leads to financial costs, communication barriers, divisions in national unity, and, in some extreme cases, conflicts and war--but it also produces benefits related to group and individual identity. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages of linguistic diversity and how does it influence social and economic progress? This book examines linguistic diversity as a global social phenomenon and considers what degree of linguistic variety might result in the greatest economic good.
Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber look at linguistic proximity between groups and between languages. They describe and use simple economic, linguistic, and statistical tools to measure diversity's impact on growth, development, trade, the quality of institutions, translation issues, voting patterns in multinational competitions, and the likelihood and intensity of civil conflicts. They address the choosing of core languages in a multilingual community, such as the European Union, and argue that although too many official languages might harm cohesiveness, efficiency, and communication, reducing their number brings about alienation and disenfranchisement of groups.
Demonstrating that the value and drawbacks of linguistic diversity are universal,How Many Languages Do We Need?suggests ways for designing appropriate linguistic policies for today's multilingual world.
eBook
THE ROLE OF THE STATE
In the decade following independence, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka all saw ethnic protests as a result of nationalist language policies. The outcomes of these protests varied from peaceful co-optation by the state to civil war. What explains this? Research on ethnic unrest in the region has focused on structural factors, using identity cleavages, social networks, and ethnic fractionalization to explain how an ethnic group may behave during periods of unrest. In contrast, this paper examines three cases of ethnic protests in the context of state response. Tracing the process of the unrest, I identify specific positive or negative state actions as determinants of how the unrest resolves. Where the state bars protesters from access to the democratic sphere, violent conflict results. Where the state actively engages with protesters in the democratic sphere, the protests are peacefully co-opted. The findings show the costs to a state of taking hardline stances with protesters in situations of ethnic unrest and how they may engage with protesters to defuse unrest.
Journal Article
Crafting State-Nations : India and other multinational democracies
Political wisdom holds that the political boundaries of a state necessarily coincide with a nation's perceived cultural boundaries. Today, the sociocultural diversity of many polities renders this understanding obsolete. This volume provides the framework for the state-nation, a new paradigm that addresses the need within democratic nations to accommodate distinct ethnic and cultural groups within a country while maintaining national political coherence.
First introduced briefly in 1996 by Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, the state-nation is a country with significant multicultural—even multinational—components that engenders strong identification and loyalty from its citizens. Here, Indian political scholar Yogendra Yadav joins Stepan and Linz to outline and develop the concept further. The core of the book documents how state-nation policies have helped craft multiple but complementary identities in India in contrast to nation-state policies in Sri Lanka, which contributed to polarized and warring identities. The authors support their argument with the results of some of the largest and most original surveys ever designed and employed for comparative political research. They include a chapter discussing why the U.S. constitutional model, often seen as the preferred template for all the world's federations, would have been particularly inappropriate for crafting democracy in politically robust multinational countries such as India or Spain. To expand the repertoire of how even unitary states can respond to territorially concentrated minorities with some secessionist desires, the authors develop a revised theory of federacy and show how such a formula helped craft the recent peace agreement in Aceh, Indonesia.
Empirically thorough and conceptually clear, Crafting State-Nations will have a substantial impact on the study of comparative political institutions and the conception and understanding of nationalism and democracy.
eBook