social orders, state formation and conflict

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SOCIAL ORDERS, STATE FORMATION AND CONFLICT: BUDDHIST NATIONALISM IN SRI LANKA AND MYANMAR DR. DAVID RAMPTON VISITING FELLOW, CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, LSE WORKING PAPER MARCH, 2016 (Revised Draft) 1

ABSTRACT: This paper develops a historical overview of ethnic and nationalist conflict in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, arguing that violence and civil war in both these contexts have their roots in the gradual consolidation of a hegemonic and hierarchic social order centered around majoritarian Buddhist nationalist identities. The paper argues that the role and significance of ethnic and nationalist identity in the reproduction of dominant social orders is not well understood in the mainstream social sciences due to their reproduction of dualistic frameworks. Such approaches render these forms of identity cosmetic and epiphenomenal to other underlying structural, objective and material dynamics and processes. This results in a tendency to neglect the significance of identity in social order building and state formation dynamics and in secessionist resistance to these processes from subordinated ‘minority’ communities, with Burma and Sri Lanka’s political crises perceived to stem, instead, from elite predation, authoritarianism, militarism and a lack of, or decline in, democracy, the rule of law and human rights protection. The danger of neglecting the significance of identity is that the role of nationalism and ethnicity in dynamics of repression and social injustice is obscured and international and local scholars, diplomats, humanitarians, peacebuilders and financial institutions will not only fail to comprehend the ongoing salience of forms of ethnic and nationalist hierarchy and conflict but contribute to oppressive dynamics through a lack of awareness and sensitivity to their significance and role.

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This working paper emerged out of research towards a final issue paper for the Berghof Foundation. I must thank firstly, reviewer, Norbert Ropers, and, secondly, David Brenner and Matthew Walton for advice on the Myanmar context and for comments on the first October 2015 draft.

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Introduction The purpose of this paper is to explore the centrality of Buddhist nationalist identity dynamics in the reproduction of the aforementioned enduring cycles of violent conflict in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar. At first sight, this comparative study looks straightforward, due to the strong parallels that exist between these societies in the form of parallel histories and experiences evident in Theravada Buddhism, British colonialism, patronage-based political culture, majoritarian nationalism and the postcolonial intensification of ethnic conflicts between the State centre and minoritybased autonomist and secessionist insurgent groups at the periphery. However, there are also significant differences including divergent geographies and geopolitics, differing historical and temporal colonial trajectories and levels of transformation, the comparatively greater diversity and complexity of identities, communities and of insurgencies in Burma, and contrasting postcolonial democratic and authoritarian systems in each of these states. Yet, these differences in no way vitiate the very striking feature of both the Sri Lanka and Myanmar cases as far as conflict and the prospects for peace are concerned, which is that majoritarian nationalism has been a major driver of antagonism and violence in both countries, directing and structuring state and social practices at a very profound level, and, in the process, marginalizing minority communities and setting in motion demands for autonomy and secession. Despite the defeat of the LTTE and a post-War environment in Sri Lanka since 2009, and, in Myanmar, a proliferation of ceasefires, reform and gradual democratization, there is still little sign that these changes will diminish the potency of Buddhist nationalist domination, or, in the long term, the conflicts that this domination has generated since independence (Holliday 2011:190; ICG 2011). The significance of these identity dynamics is not widely understood, a fact that is not just a result of deliberate political obfuscation by the respective states of Myanmar and Sri Lanka but is also a consequence of the continuing tendency for scholars, donor states, international financial institutions and aid agencies to neglect the impact of the role of identity in conflict. In both cases the tendency is to explain, understand and interact with conflict (and peace) dynamics in Burma and Sri Lanka through an emphasis on the predatory, authoritarian and/or militarised character of the State, political culture and/or of ruling classes and elites, stressing the role of these actors, political and economic dynamics in the lack, decline or weakening of human rights protection, rule of law and an active and participating citizenry. As a result, the centrality and historical development of identity dynamics in both the fomentation and reproduction of conflict and in the generation of the predatory, authoritarian and securitized character of the state and at the societal level has been overlooked. Moreover, a comparative focus on Sri Lanka and Burma produces something very interesting in so far as it juxtaposes the study of a long-standing democracy dating back to 1931, with a State that has been authoritarian and militarized since 1962. What this indicates is that the enduring crisis in Burma’s politics is not necessarily reducible to a lack of democracy (or inevitably resolvable through democratization), given that Sri Lanka, a long-standing democracy, manifests parallel dynamics of persistent identity-driven conflict, violence and war, with democracy fuelling rather than ameliorating this predicament from the very early post-independence period. In a similar way, Sri Lanka’s political crisis is often framed as a decline in democracy and democratic institutions, with the recent shift to authoritarianism under the Rajapaksa

3 regime representing an intensification of this trend (ICG 2013a; ICG 2013c; Stone 2014; DeVotta 2004, 2010, 2011). However, the island’s political crisis and its myriad of conflicts cannot simply be reduced to a crisis of democracy, given the longstanding discrimination and cycles of violence that have marginalized minority rights and citizenship in what was a fully-functioning democratic context for decades. Such a perspective also tends to ignore significant scholarship highlighting the profound connection between democracy and democratization, majoritarian nationalism and conflict (e.g. see Mann 2010; Scott 1999). Consequently, it is argued here that, whilst certainly not irrelevant, the crux of Sri Lanka’s and Burma’s political crises cannot be reduced to the issues of democracy or authoritarianism. Instead, this paper argues that we have to understand the recurrence of conflict in both these contexts as located in the mobilisation of distinct yet parallel variants of Buddhist nationalism and the capacity of these identity dynamics to reproduce territorializing hegemonic majoritarian social orders and the resistance this engenders in the form of minority secessionist nationalism, regardless of whether or not democracy (or its absence) has exacerbated or ameliorated conflict dynamics. In order to understand the centrality of identity to war and violent conflict dynamics requires a challenge to the existing frameworks utilized for understanding both identity and its significance in conflict mobilisation. This paper argues that ethnic and nationalist identities tend to be marginalized and treated as ‘second order’ epiphenomena both in mainstream conflict and peace studies literature and in standard accounts of nationalism, ethnicity and/or conflict in the Sri Lanka and Myanmar contexts. This arises because of the almost endemic tendency for dualist hierarchies to be accepted as givens in mainstream approaches. These approaches are dualist in their treatment of identity and conflict as they divide these phenomena into a series of universal/particular, material/ideational, objective/subjective, structure/agency and rational/affective dichotomies. They are hierarchic because, according to these approaches, the kinds of sociological, political and economic dynamics that, create the nation-state system and which drive the genuine end goal of ethnic and nationalist instrumental mobilisation are located in the universal, objective, material, rational and structural spheres. Classic examples are capital, material resources, development, state formation, elite motivations and rationality. In contrast, ethnic and nationalist thought and practices are subordinated to a ‘second order’, particular, ideational, subjective level, frequently cast as merely a fictive, rhetorical cosmetic, narrative or discourse instrumentally mapped onto socio-political mobilisation and conflict dynamics by political elites seeking power, resources and legitimacy (e.g. see Brass 1997; Kalyvas 2003, 2006 and discussion of their work below). The problem with this model of conflict and identity is that, firstly, it neglects the powerful way in which supposedly material practices such as development, state formation, policy etc. are infused by and directed towards nationalist goals, an issue that is particularly salient in both Burma and Sri Lanka. Secondly, the stress on the elite provenance and instrumental character of nationalism and ethnicity is in denial of the wider social diffusion of nationalism into everyday practices (see Goode and Stroup 2015; Billig 1995; Rampton 2011). This creates a profound problem for the instrumental model as it frequently fails to satisfactorily explain how and why ethnic and nationalist appeals resonate at wider social levels, an operation and outcome that is vital to socio-political mobilisation and the attainment of legitimacy.

4 So what is required, and this is the central thrust of this paper, is an understanding of the way in which nationalist and ethnic identities remain significant phenomena in the generation and reproduction of social orders and practices. Such an understanding, avoiding the pitfalls of dualism, demonstrates a profound interweaving rather than dichotomisation of universal and particular, material and ideational, subjective and objective dynamics both in the social construction of these forms of identity and the way in which they interlock with a range of processes and actions from development, to state formation to religious and social practices and conflict. The central argument being that majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burman Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar play a hegemonic role in the habitus-like reproduction of a range of practices that are both shaped by and reproductive of nationalist order (for the habitus see, Bourdieu 1990: 52-65). I should clearly emphasise that the stress here on social orders and the nationalist and ethnic discourses that drive them is not a focus on primordial ethnic enmity or hatred, nor is it about some purported nexus between Buddhism and violence or even about the Buddhist religion per se. It is about the way the (international and local) construction and reproduction of nationalism in these specific contexts, creates a hierarchic order which privileges, respectively, the Sinhala and Burman nation/people, their languages, culture and values and the Buddhist religion, and the aims and goals of the state over and against minority groups who are located in a relationally subordinate position in this hierarchical scheme (Kapferer 2012; Tambiah 1992; Walton 2010; Gravers). This hierarchy does not per se seek the eradication of subordinated groups but threats to the security and territorial integrity of these orders have historically driven the violence involved in the construction, preservation and reproduction of these social and state formations. To reiterate, this is not about Buddhism but about the channeling, interlocking and transformation of a range of linguistic, religious, cultural and socio-economic and political practices into nationalist dynamics within the context of the international, territorializing system of states. The hierarchy and the violence that this has engendered must therefore be seen within the context of modern power, which forges a governmental nexus between population, state and territory within an international structure of nation-states. So the dissemination of the nationalist, values, culture and conduct of the majority population, the reproduction of this social logic within and through state and societal practices and apparatuses seeking also the territorialized preservation and expansion of this order. Although elites instrumentalise identity and this is not denied, an instrumental framework does not capture the socially diffuse and hegemonic character of both Burman and Sinhala Buddhist nationalisms, in terms of the way that a wide variety of actors and practices including both ruling elite, subaltern and oppositional groups are caught up within and reproduce its logic albeit in distinct ways. This understanding of nationalism and ethnicity as hegemonic also provides us with an understanding of how and why resonance and reception occurs, in so far as instrumental appeals to these identities must be echoed at wider social levels if they are to secure mobilisation or ‘legitimacy’. A statement of the hegemonic character of nationalism is not an assertion of the monolithic character of social order or a denial of different and heterogeneous levels of identities and social demands in the form of class, gender, region, elite-mass,

5 urban-rural and a plethora of other identities and interests. These social fissures are constantly operative in the social field. However, on the one hand, nationalism and ethnicity, without effacing the significance of these differences (their ‘difference’), often colonises and/or appropriates these social fissures, channeling and reproducing nationalist and ethnic logic into their discourses and practices (Kapferer 2012; Rampton 2012). On the other hand, these social fissures continue to operate as differences and as sites of contestation between, for example, elite and popular movements or between regime-oriented and oppositional mobilisation (Rampton 2011). In the process, it is not uncommon for nationalism itself, in the form of nationalist authenticity or legitimacy, to become a key interface of contestation between these forces, a dynamic that further reinforces nationalist hegemonisation. So, for these reasons, this paper, in the tradition of scholars who understood the ontological force of identity in conflict and the quest for peace (e.g. Kapferer 2012, Azar 1991), argues that Buddhist nationalist identity in its distinct yet parallel Sinhala and Burman variants has a highly significant impact on both state formation and conflict dynamics. Such an approach serves as a challenge to the status quo in mainstream (and some critical) approaches to relegate identity to a cosmetic and instrumental role, a tendency that has been exacerbated by the post-Cold War ascendancy of economistic, rationalist and soft constructivist approaches. In order to do this, this paper firstly analyses the way that some of the general nationalism, conflict and peace studies literature engages with identity. Secondly, the chapter explores how the problems, which exist within the general literature on identity and conflict are repeated in mainstream scholarship on both Burma and Sri Lanka, with ontological approaches representing a more viable alternative framework. Thirdly, the chapter focuses on the history of pre-independence Sinhala Buddhist mobilization in both Burma and Sri Lanka, emphasizing the way in which forms of Buddhist nationalism centered around Burman and Sinhala identities became the vanguard of anti-colonial struggle, eclipsing the potential for a broader nationalist mobilization against colonial rule which would have transformed the nature of nationalist order in both contexts. The penultimate section explores how the dynamics of the conflict are a result of the profound post-independence hegemonisation of both Burman and Sinhala nationalism and the manner in which these nationalist discourses colonized multiple political, social, economic and cultural fields, a process which continued to subordinate, marginalize and provoke resistance from minority communities in these societies. This section concludes with a focus on the more recent development of extreme forms of nationalism explicitly mobilized against minority communities in both societies, exploring the way that these have emerged in the wake of ceasefires, peace processes and so-called ‘victor’s peace’. The chapter concludes with a brief engagement of the lessons that this holds for peacebuilding and conflict analysis in both these contexts and beyond. The Significance of Identity in Conflict and Peace Studies As stated, significance of identity dynamics to cycles of peace and conflict is not well understood or appreciated in the literature on conflict or peacebuilding or in the social sciences more widely (for critiques see Malešević 2008; Newman 2013; Rampton 2011, 2012). This is due firstly and most significantly to the relegation of nationalist and ethnic identity to second order, epiphenomenal dynamics (e.g. see Rampton 2011, 2012; Malešević 2008). These forms of identity are, in mainstream social science approaches, seen as cosmetic manifestations of other processes including economic

6 (under)development fostered by globalisation, capitalism, state failure and weakness and the predatory and pathological behaviour of authoritarian states, elites and classes, including “ethnic entrepreneurs” allied to both state and rebel forces (Kaldor 2006, 2013; Rotberg 2002). It is not that identity is neglected but that power ultimately lies elsewhere, beneath the ideational, subjective surface expression of identity, in the material and objective properties or goals of actors, institutions and processes. As a result, nationalist and ethnic identity is reduced in various ways to a flag or badge that elites, actors and institutions instrumentally manipulate or utilize to achieve their ‘real’ objectives of securing power, privilege, resources and legitimacy. Whether the framing is structural or agential, power is reduced to thin, possessive and/or quantified property or instrument to be wielded, simultaneously expressive of both the accumulation or nestling of power in these actors and apparatuses and the ultimate materiality and objectivity of their goals or purpose (see Hindess 1996 or Neumann and Sending 2006 for a critique). Nationalist and ethnic identity is emaciated becoming a mere hinge, fulcrum or mobilizing device serving these apparatuses and agents in the maintenance or accumulation of yet further material power and resources. A view that is especially prominent in perspectives on Burma and, (albeit to a lesser extent) Sri Lanka, where the governmental command of the State or of rival rebel ‘pocket armies’ is seen as both a route to political control and economic accumulation. As a result, the ideational sphere of identity is frequently marginalized, dismissed as merely the rhetorical ‘shreds and patches’ sewn together by ubiquitous ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ who ‘reconstruct’ or ‘invent’ nationalist, ethnic and religious loyalties and attachments through myths and legends of belonging, blood, soil and sacrifice. The true goal of mainstream social science, whether the framework is realist-rationalist or modernistconstructivist-liberal, is to avoid the ideational pitfalls and obfuscation produced by various forms of “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002) and instead focus on the various universal, material and objectively identifiable forms of economic and political structures, actors and procedures which provide the route to peace or conflict. Beyond nationalism studies, an analogous dichotomy has been reproduced in postCold War conflict studies in the shape of the greed/grievance debate. This debate, which almost inevitably features as a staple diet on every conflict and peace studies curriculum, has almost certainly arisen because of the confluence of both the rise of the economic agendas and rational choice literature on the one hand and, on the other, the constructivist assault on particular (nationalist and ethnic) identities during this period. Turning to the economic agendas and rational choice literature first, these perspectives represent a post-Cold War pendulum swing, itself a product of an aggressive hyper-liberalism, towards increasingly econometric perspectives on conflict in which the structures, motivations and opportunities of conflict actors are seen in increasingly economic terms. Such perspectives stress the rationalist, functionalist and/or utilitarian drive for the egoistic maximalisation of resources, wealth and power as the universal base rationality pervasive amongst civil war conflict actors (but particularly rebels), a rationality that furthermore operates around a felicific calculus of cost/benefit or loss/profit in terms of the maintenance and/or accumulation of political and economic goods. When the motivating factors are not the central dynamic, objective, predominantly economic opportunity or feasibility structures become the facilitating dynamics of crisis including inter alia the resource

7 curse, unemployment, low income, low education, poverty, low GDP alongside weak states, population size, and mountains (e.g. Collier and Hoeffler 2001, 2004, 2009; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Whilst the field has a host of adherents (see Cramer 2002, for a critique), the work of Collier and his various co-authors has assumed a particular prominence, due no doubt to the incredible influence that this has wielded over the orthodox positions on conflict held by Western donors, IGOs and IFIs, including the World Bank (Jones and Rodgers 2011; Cramer 2002: 1848). Such perspectives are clearly dismissive of grievance perspectives and particularly the role of collective identities in the form of ethnicity or nationalism, which are either seen as at best “exaggerated” and/or resistant to objective quantitative measurement due to their subjective nature (Collier 2004) or, at worst, an aberrant “residue of Darwinian survival processes” (Hirshleifer 1994 cf. Cramer 2002). On the other hand, the constructivist literature has also contributed to this orthodoxy through its tendency to deconstruct and disqualify nationalist and ethnic mobilization despite the centrality of identity to the constructivist project. This is clearly apparent in work emerging from diverse areas of research. For example, Brass’s work on ethnic riots in India sees ethnic violence as an result of ‘fire tenders’ and ‘riot specialists’ stoking and fanning the flames of ethnic violence for collective mobilization in the interest of maintaining the political and material interests of established elites, in the process producing a post-facto ethnicised discursive encoding of events with very different drivers (Brass 1997, 2003). The work of Gagnon, Mueller and Bowen, much of it focused on the Balkans and Rwanda respectively, highlights the way that nationalist and ethnic loyalties are manipulated often through violence by opportunistic elites and criminal or predatory warring leaders for instrumental mobilizing purposes (Gagnon 2004; Mueller 2000; Bowen 1996). Such perspectives have also fed the strains of the New Wars approach in which identity is reduced to an elite recruitment mechanism for the pursuit of political power and resources. In Kaldor’s approach identity is even denied ideological status since, according to this view, identity in post-Cold War conflicts is framed as exclusive, particular and lacking in the universal and inclusive politics that characterizes a universal, cosmopolitan, civic, secular and inclusive politics (Kaldor 2013). Attempts to resolve the greed/grievance dichotomy apparent in the work of rationalists like Stathis Kalyvas and in micro-conflict approaches (e.g. Weinstein 2007; Mampilly 2011; Pearlman 2011) have also tended, intentionally or not, to ultimately reinforce the ‘greed’ and/or ‘rationalist-instrumentalist’ rather than ‘grievance’ side of the debate.2 Kalyvas divides the world of violent conflict between the “top-down” “discursive” “master cleavage” of the “centre” (e.g. nationalism, ethnicity) and the atomistic “private” and “localized” dynamics of the periphery. Despite the claim that it is the interaction or “alliance” of these central and peripheral spheres that is ultimately reproductive of violence, Kalyvas tends to stress, instead, the often “pre-existing local rivalries whose connection to the cleavage that informs the civil war is tenuous and loose – even when conflicts are framed in the discursive terminology of the master cleavage” (Kalyvas 2003:47). As a result, Kalyvas tends to 2

There are exceptions within the micro-conflict field. Autesserre is very attentive to both top-down and bottom-up identity dynamics, yet continues to profess allegiance to the Kalyvas framework despite his overall disqualification of identity (2010). Wood’s analysis, although ultimately rationalist, is far from straightforwardly dualistic and is attentive to both material and ideational, subjective and objective, structural and agency dynamics (2003).

8 see the micro-conflicts of the periphery as the primary drivers of conflict with “local cleavages… typically articulated in the language of the war’s master cleavage, often instrumentally”, thereby relegating both grievance and master cleavage to a secondary, ideational level as an “ex post facto” “master narrative” grafted over more atomistic private and localised ‘greed’ dynamics, simultaneously obscuring “war’s ambiguities and complexities” (Kalyvas 2003:480, 487).3 Once again, this rationalist perspective reproduces a potent dichotomy between the material and the ideational and the objective and subjective. In this way, the recent upsurge of interest in the ‘local’ (Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2011), and in micro-conflict studies has, if anything, exacerbated a trend in which the atomized dynamics of conflicts and conflict actors are privileged and in which grievance and identity dynamics are marginalised. Consequently, in the wake of the Cold War and despite a substantial set of critiques which stress the significance of (identity-based) grievance and/or the inseparability of greed from grievance (e.g. Buhaug et al. 2014; Kissane and Sitter 2013; Stewart 2002; Regan and Norton 2005) or the interaction of greed and grievance and of economics and politics including in the statistical proxies isolated in economistic studies (e.g. see Nathan 2005; Keen 2012; Ballentine and Sherman 2003; Arnson and Zartman 2005; Cramer 2002), the ‘greed’ thesis seems to have, if not won the day, then at least predominated over both policymakers and scholarship. The dominance and influence of the ‘greed’ hypothesis has had a number of effects in terms of the way that conflict is perceived including amongst scholars who would not automatically align themselves with economistic approaches including the New Wars approach (e.g. Kaldor). Firstly, it tends to stress the role and dynamic of conflict and of conflict actors as ‘state disintegrative’. This can be seen in the contrast in New Wars frameworks between ‘traditional’, Westphalian and ideological conflicts aimed at consolidating inclusive states, territories and secular nationalism on the one hand, and, on the other, post-Cold War conflicts and wars in which increasingly privatized and factionalised conflict elites instrumentalise particular identities for the control and recruitment of populations for predominantly material ends of securing state power and resources (Kaldor 2012:79-90). This tendency to focus on state disintegration and conflict is also repeated in economic agendas approaches that tend to privilege rebel groups as the target of study, with Collier for instance, equating ‘civil war’ with rebellion and neglecting states despite the fact that states are often key anatagonists and drivers of civil war (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; see also Keen 2012 and Nathan 2005 for excellent critiques). Secondly, what we are then left with is, at best, a level playing field of factionalised warring groups with ruling elites occupying a beleaguered centre of often fierce, authoritarian, weak, failing and illegitmate state machineries, with all parties geared towards rent-seeking and resource extraction. Thirdly and most significantly, conflict actors, especially rebel groups, are represented as automatically greed-driven and state disintegrative thereby marginalising ‘grievances’ to a mere instrumental, elite 3

What remains under-theorised and relatively unexplored in Kalyvas’s Ontology of Political Violence are the implications of his point near concluding, that “the recurrence of the same alliances over time and the reliance on the same central symbols and messages may ultimately integrate and fuse the multitude of local cleavages into the master cleavage—consistent with the observation that wars are statebuilding processes” (Kalyvas 2003:487). The implication here are that discourse has generative power, which as understood by this author, contra Kalyvas, is always at work and not just in the conclusion or commencement of a conflict.

9 device for the legitimation and recruitment for war. At the same time, identity is also automatically disqualified in this conflict paradigm as identity is central to the genesis, articulation and mobilization of grievance in ethnic, nationalist and religious conflicts (Azar 1991). In this way, conflicts are infantilized, depoliticized and securitized as dynamics without meaningful political or ideological aims and goals but with dangerous and threatening global effects (Duffield 2001, 2008). In terms of mapping the conflict terrain, what also occurs is that states, and rebel and state elites, are divorced from the social field, whilst society is represented as the realm requiring rescue and intervention from the predatory instincts of elites in weak states and the effects this generates in the form of violent predation, poverty and inequality. In many ways, these facets of analysis in dominant conflict frameworks have travelled almost seamlessly into peacebuilding approaches. As Edward Newman (2013) has noted, a core tendency that has evolved in peacebuilding approaches is to see recent and contemporary war and conflict as state disintegrative and to equate peacebuilding with statebuilding built on the assumption that this is a conciliatory process with considerable premium placed on areas of cosmopolitan engineering including good governance, democratization, civil society, communal interdependence and integration. However, as Newman notes these assumptions are if not seriously flawed then at least misguided in so far as even a rudimentary survey of historical sociology indicates that statebuilding is a violent process as contemporary and past scholarship has been keen to point out (Newman 2013; see also Cramer 2006; Tilly 1990). What Newman (2013) is pointing out, as Malesevic has also (2005), is that despite all the focus on the disintegrating and atomizing vehicles, aims and effects of the novel dynamics of war, these are formative exercises in which the formation and/or capture of states and territories is still a central goal. Newman is also keen to locate the significance of identity and specifically national identity as a key dynamic to this process as statebuilding is often accompanied by violent processes of nationalist and ethnic exclusion (Newman 2013). Newman’s intervention is resonant with the focus undertaken in this chapter. The lesson is that identity and specifically, nationalist and ethnic identities need to be taken seriously. What I would nonetheless add to Newman’s astute interrogation of war, conflict and statebuilding is that there is a profound ‘levels-of-analysis’ problem in the peacebuilding approach and the analytical frameworks of conflict analysis which underpin it, which is basically a lack of attention to the ‘social’ dimensions which drive both nation and state formation dynamics. Indeed, if there is a lesson to be had for the social sciences generally, when engaging statehood and nationalism, it is that these dynamics cannot be apprehended without attention to the governmental triumvirate of state, territory and population and furthermore how dynamics of statehood are generated at social levels (and not necessarily vice versa as is commonly assumed) that go beyond both the statist, elite-centric and territorial trap of mainstream social science. Instead, the tendency has been for, at worst, the privileging of the economic dynamics of conflict, or, at best, a statist and elite-centric focus on forms of predatory elitism, at the expense of an understanding of how nationalist and ethnic identities themselves act as the channels and dynamics of conflict at a ‘first order’, phenomenal level. As we will see below these problems are recurrent in the mainstream and seminal literature on conflict in both Sri Lanka and Burma.

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The (In)significance of Identity in the Burma and Sri Lanka Literature Although a number of scholars have given due weight to the primary significance of ethnic and nationalist dynamics in the reproduction of conflict in both Burma and Sri Lanka (e.g. Smith 1999; Gravers 1999; Walton 2013; Brown 1994; Kapferer 2012; Rampton 2011), as stated above, a significant seam of social science literature tends to marginalise the significance of such dynamics to second order phenomena either by explicitly dismissing the significance of nationalism and ethnicity as a driver of conflict or through an implicit privileging of other dynamics. It is beyond the scope of this paper to engage in an exhaustive overview of the literature and as a result, I will utilise a few examples of seminal literature in relation to each case to support my point. In relation to Burma, a significant seam of literature highlights the salience of state, military or authoritarian dynamics in the history and politics of the country. Firstly, Callahan’s dense historically sensitive study of statebuilding and militarisation privileges colonial and postcolonial elite-led coercion and war as the central dynamic underlying the form of the Myanmar state, its authoritarianism and the conflicts that have plagued its development (2003). Although, it cannot be stated that dynamics of state formation are neglected in Callahan’s work as the Tatmadaw’s gradual but uneven recourse to the centralisation of violence in a context of extensive political factionalisation and ethnic discontent, is key to her work, the social, political and ideological dynamics of Burmese political culture are sidelined. This is implicit in her division of the “political” and the “coercive”, with the Tatmadaw, and the colonial state before it, understood as pursuing a coercive strategy at the expense of a meaningful engagement with political and social forces, an area where the military and militarised rulers have remained a failure (2003:2,17). In this there is a profound tension between coercive state formation and the state disintegrative effects of the consistent failure at forging political consensus and wider legitimacy. The role and significance of nationalism and ethnicity is either not clearly engaged with, or anthropological and cultural explanations that focus on such dynamics are dismissed outright as “speculative and imaginative at best” (2003:6). Even where she has remained more attentive to the issue of ethnic conflict (2009), the tendency here is again to stress the historical role of colonialism in the structuring of “the centralized yet highly differentiated spatial logic of power” from which ethnic conflict emerges (2009:29). What we therefore end up with and which is also characteristic of other literature that narrows its focuses to the Tatmadaw (e.g. Selth 2002), is a neglect of the extent to which Buddhist nationalist ideology as a phenomenon reproduced at a wider social level is key to the development and evolution of conflict, insurgency and counter-insurgency. Even those studies of the military that do engage with the ideology of nationalism, tend to reduce this to the instrumental and elite level, focusing on the role that nationalism plays in military doctrine and indoctrination (e.g. Maung Aung Myoe 2009:59). The opportunity to explore how and why state elites feel it necessary to engage in ideological and discursive reproduction, where these discourses emerge from and what their social effects are, is completely missed. This presents a picture of Myanmar as split between an authoritarian and coercive military state that utilises identity instrumentally and a society that represents little more than a tabula rasa that

11 is either left devoid of content or onto which numerous (often liberal) normative desires are projected. Secondly and likewise, despite his historical focus on cultural continuities across the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial state, Taylor has argued that the nature of politics and state-society relations in Myanmar can only be understood in terms of the primacy of the State and its governing elites including Tillyan frameworks of resource extraction, armed forces and war-making. For Taylor, these state formation processes are objectively measurable dynamics whilst Buddhist nationalist identity is not, in so far as, firstly, “the state qua state has no ethnicity” and, secondly, we “do not know (h)ow much the state’s leaders in the 1950s consciously used Buddhism as a religious weapon against the state’s rivals” or “how far they genuinely believed that the faith should be upheld by the state” (Taylor 2009:288-290). This perspective automatically marginalises what it implicitly defines as the subjective dynamics of nationalism and ethnicity whilst also reducing nationalism and ethnicity to merely elite-led instrumental dynamics. Whilst Steinberg (2001) certainly acknowledges the significance of ethnicity and nationalism, he gives little emphasis to the structuring dynamic of Burman Buddhist nationalism itself. Instead, the State is seen as “essentially secular in administration even as it was Buddhist in feeling” and the role of ethnicity in the commencement of insurgencies upon independence was negligible as these insurrections, with the exception of the Karen, were primarily “left wing political” and “not ethnic” (184). At the same time, Steinberg privileges the internal and international dimensions of insecurity represented by the communist insurgencies, elements of the People’s Volunteer Organisation, Muslim insurrection on the East Pakistan border and the presence of KMT troops on Burmese territory (an issue Callahan also sees as intrinsic in the entrenchment of centralising coercion [2003]). For Steinberg, these interlocking internal and international insecurities inculcated a siege mentality as the “cardinal element… in the tatmadaw’s continued emphasis on the need for unity – for the country, for the military, and in administration and ideas and ideology” (2001:185). As a result, what we have is a continuation of the tendency to privilege statist and elite-centric readings of Burma, its politics and its conflict dynamics. Again, although South can hardly be accused of neglecting ethnicity and he is sensitive to the need to balance between ethnosymbolist and constructivist accounts of identity, he nonetheless also repeats the tendency for elite-centric framing of ethnicity and nationalism through his (constructivist) stress upon elite groups in the “(re)construction” and “manipulation” of ethnic nationalism (2001:6, 29-30). This tendency to stress the instrumental facets of identity in the hand of ruling elites reaches its zenith in approaches that reduce Burman nationalism and ethnicity to an instrumental State-led appropriation of Burma’s “beliefs, values and institutions, as well as its traditions, rituals and symbols, as a means of legitimating… political power and authority” (Philp 2010:83-5). This sidelining of what I call the ‘first order’ phenomenal dynamics of nationalism and ethnicity has also been accompanied by a considerable seam of literature engaging economistic understandings of recent conflict dynamics in Burma. Classic examples include Snyder (2006), Sherman (2003) and Woods (2011) with an increasing focus not just on the way that resources and economic interests drive conflict but also have been utilized by the Tatmadaw and insurgents in the securing of

12 ceasefires in which a myriad of rebel groups have exchanged war against the Burmese State for state-sanctioned de facto autonomy and economic incentives. Such approaches are clearly beholden to the ‘greed’ hypothesis but are also guilty of an overwhelming presentism (which scholars like Taylor, Callahan and Steinberg are not) through their substitution of a focus on the historical evolution of conflict by a universal, ahistorical, economistic rationality. In the case of Sri Lanka, one witnesses a not dissimilar distribution of analytical frameworks with a tendency in mainstream literature to render identity dynamics as second order phenomena determined by elite and state-led dynamics. As a result, much of the scholarship focusing on either nationalism and/or conflict dynamics has tended to reproduce the same tendency towards instrumentalist, statist and elitecentric readings, with differences merely being variations on a theme. So, for instance for Moore (1989, 2008), Stokke (1998), Bush (2003) and DeVotta (2004), Orjuela (2008) and Hensman (2015), nationalism is a means, result and/or effect of State, ruling class or elite instrumentalism either as a means of securing office through dynamics of “ethnic outbidding” or as a form of social cohesion and source of legitimacy. Moore’s work, a powerful study of the nexus between state formation, legitimacy and development explicitly focuses on the use of nationalism as an elite strategy of legitimation in which the reproduction of the smallholder peasantry is seen as the moral core of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Yet even here, where the discourse and ideology of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is taken seriously, there is a tendency to avoid engagement with the question of the social hegemonisation of nationalist ideology due “to a paucity of knowledge about how the rural population understand their society and state in a holistic sense” (Moore 1989: 207). Similarly for Stokke both Sinhala and Tamil nationalism are ruling class ideological projects from above (Stokke 1998), a view that is echoed in Hensman’s analysis of Sinhala (and Tamil) nationalism, in which the “political leaders of various parties stoked Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism in an effort to gain or remain in power” (2015:6, 17). For both Bush and DeVotta, the reproduction of nationalism in Sri Lanka is a result of consistent intra-group dynamics of “ethnic outbidding” productive of institutional decay and ethnicisation (Bush 2003; DeVotta 2004, 2005), which whilst focusing on the way that nationalism emerges from social pressures, nonetheless still remain both instrumental and elite-centric in their focus on “ethnic entrepreneurs” with “linguistic nationalism” serving as the functional “mechanism” that “Sinhalese elites used to achieve their preferences” (DeVotta 2004:1-2). As a result, despite the ostensible claim to challenge “instrumentalist (elite and rational choice)” understandings of Sinhala nationalism, DeVotta (2004: 1-2) falls into the very instrumental trap that he set out to avoid. Again, an interrogation of the social level and extent of nationalist diffusion is neglected. Orjuela (2008) offers a potentially more nuanced picture of nationalist dynamics in which the “Sinhalisation of the State” is seen as the central engine for the reproduction of Tamil resistance and conflict. Going somewhat further, Goodhand (2010: S359) understands the Sri Lankan civil war as a “state formation conflict, between the clashing logics of Sinhala and Tamil nationalism.” Yet, despite this implicit recognition of the social level and dimensions of nationalism which then proceed to ‘colonise’ the state, the development and reproduction of Sinhala nationalism at the social level and its implications for theory and analysis is not explicitly engaged or foregrounded, precisely because analysis remained entrapped in thin, elite-centric instrumental and statist understandings of power.

13

More recent analysis of the Sri Lankan context, has tended to focus on the intensification of institutionalist decay, arguing that in the post-2005 final phase of the war against the LTTE, Sri Lanka, has witnessed a shift towards authoritarianism, militarization and hardened patronage in which the State, the “regime” and political elites, most notably Mahinda Rajapaksa, utilize Sinhala Buddhist nationalism (or the “new patriotism”) as a way of legitimating their rule (Wickramasinghe 2009, 2015; Hoglund and Orjuela 2012; Stone 2014). Although, it is clear that these writers are not by any means inattentive to the long history in the construction and manifestation of Sinhala nationalism (e.g. Wickramasinghe 2009: 1049-1051), the issue becomes one of framing and emphasis. So, for example, despite the acknowledgement of a wider nationalist seam (2009: 1048), Wickramasinghe’s analysis remains tied to an instrumental and elite-centric conception of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism as a symbolic politics instrumentally engaged by “state institutions”, “statesmen” and the “regime” (2009) or as “a state strategy to consolidate the Sinhalese majority vote” (2015: 62). Similarly, for Hoglund and Orjuela, Sinhala nationalism or “patriotism” is a “key ideology of the state” harnessed by the Rajapaksa regime as a means “to strengthen and further concentrate power” (2012:93). Although these perspectives do not deny the role that Sinhala nationalism has played in the conflict, they maintain and reproduce instrumental and elite-centric frameworks incapable of fully capturing or analyzing the social dynamics of Sinhala nationalism. This is a problem because, as in the Burma case, at no point are we really offered an understanding of how and why elites, regimes and states benefit from recourse to nationalist rhetoric, mobilizing and legitimacy strategies or what the effects of these discourses are. This requires a study of the social logic and dynamics of nationalism as it is in the social sphere that political support and legitimacy is located and where its effects accumulate. The economistic turn in Sri Lanka has not been without adherents (Abeyratne 2004; Biziouiras 2014). However, the ability to reduce the conflict to a‘greed’ over ‘grievance’ argument has remained marginal in this context, precisely because of the consistent and enduring visible experience and articulation of ‘grievance’ by minority Tamil and Muslim groups (Goodhand et al, 2000:400). Whilst both the patronclientelism of state elites and the taxation by rebel groups in Sri Lanka have been the focus of numerous studies, a number of scholars have stressed the need to understand the interaction of greed with grievance in the Sri Lankan context (e.g. Goodhand et al, 2000:396; Korf 2005), or have gone further and argued that grievances in the form of horizontal inequalities are the best explanation for the persistence of conflict dynamics in the country (Stewart 2002). Nevertheless, the proponents of the greed/grievance perspectives frequently continue to commence from an economistic foundation in which the ‘greed’ of the now almost ubiquitously termed ethnic or conflict “entrepreneurs” (itself an economistic terminology) serves as the starting point (through patronage) for grievance to emerge (see Korf 2005:201-202), reiterating the mainstream view that “grievances are seen as the product of civil war and not their cause” (Kissane and Sitter 2013:39). And as a result, it is yet again the case that these perspectives remain elite-centric and ultimately instrumental in their understanding of conflict with identity factors and the history of their evolution remaining at best a marginal focus. Alternative Scholarship: Buddhist Nationalist Hierarchy and Social Order Whilst it is not denied here that elites utilise identity and culture for the sake of

14 legitimacy and social cohesion, the danger is that the framework either wittingly or unwittingly maintains a statist and/or elitist outlook in which the longue durée sociohistorical dimensions and effects of hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) dynamics of nationalism and ethnicity are neglected, which a more attentive approach to social forces reveals (see Holliday 2011 for a critique along these lines in relation to Burma). Once identity dynamics such as those described even in elite-centric accounts, are set in motion they have a tendency to social diffusion beyond merely the elite level. The danger in neglecting these social forces, as Holliday (2011:185-190) and others have recognised, is that the political landscape in both Burma and Sri Lanka is reduced to a set of overly simplistic dichotomies dividing this world into, on the one hand, a regressive authoritarian and militarised state, utilising ethnicity and nationalism in an instrumental fashion and, on the other, a repressed society or ‘people’ inevitably seeking an emancipatory democracy as a route to peace beyond both rigid authoritarian discipline and violent ethnic and nationalist conflict. More critical approaches have sought to render a more complex picture in which nationalist and ethnic identity is understood as a social order, which reproduces and feeds a nexus of statehood, territory and population at a more diffuse social level. These forms of identity are generative of social order through the colonisation of a wide set of practices encompassing apparatuses of the State, politics, law, society, the economy and culture. In its ability to shape apparatuses, institutions, actors and practices, identity is at once both material and ideational, subjective and objective. It is certainly the case, as constructivists will argue, that identities are heterogenous and multi-layered but the tendency is for nationalism to colonise and shape other identities and practices so that “realities once multiple and even distinct begin to refract similar messages and begin to shine with the same burning light that is shone over them” (Kapferer 2012:4). In this way, the orthodox division between state and society becomes more complex as both society and state are traversed by practices of identity and power, thereby blurring the divide between the state and the ‘people’, a force which also ensures that whether the political system is ‘democratic’ or ‘authoritarian’, this social force also colonises these apparatuses, institutions and practices. Having taken this on board, the widespread tendency to reduce the conflict in either Burma or Sri Lanka to a crisis of elites, states or democracy through the clientelisation, militarisation or authoritianisation of the state, is itself neglectful of the central fact that neither periods of functioning democracy, nor the shift to either democracy or authoritarianism in these contexts, have significantly affected the persistence of ethnic and nationalist conflict dynamics. What is instead required is attention to the historical dynamics through which nationalist discourse is disseminated and stratified at and from the social level, the relentless course of which in both Sri Lanka and Burma has gradually resulted in the colonisation of multiple areas of society and state by a hegemonising nationalist discourse. In Myanmar, where the Burman population constitutes between 60% to 70% of the total population, a hierarchy has been created privileging Burman ethnicity at the apex, constructed from the confluence of specific identity markers in the form of the Burmese language, Theravada Buddhism and a specific set of Burman cultural values (see Walton 2013). Burma’s myriad of ‘minority’ groups, including Chinese and Indian-origin populations, Mon, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Chin, Shan, Rohingya and Wa are subordinated within this hierarchic scheme, which locates Burmannness as quintessentially Buddhist, despite significant Buddhist populations

15 amongst these non-Burman ethnicities. A hierarchy encapsulated in the nationalist slogan, “to be Burman is to be Buddhist” (Lehman 2007:109). Similarly in Sri Lanka, a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist hierarchy has been established, which places the Sinhala majority population (about 74% of the population), the Buddhist religion and Sinhala language, culture and values at the apex, simultaneously subordinating Tamil and Muslim minorities (Kapferer 2012; Rampton 2011). In both cases, the territorial integrity of the state and the protection of the majority populations’ core values, culture and the Buddhist religion have become inextricably interconnected, to the extent that citizenship and development frameworks and policies either explicitly or implicitly privilege the Burman or Sinhala identity, a dynamic that marginalizes minorities who do not remain faithfully subordinate, peripheral or assimilated within this overarching hierarchy (Walton 2013 20-22). As we will see from the subsequent sections, the historical process through which this hegemonisation has occurred is fundamentally important. As Laclau has stated, “once a particular social force becomes hegemonic, it remains so for a whole historical period. The object of the investment can be contingent, but it is most certainly not indifferent - it cannot be changed at will” (Laclau 2005:115). As the next section will demonstrate whilst elites are often at the vanguard of these dynamics of hegemonisation, this produces a much wider social effect, an historical process which is the focus of the subsequent section Parallel Histories: Colonialism and the Emergence of Buddhist Nationalism The evolution of these hegemonic, hierarchic schemas in Burma and Sri Lanka share temporally and historically distinct yet parallel trajectories in the evolution of social order. This commenced from a precolonial situation in which Theravada Buddhism and monarchic rule were inextricably interwoven with one another both in terms of the pre-colonial state or monarch’s patronage and protection of Buddhism and the role of the Buddhist sangha in the legitimation of monarchic order and the provision of merit. An architecture that was cosmologically encompassed by and subordinate to the dhamma as a form of dhammaraja or righteous Buddhist rule (Schober 2011; Taylor 2009; Gravers 1999; Phadnis 1976; Tambiah 1992).4 This occurred within a mandala-shaped ‘galactic polity’ in which Buddhism and monarchy formed the centre within a set of “pulsating” concentric circles based on fluid, ‘fuzzy’ and tributary relationships between the centre and other polities, principalities and chieftainships in the outer rings (Taylor 2009). The logic of politics was therefore quite different in the pre-colonial or early colonial state in both Burma and Sri Lanka, in so far as the governmental thrust of the modern state was if not absent then at least only gradually evolving and mainly evident in the expansion of socio-linguistic markers of identity from very narrow dynastic roots to the piecemeal and fluid absorption of multiple groups into Sinhala and Burman religious and linguistic identities (Gunawardana 1990; Schober 2011; South 2008). This allowed considerable scope for fluidity and centrifugal forces, especially in the outer circles, including a very fuzzy logic in the understanding of sovereignty, borders and group relationships (Winnichakul 1994). As a result, the pre-colonial and early colonial polity was one of contextuallydependent “overlapping centres of power and meaning…”, where a community’s relationship with monarchic rule would involve tribute through endowment, resources, labour and service (South 2009:4; Rampton 2011). However, this 4

Scholars do note potential tensions within the relationship between the religious precepts and conduct of Buddhism and that of temporal monarchic power, as the latter involves the exercise of power and of violence antithetical to the former. See Gravers 1999; see also Tambiah 1976.

16 relationship and the overarching edifice of social and political order did not demand congruence between community identity, territory and governance in the abstract sense, (Lieberman 1978). In fact, in both pre-colonial and early colonial Burma and Sri Lanka, there are widespread examples where different religious, linguistic and other identities co-habited in multiple ways. For instance, in pre-colonial and early colonial Sri Lanka, Tamil Nayakkar monarchs governed Kandy, the Kandyan Convention acknowledging British sovereignty was signed by ‘Sinhala’ chiefs in Tamil script, whilst anthropological sources indicate a residual legacy of bilingualism amongst fishing communities in the Western littoral and a syncretic history of Sinhalisation of Tamil groups and Tamilisation of Sinhala groups (Stirrat 1992; Fuglerud 2003). In pre-colonial Burma, the situation was also similar. For example, as South acknowledges, “it was quite normal… for a Tai-speaking petty principality to be subject of a Mon- (or Khmer) speaking prince, or for Karen animists… to trade with (and incorporate elements for religion from) prestigious lowland Mon or Tai city-states” (South 2009:5). In that sense, the modern governmental nexus of state, territory and identity/population was at least absent if not merely incipient prior to the advent of later colonialism, an arrival that accelerated albeit in an extremely uneven fashion the introduction of this very modern logic of politics. British colonialism disrupted and transformed this plural and fuzzy logic in a number of different but often contradictory and tension-ridden ways. First and foremost, colonialism, and liberalism (including liberal peacebuilding), has sought, at one level, to quell the influence of ethnicity, religion and patronage on politics as these are seen as inimical to the correct political disposition which must reside in the production of secular liberal, autonomous, democratic individuals, societies and states in which forms of religious and ethnic attachment are ideally banished to the private sphere. As Gravers has indicated in relation to Burma (1999) and Scott in relation to Sri Lanka (1999), this transformation was not merely pragmatic or context-dependent. In fact, it revealed a far deeper embedding of thought and practice in which the colonial authorities believed that “peace” in Burma and Sri Lanka would only emerge as a result of the pacification wrought by the governmental inculcation of secularism and democracy as the most direct route “through which the population would learn to rule themselves” (Gravers 1993:8). A classic example of this logic in both the Sri Lankan and Burmese cases is that colonial authorities in the nineteenth century abolished monarchic rule, dissociated state rule, administration and education from Buddhism, thereby breaching the forms of intertwined social, political and religious order that inhered in the profound relationship between Buddhism and kingship at the centre (Schober 2011).5 Yet, the logic and effect of colonialism was by no means singular and this is again common to both Myanmar and Sri Lanka. For, even as colonialism pursued de facto secular logic and aims, the colonial state and the forms of knowledge and practice that accompanied it, also served, paradoxically, to rigidify the forms of identity that it encountered in colonial space, a process that fed into the transformation of existing identities and the relations between them in both Myanmar and Sri Lanka. As numerous scholars have noted in different colonial contexts, colonialism obsessed itself with the taxonomic categorisation and utilisation of identity both stemming 5

The secular logic of the colonial state was not without its nuances and tensions, including the fact that Christian proselytisation and educational activities continued to be tolerated in Sri Lanka and in the frontier regions of Burma.

17 from its knowledge frameworks and as a means to secure transform political, economic, social and cultural order (Nissan and Stirrat 1990; Scott 1999; Mamdani 2002). In Burma and Sri Lanka, as in other colonial contexts, forms of regional, ethnic and religious identity were mapped through the anthropological and sociological lens of Western knowledge, through governmental taxonomic apparatuses such as the census and through the use of identity to secure governmental hierarchies in different spheres. In Sri Lanka, different ethnicities were utilised to drive the colonial project with Tamils assuming a relatively stronger position to Sinhala elites in education, the professions and colonial administration whilst particular sectors, such as the plantation economy were manned, in dystopian conditions, by imported Indian Tamil labour. Early forms of political representation were also ethnicised. In Burma, the potent division between ‘Ministerial Burma’, focused specifically on areas of Burman dominance, and the ‘Excluded’ or ‘Frontier’ areas inhabited by minority Shan, Karen, Karenni, Kachin and Chin produced a “radical bifurcation” between relatively autonomous minority groups in these indirectly ruled areas and the Burman Buddhist population at the centre who were, in relative terms, excluded from direct colonial administration, the military, education, the colonial economy and infrastructural development, dominated by Indian and Christian ‘minorities’, particularly Karen, Chin and Kachin (Walton 2008:893; Callahan 2009:34-37; South 2009:10; Thant Myint-U 2004:253; Holliday 2011:117; Steinberg 2001:183). In the contexts of both Burma and Sri Lanka, the disenthroning of Buddhism, the transformation of identity into these separate taxonomic categories and the relative, proportional exclusion of majority identities provided a space and nodal point around which new forms of anti-colonial political and social mobilisation emerged, namely through a transformed and revived Buddhist identity intent on challenging the inequities of colonial order and Christianity (Gravers 1999:22-26; Harris 2006 Jayawardena 2004). As a result, in both contexts in both the latter 19th Century and early 20th Century, one witnesses the gradual emergence of Sinhala and Burman Buddhist nationalism, typified in an explosion of print media and organisations such as the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, Young Women’s Buddhist Association, in both Sri Lanka and Burma and the General Council of Buddhist Associations and Dobama Asiayone (‘We Burmans’ association) in Burma and the Buddhist temperance movements, Buddhist Theosophical Society, Sinhala Maha Sabha and samagam associations in Sri Lanka (see Malalgoda 1976; Jayawardena 2004). This Buddhist nationalist revival has been understood as a form of Buddhist Modernism or Protestant Buddhism (Schober 2011; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988) in which Buddhism is increasingly rationalised, laicised, cleansed of its spiritual and syncretic elements, with a strong stress on Buddhism as a science or philosophy rather than religion and on worldly as opposed to ascetic activity, particularly in terms of social and political activism (see for example, Guruge 1965, Seneviratne 1999; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988). In this, one also witnesses an often profound nexus formed in both contexts between forms of socialism and Sinhala and Burman Buddhist nationalism, including in labour agitations and unions in both Sri Lanka and Burma and in the Marxist outlook of elements of Dobama Asiayone in Burma, including Ne Win (see Smith 1999:53-59; Jayawardena 2004; Gravers 1999: 39-40).6 This has even 6

The Dobama Asiayone is often cited as a classic example of ‘secular’ nationalism. However, closer scrutiny of the organisation defies the neat categorisation of the secular and the religious inherent in mainstream social science.

18 led some scholars to talk of ‘Theravada socialism’ (Fernando 1973).7 These movements became increasingly involved in social and political activity, including in forms of anti-colonial politics, protest, labour strikes and in the regeneration of forms of modern Buddhist education in both contexts (Tambiah 1992:186). In fact, in both Burma and Sri Lanka what one witnessed in the run-up to independence, when compared with the Indian nationalist movement, is that anti-colonial struggle was from very early on centred around a narrow Buddhist nationalism, lacking the forging of a counter-hegemonic All-Burma or All-Ceylon identity and social mobilisation that could bridge the divide between the different ethnic communities (Rampton 2011:259; Bose 1994:45; Steinberg 2001:182; Gravers 1999:39-40). The very same hybrid Buddhist nationalist and socialist forces and movements spearheading the anti-colonial struggle were also often manifest in sectarian and racist political dynamics and discourse, including in violent opposition, riots and pogroms targeted against Burma and Sri Lanka’s minority groups including Christian minorities, Muslims and Indian communities (including Borahs and Chettiars). Such dynamics were witnessed in the Anti-Muslim riots of 1915, and in the Ceylon Labour Union’s hostility to ‘minority’ identity workers in Sri Lanka in the 1920s and 1930s and in the HSaya San rebellion and Dockworkers strikes against Indian workers and Chettiars in Burma in 1930-2 and 1938 (Jayawardena 2004; Roberts 1974a, 1974b; Gravers 1999:35-40; South 2008:21). These protests, rebellions and strikes typified the interweaving of regional, political, socio-economic and cultural dynamics through nationalist channels.8 Whilst Buddhist nationalism, was to be relatively eclipsed by an interregnum of reformist, elite-led politics in the run-up to Ceylon’s Independence in 1948, violent and frequently ethnicised dynamics accelerated in Second World War Burma, with the country divided between British colonial military forces and their local minority “levies” (particularly Karen and Karenni) on the one hand and, on the other, the occupying Japanese and the Burman-dominated Burmese Independence Army (BIA). The Second World War in Burma, therefore witnessed a severe intensification of ethnic violence, including massacres and attacks against Indian and minority communities conducted by the BIA (South 2008:22-23; Smith: 1999:62-4). As a result, with differing histories and fluctuating levels of intensity, late colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle against it, heralded and, to a significant degree, constituted a legacy of ethnicised conflict and violence that would characterise the post-Independence period for both these Asian states. As Smith has argued, this period was “a bitter formative experience in intra-societal conflict that has endured, in some cases until the present day” (Smith 2007: 9). In this sense, the history of the colonial period in these Buddhist-dominated Asian societies is key to the understanding of the formation of identity, conflict and violence in both these contexts, not just due to a pedantic care for historical detail, but also because there is a weight in history, its shaping, moulding, and construction of identity, which is ironically often ignored in constructivist approaches to politics and sociology. These frameworks frequently dismiss nationalist identity as ‘invented’, instrumentally manipulated or ‘contingent’, a charge, which is seldom ventured 7

Taylor notes a division between the communist and socialist movements in Burma, with the former being for the division between state and religion and the latter for a viable merger between Buddhism and socialism (Taylor 289-291). 8 Brown offers an interesting analysis of the regional and geo-political dimensions for the anti-Indian violence (Brown 2013).

19 against the liberal vantage point from which such judgements are often made. History is significant as it provides the temporal space within which multiple areas of conduct and human existence are colonised by dominant rationalities, ideology and discursive formations including nationalism to the extent that in Sri Lanka and Burma, Buddhist nationalism begins to permeate the fields of political and social mobilisation and political culture, development, law and society, transforming, hegemonising and constituting the logic of multiple actors, apparatuses and institutions. It is to this process that we now turn. Post-Independence Buddhist Hegemonisation The impact of colonialism upon the construction of identity, on Buddhist nationalist mobilisation and the reproduction of an ethnically divided society has been dealt with in the preceding sections, with the assertion that anti-colonial forces were spearheaded by the mobilisation of Buddhist nationalist resistance. This set in motion Buddhist nationalist dynamics that have frequently been described as a belated battle with the effects of colonialism (Gravers 1999; Uyangoda 2000:108; Schonthal 2014:472). Prior to independence, the full force of these social dynamics was thwarted by the continuing hold of colonial power and/or the impact of World War II upon processes of state and social formation. In the aftermath of independence and with the colonial gauntlet removed, what one witnesses is the gradual logic of an unfettered Buddhist nationalist rationality that begins to impact on a number of practices traversing the state and social levels. One of the first key areas to consider is that way that this process was reflected in the political and social architecture in both Burma and Sri Lanka, in terms of the nature of the state, the political system, constitutional order and the way that a hegemonising Buddhist nationalism impacted on these areas entrenching an ethnic hierarchy in the inter-relations between the majority and minority populations. In the Sri Lankan context, the colonial legacy had bequeathed a unitary, centralised state form in the Soulbury Constitution with some minimal safeguards to the protection of minority rights and extremely weak local government structures (Sirivardana 2003; CLIGR 1999). The democratic system, having granted universal suffrage since the Donoughmore constitutional changes of 1931, was based on a Westminster-style firstpast-the post electoral model. Both the centralised, unitary nature of the state structure and a democracy without minority-sensitive checks have ensured that, despite signs of democratic health such as high voter participation and frequent turnover of governments between the two main SLFP and UNP parties, the polity was completely at the mercy of Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian social forces, demonstrating the susceptibility of the democratic ethos to nationalist domination (Scott 1999). This logic was first witnessed with force in the 1956 election when SWRD Bandaranike’s SLFP-led MEP coalition swept the polls on a Sinhala Only official language platform, an event that also cemented vertical patron-clientelist ties between the anglicised Colombocentric Sinhala elites on the one hand and on the other, an increasingly politicised sangha and the subaltern, vernacular rural sphere, ensuring that access to highly sought-after public sector employment became tied to political loyalties. Although the electoral system introduced proportional representation after 1978 and this has given the Tamil and Muslim minority parties some veto powers, this has not provided sufficient balance to prevent the ongoing force of Sinhala majoritarianism.

20 The changes that have occurred at the constitutional and state level in the aftermath of Independence have been thoroughly immersed in the logic of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. In 1948 and 1949, even before Buddhist nationalism was mobilised en masse electorally, the Government passed two citizenship acts disenfranchising the majority of the Up Country Tamil plantation workforce, thereby eliminating 11.7% of the population from the democratic equation, an act which further entrenched Sinhala Buddhist majoritarianism (Kanapathipillai 2009; Devaraj 2008). Constitutional changes in both 1972 and 1978 have led to the further centralisation of the state structure, diluted the already very weak safeguards that existed for minority communities (Welikala 2008) and produced an explicit link between statehood and Buddhism, giving Buddhism the “foremost place” and a duty to “protect and foster” Buddhism (or, as in the 1978 version, “the Buddha Sasana”) without resolving how tensions between this and the fundamental rights of other religious groups would be determined (Schonthal 2014; Deegalle 2013:48). These changes clearly signalled the extent to which the rule of law rather than always being lacking in a country wracked by ethnic antagonism and conflict, has actually served, where it has been observed and implemented, to further entrench the logic of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its ongoing battle with the secular colonial legacy (see Schonthal 2014). And where law has served to introduce even weak proposals for provincial governance at local level and linguistic parity in the form of the 13th Amendment, these have either lacked implementation and/or legitimacy. Whether law has been observed or evaded, the goal or effect has been the same, a continued neglect of demands for Tamil autonomy, with intensifying Tamil nationalism reactive to an increasingly hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and shifting from non-violent protest spearheaded by ITAK (the Tamil nationalist Federal Party) in the 1950s to secessionist demands and armed conflict after 1976 (Wilson 1994, 2000). In the post-war situation since 2009, donor expectations that the 13th Amendment might be revived through elections the functioning of Northern and Eastern Provincial Councils have proven hollow as these entities remain weak and powerless in the context of a heavily centralised state. In Burma, a key point of difference in the run up to and aftermath of independence was the legacy of the colonial bifurcation between ‘Ministerial’ and ‘Frontier’ Burma and between the Burman-dominaterd centre and the ethnic minority areas of the periphery. Central to constitutional and political deliberations around these issues has been the Panglong Conference, which is both a landmark in Burma’s history of troubled ethnic relations as well as a much-invoked memorial to lost opportunities and the spirit of potential future ethnic accommodation. This conference was convened in the Shan States in February 1947 between the AFPFL and Shan, Kachin and Chin elites, a few weeks after the intention was declared, in the Aung-San-Attlee Agreement, for a year-long transition to full independence from British colonial rule (Holliday 2011:39). The agreement included a document in which minority recognition of the (federated) Union of Burma was exchanged for a commitment to the full autonomy of Frontier areas (South 2008:25; Taylor 2009:229). As Walton has noted (2008), despite its legendary status, the intentions, unity, legitimacy and participation of leaders at the Panglong Conference, and particularly Aung San, have been over-optimistically misrepresented. This is due firstly, to the narrow nature of participation in terms of the groups present, with the Karen only there as observers, the Mon, Arakanese and Karenni treated as part of the Burman centre and the Wa, Naga and other Frontier groups ostracised as too uncivilised to

21 merit invitation or consideration for autonomy (Walton 2008:902-3). Secondly, the legitimacy and unity of ethnic minority leadership representation was also unclear (ibid.). Thirdly, Walton also questions Aung San’s sincerity in recognising minority claims. As a result the well-intentioned optimism surrounding Panglong tends to obscure the bleaker historical reality of a context in which the State was unwilling to make a genuine commitment to autonomy and minority groups understandably wary of committing to the Union or giving up the option of armed struggle to achieve autonomy. It is in this early post-Independence context, and alongside insurgencies of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and Burmese Communist Party (BCP), that Arakan, Karen, Mon, Karenni and Pao forces commenced insurgency struggles in 1948 and 1949 (see South 2008:26; Smith 1999).9 The reality underlying Panglong suggests the actual intractability of ethnic and nationalist conflict and this is more than borne out by both post-Panglong constitutional and state practice and the postindependence emergence of a long-running history of ethnic insurgency. This helps us to make some sense of a puzzle in which autonomy and the potential for secession were recognised in the 1947 Constitution and yet the country beset by violent selfdetermination struggles. For, as Taylor has noted, the Constitution, despite the absence of the ‘f-word’, “delineated the federal state but in reality provided for a centralised governmental system”, in which recognition of autonomy was either informal or where formal, lacking any substantial allocation of legislative or fiscal power (2009:229). This puzzle also extends to the outwardly secular nature of the 1947 Constitution, which nonetheless contained Article 21, asserting that “(t)he State recognises the special position of Buddhism as the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens of the Union” (Govt. of Burma 1948), pointing to the early constitutional privileging of Buddhism as the majority religion of 80% of the population, spanning both the Burman majority and significant swathes of the minority communities. As in Sri Lanka, post-Independence constitutional change in 1974 reflected a desire to depart from the colonial legacy but also further entrenched a highly centralised, unitary state (Taylor 2009:306). Despite the addition of three new Arakan, Chin and Mon ethnic states to the exisiting Kachin, Karen, Karenni and Shan entities, counterbalanced by seven lowland Burman-dominated states (South 2008:35), this new administrative arrangement ensured that these entities wielded no political “sovereignty or autonomy” with the Constitution stating that “sovereignty” resided in the “entire nation”, organised according to the principle of democratic centralism (Taylor 2009:306). The 2008 Constitution, despite including frameworks for the separation of powers, democratisation, liberalisation of the economy and, in principle the recognition of self-administration and autonomy for some ethnic regions, is still in practice highly centralised, resisting any genuine concession to federalism, with a strong presidency and the powers at the Union level, superceding regional power in almost all areas including the incorporation of ethnic militias into the Tatmadaw (Taylor 2009:496-506; Holliday 2011: 95). The 2008 constitution also reserves strong representation for the Tatmadaw and continues to privilege a ‘special position’ for Buddhism in a Buddhist majority society (Taylor 2009:496). What we witness 9

This first wave of insurgency was followed by a second wave of Shan and Kachin insurgencies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1980s there were at least 25 ethnic-related rebel groups operative, many of which continued to maintain bases and strongholds straddling Burma’s borderlands and the territory of neighbouring states including Thailand, India, Laos, Bangladesh and China (Steinberg 2001:194-5).

22 overall then, is the tendency for the constitution and the state structure to remain or to intensify a heavily centralising and ethnicised logic. The explicit articulation of Buddhist nationalism as a state framework per se has not always been visible and has even been suppressed, through, for instance, the absence of a direct association between statehood and Buddhism until 2008 and the failure of U Nu to legislate on his 1960 electoral platform to more explicitly make Buddhism the State religion (Holliday 2011:47). However, the centralised form of the state reinforces Burman Buddhist privilege through the unchecked capture of the State centre by the social force, personnel, values and practices of Burman Buddhist nationalism, a dialectical process in which the state seeks to further transform its policies and society whether the State has been formally defined as ‘democratic’ (as it was from 1948-1962 and after 2010) or ‘authoritarian’. So, regardless of the extent to which the Burma case differs from Sri Lanka with regard to the explicit articulation of this logic as a conscious state ideology, the capture of the state centre has in turn colonised state policy and practices in a multitude of other areas where the logic is more transparent, a pattern that is shared across both the Burma and Sri Lanka cases. As a result, there are a number of other areas where this ethnocratic domination and hierarchy is highly visible and undeniable in both Burma and Sri Lanka. In Burma, it has been manifest in a potent ethnocratic assimilatory logic, policy and practice of Burmanization. This has been apparent in language and education policies, with Burmese the predominant medium of educational instruction. As Brown has noted, this has ensured that social mobility requires assimilation through attendance of schools and universities in the Burman-dominated centre. History curricula have also been taught from a Burman standpoint, frequently subordinating and demonising minority groups as primitive, uncivilised and backward (Brown 1994:48-9; Walton 2013:10-12). This has involved the penetration of society through state-established authorities, social and religious organisations including the Ministry of Culture, the Mass Education Movement, the National Solidarity Association, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Buddha Sasana Organization, all of which sought to disseminate and proselytise Burman Buddhist values, culture and education, including in ethnic minority areas (Brown 1994:49; Schober 2005). This has included the erection of Buddhist monuments and temples and the Burman renaming of cities, streets, landmarks and the country as Myanmar (Walton 2013:12). In that sense, despite the ostensible secularism of the Burmese State, Burman Buddhist nationalism has thoroughly colonised the State’s policies, practices and organisations. This has occurred whether the premier has been a committed and self-evident Buddhist like U Nu or a supposedly secular military ruler like Ne Win or the State controlled by the BSPP, SLORC or SPDC (Schober 2006: 88-91), with political elites continuing also to seek the blessing and merit of the sangha. As Walton has stated, these dynamics of Burmanisation are frequently designated euphemistically as forms of ‘development’ for border areas, regions and races (Walton 2013:11-12), a dynamic which nonetheless betrays the profound historical nexus between forms of security, development and nationalist and ethnocratic hierarchy and consolidation. The overall effect of this has been to reproduce a thoroughly ethnicised ‘categorical suspicion’ targeted at non-Burman ethnic groups who are seen an unpatriotic and a political, social and cultural threat in a social order where the State, loyalty to that state, to society and to correct moral order is essentially bound to Burman Buddhist identity. Although members of ethnic and religious minorities experience this in the realm of ‘everyday’ existence, it is manifest in violent form through the conduct of Burman-

23 dominated security forces and the oppressive tactics used in forms of counterinsurgency and policing (Walton 2013:18-20; Walton and Hayward 2012; ICG 2013b). What is also clear is that the “ceasefire” strategy deployed by numerous past and contemporary regimes is merely a holding or containment strategy towards the eventual assimiliation of these ethnic “homelands” and this is revealed both in the 2008 Constitution’s framework for appropriating ethnic militias into the Tatamadaw as well as the continuation of Burmanisation strategies and tactics, with little genuine political deliberation over recognizing or granting long-term federal autonomy. Parallel dynamics are apparent in the Sri Lanka case, although, if anything with the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist logic remaining more explicitly articulated. In the immediate aftermath of independence in the 1950s, the Sri Lankan State commenced many decades of state-led but foreign-aid funded development centered around the reproduction of peasant agriculture and grand irrigation schemes located in areas of Tamil and Muslim demographic concentration in the North-East that nationalists claim as ethnic ‘homelands’ (Moore 1985; Herring 2001; Rampton 2011:260). The ethnic and nationalist logic of these development programmes intensified and became both more violent and more strategically explicit in their demographic reengineering as the conflict worsened. However, contrary to claims that these programmes were primarily driven by the objective and material necessity of dealing with landlessness (Hennayake 2006), these development programmes were always articulated in Sinhala Buddhist nationalist terms as “the reclamation” of “Buddhist kingdoms” and “heartlands”, even by politicians like DS Senanayake who are frequently lauded for their secular credentials (Rampton and Welikala 2005:15-16). As scholars have noted, the state development strategy of reproducing peasant agriculture is itself thoroughly immersed in the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist ideology which privileges rice cultivation and the peasant as the backbone of the moral core of the nation and of the past glories of hydraulic Sinhala Buddhist kingdoms, a nationalist motif that is shared by both elites and by subaltern political actors like the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) (Rampton 2011; Rampton and Welikala 2005). As the conflict has escalated since the 1980s, a strong nexus has developed between security, development and Sinhala Buddhism, with the presence of new Sinhala settlers often accompanied by both militarization, either through the presence of the overwhelmingly Sinhala-staffed security forces, the displacement of minority communities from High Security Zones or the use of armed Sinhala or Muslim home guards. These processes are frequently accompanied by dynamics of Buddhicisation through the erection of Buddhist temples, stupas and statues and the Sinhala renaming of streets, villages and geographical landmarks, forms of religious and social development which have antagonised local Tamil and Muslim communities fearful of the impact of these processes of Sinhalisation on minority national ‘homelands’ (ICG 2008; ICG 2009; McDowell 2012:33-34; Rampton 2009; Gugler 2013; Sumantiran 2011). These dynamics at work from independence until the 1980s, subsided during the 1990s and immediate post-millennium period, but were reinvigorated after the commencement of the final phase of the war against the LTTE and continued into the post-war period, including a campaign by the Sri Lankan Army to obliterate the memory of the LTTE through the destruction and/or occupation of former LTTE cemeteries, memorials and buildings (McDowell 2012). Intensified post-war Sinhalisation has evidently been a result of the absence of any coercive counter-force in the form of the LTTE, which was always able to contest and/or hold territory and

24 space. As in Burma, in Sri Lanka, State language, education and administrative policies have also revealed the potent force of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. This has been manifest in the Sinhala Only language platform in 1956 and the postcolonial loss of English as a link language for both education and administration in either official policy or in practice, despite the fact that English has remained the de facto language of elites, thereby obstructing social mobility (Rampton 2011: 259). Consequently, despite reversals in language policy in 1958 and in subsequent constitutions and constitutional amendments, many Tamil speakers, including in the Hill Country areas, have been unable to access administration, judicial procedures or higher education in their first or second language. As in Burma, there has been an increasing tendency for school and university curricula to use educational resources, including in the humanities and social sciences, which demonstrate a heavy Sinhala nationalist bias in the representation of history and culture. As Heyneman (2003:32) and others (e.g. Nissan 1996; Orjuela 2003:202; Lopes Cardozo 2008:25-26) have noted from “as early as the 1950s”, “(t)he dominant historical image portrayed in textbooks was that of a glorious but embattled Sinhalese nation repeatedly having to defend itself and its Buddhist traditions from the ravages of Tamil invaders. Tamils were portrayed as historical enemies. National heroes were chosen, whose reputations included having vanquished Tamils in ethnic based wars,” perspectives which helped “lay the intellectual foundations for social conflict and civil war”. Clearly, with Sinhala nationalism this clearly entrenched, it is difficult to deny the ‘social’ and hegemonic force of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in which the myths and glories of the past are recycled to reproduce and justify present oppression. In terms of effects, the parallels with Burma are again striking with the tendency for a ‘categorical suspicion’ of Tamil and Muslim minorities both in terms of their treatment by the security forces, state agencies and in everyday life, a ‘security’ logic that the Government of Sri Lanka sought to reinforce in the final phase of the war, through the dictum that you were with or against the war on terrorism (Wickramasinghe 2009). The long history but also final months of the war against the LTTE also exposed the ethnocidal logic of violence through the incredible scale of suffering experienced by displaced and war-affected Tamils in the North-East when an estimated 40,000 people are assumed to have been killed, often through targeted atrocity and massacre (UN 2011). The end of the war and the ‘victor’s peace’ situation has not brought about any dramatic amelioration of the situation with continuing militarization, securitisation, harassment, abduction, sexual violence and displacement targeted upon or experienced by Tamil communities in the North East but also in the South, increasingly including Muslims (ICG 2010a, 2012a, 2012b). The absence of any genuine reconciliation process, which must surely involve meaningful politically negotiated reform about the ‘national question’, means that there are few short-to-medium term indications of a commitment to anything other than a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist ‘peace’. Accordingly, what we have in both Burma and Sri Lanka are variations on a Buddhist nationalist form of social order which colonises the logic of both state and society ensuring that there is a tight nexus between this Buddhist nationalist social formation, unitary, centralized statehood and territorial integrity, all of which produces a dialectical if not circular logic in which state action on society further entrenches this

25 hegemonic logic. That the logic is hegemonic is also clearly apparent in scholarship indicating continuities in this Buddhist nationalist logic in political opposition to the authoritarian military State in Burma and in subaltern counter-State resistance to elite politics in Sri Lanka. In the Burma context, Matthew Walton has argued that Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD “remain blind to the privileged position of Burmans in Myanmar” and this is manifest in both NLD readings of history that see the preIndependence period as one of nationalist unity and platforms for the future of Myanmar, which disqualify ethnic minority demands for autonomy through a reassertion of unity as the only way forward. Key to Walton’s analysis is the need to critically interrogate the possibility that “the NLD, as the pre-eminent opposition party, implicitly represents Burman interests” (Walton 2013: 17-18). In the Sri Lankan context, research on the JVP also looks at the way that this counter-elite movement with a profound constituency in the subaltern, vernacular-educated classes has reproduced Sinhala Buddhist nationalism across both insurgency and electoral political platforms (Rampton 2011, 2012; Rampton and Welikala 2005; Senaratne 1997; Venugopal 2009). What this indicates across both the Burma and Sri Lanka contexts is that, beyond resistance by ethnic minorities, Buddhist nationalist discourse and practices is hegemonic to the extent that departures from its logic have thus far been rare, sporadic and lacking in sustained popular appeal or the foundations on which to build a populist platform. They frequently emerge as short-lived ‘moments’ in the wake of the worst excesses of State counter-insurgency and/or authoritarianism when cross-ethnic perspectives are built, such as the post-counter-insurgency emergence of progressive Left splinters from the JVP in the 1970s and 1990s and the movement of Burman opposition leaders to frontier areas in the wake of 1988. What is also key to this understanding is that nationalist discourse and ideology is not a static or rigid monolith as understood in mainstream understandings but is fractured and fluid but with the potential within this fluidity for conflicting nationalist groups to augment and escalate nationalism through processes of ‘ethnic outbidding’ (Rampton 2011, 2012). This lesson is not well understood within mainstream conflict or peacebuilding approaches which tend to automatically equate subaltern and ‘democratic’ resistance with progressive forces, misunderstanding the extent to which the sources of conflict are bound up with exclusive nationalist and ethnic social orders which democratization will not automatically resolve. This problem is frequently not addressed within recent critical peacebuilding approaches that celebrate the potential for the ‘everyday’, ‘local’ and ‘subaltern’, replicating the same flaws as mainstream peacebuilding (e.g. Mac Ginty 2010, 2011, Richmond 2011; see Nadarajah and Rampton 2015, Sabaratnam 2013 for critiques). The Post-Millennium Ascendancy of Extremist Buddhist Nationalism The aforementioned fluid and fissured character of Buddhist nationalism is thrown into stark relief in the recent and contemporary rise of modern, extremist movements in Sri Lanka that deliberately incite and target violence against Sri Lanka and Burma’s ethnic minorities. Both Burman and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism have long reproduced an ethnocratic hierarchic logic in which ethnic minorities are subordinated and in which a territorially integral, unitary and centralized state is seen as the necessary hub protecting the norms, values, apparatuses and practices of the Burman and Sinhala Buddhist majorities. However, the key difference between past Buddhist nationalist movements and these newer manifestations is their sustained, explicit, aggressive and violent antipathy for minority groups, with a particular racist hatred

26 and antipathy reserved for Muslims and Islam (Walton and Hayward 2012; ICG 2103, 2014; Fazil 2014; Imtiyaz and Mohamed-Saleem 2015; Ali 2014; Jones 2015; Jerryson 2015; Stewart 2014). Key also to a number of these movements, particularly the JHU, BBS, 969 and MaBaTha has been the active involvement and leadership by members of the Buddhist sangha. In Sri Lanka, although they have an older genealogical provenenance, movements like Sinhala Urumaya, Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS), Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balaya began to emerge with real political force in the postMillennium and post-war periods with the JHU achieving a sharp political rise in the midst of the 2002-6 peace process when the JHU won 9 seats in the 2004 election (see Rampton and Welikala 2005; Deegalle 2006).10 The BBS, Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balaya emerged with sustained force in the post-war context. These groups have targeted a wide range of ethnic and religious minorities including Muslims, Christians, Up Country Tamils and Tamil nationalists, justifying attacks on churches, madrassas, mosques, businesses and communities as a means of protecting the Sinhala Buddhist nation from the threat of ‘foreign’ influences. Although attacks on minorities are often physically violent, these movements have also led verbal assaults and demonstrations against other Western influences, power structures and actors, including NGOs and Western States, including particularly the mediator of the 2002-6 peace process, Norway, depicted in Sinhala Buddhist rhetoric as allied to the LTTE and part of a Western conspiracy for the balkanization of the country. In 2002 the JHU spearheaded a campaign for the tabling of an anti-conversion bill, aimed at preventing Christian groups from proselytizing amongst the Buddhist community, a campaign that was specifically targeted against NGOs. In Burma, likewise, 969 and MaBaTha (Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion), have emerged as Burman-dominated sangha-led organisations in the post2011 period in a context in which Burma has been opening up to Western influences and commenced processes of democratization and more sustained liberalization (Walton and Hayward 2012).11 These movements have spearheaded agitation, demonstrations, communal violence and boycotts targeted against Muslim homes, schools, mosques, businesses and communities particularly the oppressed Rohingya of Rakhine State. Both these groups assert that Muslims, Christians, minority groups along with other ‘foreign elements’, form an acute threat to Burman Buddhist religion, culture, values and way of life. Both MaBaTha and 969 have also castigated the role of INGOs and Western powerbrokers, including, for example, their opposition to the Interfaith Marriage Bill in 2014, aimed at placing restrictions on marriage between Buddhists and non-Buddhists and accusations that Christian NGOs fund and support insurgent groups on the Thai-Burma border (ICG 2014:8; Walton and Hayward 2012).

10

The SU changed its name to JHU in the 2004 elections. The party basically emerged as an amalgam of figures previously active in variously, the Buddhist nationalist end of the UNP, the JVP and Jathika Chintanaya. The BBS is sangha-led off-shoot of the JHU formed in 2012. Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balaya are lay-led groups with vigilante tendencies, that emerged in a similar period to the BBS (see Jones 2015; Stewart 2014). 11 969 is a populist social movement led by the Mandalay-based monk, U Wirathu. MaBatha is a movement founded in 2014 by a group of monks convening for a conference in Mandalay (see Walton and Hayward 2012).

27 The emergence of these groups must be seen within a simultaneously global, regional and local frame as in both contexts these movements have emerged as a response to shifts in the global and local context. Key to this is a response to liberal order and its interface with Sri Lanka and Burma. In Burma, these groups have emerged as a result of rapid changes to the economy, political culture and the state in the wake of moves to democratize, liberalise and open up to the West (Walton and Hayward 2012). Such changes have intensified long-standing Burman Buddhist anxieties about the threat of global and foreign influences to Burman Buddhist society, culture and religion. In the Sri Lankan context, extremist nationalist movements have also emerged in a perceived context of intensified liberalization and international engagement that occurred under the Ranil Wickremasinghe UNF regime between 2001 and 2004 (Rampton and Welikala 2005). Inherent to this, was a reaction to the 2002-6 peace process and the role of ‘liberal peace’ forces including Western donor states, IFIs and INGOs, which were perceived as aiding and abetting Tamil nationalists goals, heralding a potential balkanization or federalization of the country (Rampton and Welikala 2005; Rampton 2010). This reaction to the forces of global liberal order was also intensified by responses to Post-Tsunami humanitarian and development assistance, which were perceived in nationalist discourse as usurping the rightful role of the state. These became major mobilization platforms for the gradual capture and consolidation of power by Presdient Rajapaksa and his UPFA coalition. As a result, in both contexts, international and global forces are seen as a threat to the sovereignty and unitary form of the State and to territorial integrity, with Sinhala and Burman Buddhist nationalists mobilizing for the reinforcement of these contours of the Buddhist nation-state (Rampton and Welikala 2005; Rampton 2010). In understanding this, it is important not to frame these extremist movements as ‘regressive’ or ‘traditional’ as all of these movements demonstrate powerful modernist traits both in terms of their mobilization and use of social media and their aims and goals in securing modern nation-state order (Stewart 2014:246-7; Rampton and Welikala 2005:45; Walton and Hayward 2012). In that respect, they are merely the latest avatars of a modern Buddhism commencing in nineteenth century transformations in society, statehood, religion and social, political and cultural mobilization. In that sense, Buddhist nationalism has always and continues to evolve at the intersection between global and local dynamics, including the interface between liberal and local order. In many ways, a posited binary division between Western liberalism and local nationalism is inherent to both the liberal and nationalist projects and their troubled relationship and yet this obscures the profound historical coconstitution of these orders stretching from the colonial period to the present. The context and impact of the global-war-on-terror on the rise of these extremist movements has also been significant in both cases (Walton and Hayward 2012). The post-9-11 war on terror has witnessed the rise of a categorical suspicion, surveillance and racist antipathy against Muslims and Islam on a global scale, a development that has actually served to intensify the mobilization of overlapping global, regional, nationalist and local movements seeking the establishment of an Islamic state, caliphate or even global umma (e.g. see Devji 2005; Steger 2009). Both the interlocking rise of Jihadist Islamism and the global and localized effects of confronting Islamism and demonising Islam have therefore facilitated the rise of localized antipathy for Muslims who are seen in Buddhist nationalist discourse as a global, regional and local threat to Buddhist values.

28

The emergence of these movements has also highlighted the extent to which there is considerable regional co-constitution of, and traffic between, the political and sociocultural dynamics of Burma and Sri Lanka as Theravada Buddhist societies. This has ancient provenance as the arrival and consolidation of Theravada Buddhism in Burma was itself a result of ties with its island neighbour (Sirisena 1978; Philp 2010). Religious and socio-cultural ties which have continued from the precolonial to postindependence periods, through monarchic dynasties, the sangha and Buddhist reformers and activists. This has included the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist reformer, Anagarika Dharmapala’s establishment of a Burmese branch of the Mahabodhi Society and long-running funding and ordination ties between different Buddhist nikayas (sects) in each country. In the contemporary period, this is also continued in communication and dialogue between extremist nationalist movements, with, for example, U Wirathu, the leader of 969 attending a 2014 BBS convention in Sri Lanka as a guest of honour (Wickramasinghe 2015:63). Although such ties do not amount to explicit collaboration between these groups, they certainly indicate a forging of ties and the potential for cross-context emulation and learning, a possibility that is also apparent in fears that the exchange of bilateral visits between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Than Shwe in 2009 indicated a potential transfer of ideas about Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency model (Holliday 2011:170). However, although contemporary dynamics are highly significant, it must not come at the expense of a focus on the longer-term historical hegemonisation of Buddhist nationalism (as a global and local dynamic) and the place of these new movements within such a framework. As we have seen, Buddhist nationalism is a hegemonic order that has gradually and inexorably captured the logic of state and social practices, encompassing even radical opposition movements in its frames. The emergence of extremist nationalist groups is therefore also related to processes of ethnic outbidding within the overall envelope of nationalist hegemony, in which Sinhala and Burman political parties and movements seek to take the high-ground through a nationalist contestation of authenticity (Rampton 2011, 2012). As a result, these more aggressive ‘ultranationalist’ groups have emerged, increasingly seeking to both outflank the State, mainstream and other radical political parties and social movements in the authenticity and the potency of their Buddhist nationalist credentials and aims. This framework also neatly encapsulates the relationship between instrumental mobilization and nationalist hegemony in a number of ways. Firstly, approaches which tend to understand these organizations and parties as mere instruments of established political elites and/or business interests (see for instance, Wickramasinghe 2015:62; Fazil 2014:66; Imtiyaz and Mohamed-Saleem 2015:196), neglect the longevity and purposive character of these movements in their welldeveloped agendas, manifestos and intentions not just to capture power but more significantly to push the whole political spectrum in a Buddhist nationalist direction. Secondly, an acknowledgement of this does not constitute a denial of the fact that in both Burma and Sri Lanka, regimes and elites use Buddhist nationalist platforms, agendas and movements in an instrumental fashion. For example, it is perfectly clear that the Rajapaksa regime sought to appropriate the force of the JHU and, prior to their departure, the JVP through their inclusion in the UPFA coalition, including the presence of a JHU minister, Champika Ranawaka. However, what this indicates, thirdly, is that instrumentality does not exist outside of the Buddhist nationalist hegemonic framework. It both presupposes a populist discourse that renders this a

29 useful political tactic through social resonance and captures both elites and subaltern actors within its fold, both shaped by and reproductive of hegemony as social order. These movements must therefore be seen as the latest manifestations of Buddhist nationalist hegemonisation that has long historical provenance. Attacks on Muslim and other ethnic minorities are not new in either Burma or Sri Lanka but have occurred recurrently before and after independence. The difference with these movements is their intensification into avatars inciting racist violence against Muslims and other minorities in a sustained and explicit way, highlighting the way that hegemonisation produces a violent intensification of the forms of majoritarian nationalism that are both its vehicle and effect. Conclusion This paper has sought to highlight an understanding of Buddhist nationalism in both Burma and Sri Lanka as a social phenomenon, arguing that mainstream and even ‘critical’ conflict and peace studies frameworks are not well-disposed to appreciate the significance, potency and force of these forms of identity and social order due to their tendency to explain ethnic and nationalist identity, power and conflict as a purely cosmetic, instrumental dynamic utilized by states, regimes and elites for the attainment of materialist and objective goals and resources. However, what has been contended here is that both Sinhala and Burman Buddhist nationalism are forms of discursive mobilization and practice that generate political, social, cultural, and economic order in which the vehicle for the attainment of power and the developmental goals of state and society are one and the same. Although, it has not been denied that elites use forms of nationalist and ethnic attachment in instrumental ways, the point articulated here is that instrumentality is encompassed within and yet also historically constructive of a hegemony that is socially diffuse and it is only through this framework that the mobilizing power and legitimacy of pursuing instrumental rhetoric can also be understood. Essential also to this argument, is the extent to which this cumulative stratification of hegemony has encompassed the logic not only of mainstream state elites and extremist organizations but also potentially progressive subaltern and opposition movements. The elucidation of this perspective is not just an academic exercise as it indicates the real dangers that a failure to appreciate the social depth of identity dynamics can pose for international and local peacebuilding policy frameworks and practices. As indicated in the foregoing pages, there is a tendency in mainstream approaches to see these dynamics in either politically or economically reductionist terms as a problem of states and elites and the lack of constraint on the predatory and pathological relation between these actors and apparatuses and the societies they engage. A relationship which, according to this perspective produces state disintegration, state weakness and lack of accountability and of a social contract between these spheres. This perspective in turn reproduces an obsession with democratic and authoritarian governance, with democratization and the rule of law often perceived as the key inputs for successful peacebuilding and development. However, what has been contended here is that the division between a predatory state and an oppressed society is overdrawn in these and other contexts, as the lines between these spheres are blurred through the mutual penetration of both state and society by a majoritarian Buddhist nationalist discourse. In the process, this has generated forms of ethnic and nationalist autonomist and secessionist resistance by minority groups. Democratisation will not necessarily resolve this issue as democracy does not in itself

30 counter majoritarian dominance but is in many contexts reproductive of nationalist and ethnic violence (see Mann), as testified by the Sri Lanka case. As has been argued here, this is testament to the colonization of state apparatuses, procedures and practices by the force and power of social order. As Walton (2013), Holliday (2011:188-190), Brown (1994), Rampton (2011), Kapferer (2012), Tambiah (1986, 1992) and others have noted the real lesson is therefore, to understand the significance of the hierarchic ethnocratic nature of both state and society through the divergent life worlds that different identity groups experience in both Burma and Sri Lanka and to ensure that the demands and voices of these subjugated and repressed groups are heard, including their identity-related grievances. Whilst it can be argued that democracy and democratisation are key to facilitating ‘voice’, attention to democracy at the expense of issues of power-sharing and autonomy, may ultimately reinforce ethnocratic hierarchy. International and local agencies are already involved in governance, development and peacebuilding activities in these contexts. The risk is that these grievances and the demands for autonomy that accompany them will be silenced through a collusion of the liberal cosmopolitan lens and matrices of international actors on the one hand, with the majoritarian framework of state and social order on then other. These dynamics and their effects have already played out in a very prominent, high profile and tragic way through the 2002-6 peace process, the final phase of the war and its aftermath in Sri Lanka, with international actors seeking to compensate for their failure to fully appreciate the hegemony of Sinhala nationalism through a focus on reconciliation, post-war justice and state reform. In Burma, the danger is that the lessons from the Sri Lankan context will not be learnt and that emphasis will be placed on supposedly neutral and impartial vehicles of conflict sensitivity, economic development, civil society and democratization with the risk that this focus will actually silence and obfuscate identity-related grievances and thereby assist in the longer-term oppression and pacification of Burma’s minority communities and the consolidation of hegemonic majoritarian nationalism. Bibliography: Abeyratne, Sirimal (2004) ‘Economic Roots of Political Conflict: The Case of Sri Lanka’, The World Economy 27, 8:1295-1314. Ali, Ameer (2014) ‘Muslims in Harmony and Conflict in Plural Sri Lanka: A Historical Summary from a Religio-economic and Political Perspective’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 34:3, 227-242. Arnson, Cynthia Zartman, William (eds.) (2005) Rethinking the Economics of War: The Intersection of Need, Creed, and Greed, John Hopkins. Autesserre (2010) The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding CUP. Azar, Edward (1991) ‘The Analysis and Management of Protracted Social Conflict’ in J. Volkan, J. Montville and D. Julius (eds.), The Psychodynamics of International Relationships, Vol. 2 D.C. Heath: 93-120. Ballentine, Karen and Sherman, Jake (2003) The Political Economy of Armed

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