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Constituting martial virtue : the processes of militarization in Sri Lanka -- Marketing war, marketing peace : mediating global capital and national security -- Staging pain : the disabled soldier and the Butterflies Theatre -- Allegories of war : the politics of childhood, mourning, and melancholia in the tales of the Butterfly Peace Garden -- Figure of speech : the female suicide bomber, censorship, and the literary-cinematic site -- The promise of the archive : memory, testimony, and feminist domains

The suicide bomber has been one of the most potent weapons of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in its 19-year separatist armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state. Of the 217 suicide attacks to date, 46 have been by women. This paper will analyse the representations of the LTTE female suicide bomber in literature, propa ganda, public debate and state security practice. It will argue that a discourse of morality already attenuating the act of suicide bombing lends itself to a particu larly gendered representation of the female suicide bomber that invariably twins her body to sexuality, in a scripting that also enables a patriarchal surveillance of her by the state and the LTTE.

Spotlights and shadows : revisiting the scope of transitional justice / Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer De Mel -- Celebrating the end of apartheid / Tim Murithi -- Commemorating genocide in Rwanda / Erin Jessee -- Victory celebration and the unmaking of diversity in post-war Sri Lanka / Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu -- Social justice and the persistence of racialized segregation / Kevin Durrheim and Amy Jo Murray -- Intergenerational justice / Esther Surenthiraraj -- Non-citizens' rights : xenophobia, nationalism and struggle post transition / Philippa Kerr and John Dixon -- Diaspora communities in transitional justice : a hidden presence / Stephan Parmentier, Mina Rauschenbach and Laura Hein -- Rural women and their access to the law : gendering the promise of postwar justice / Neloufer De Mel and Danushka Medawatte -- Former combatants : assessing their reintegration ten years after the end of war / Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek and Viyanga Gunasekera -- Constructive resistance and the importance of not knowing in transitional justice / Briony Jones -- Inclusive narratives of suffering / Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Michelle Sinayobye Twali and Sumedha Jayakody -- How crowds transfom identities / Yasemin Gülsüm Acar and Stephen Reicher -- Collective resilience / Sandra Penic, John Drury and Zacharia Bady -- On the futures of reckoning with the past / Neloufer De Mel and Guy Elcheroth.

This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation. The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice - or indeed, any societal engagement with the past - more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses - South Africa and Sri Lanka - alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d'Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice.

"This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation.


The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice - or indeed, any societal engagement with the past - more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses - South Africa and Sri Lanka - alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d'Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice. "

"This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation. The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice-or indeed, any societal engagement with the past-more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses-South Africa and Sri Lanka-alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d'Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice"--

Policies that address post-war displacement often reflect temporal linearity as transitional periods during which they are developed imply a shift from one situation to another. These policies obscure complexities experienced by local communities for whom displacement is ongoing and interminable. This essay applies Sri Lanka's National Policy on Durable Solutions for Conflict-Affected Displacement (NPDSCAD) to the case of Northern Muslims who were expelled from the Northern Province of Sri Lanka in 1990 and have lived in prolonged displacement for over 25 years. For these Muslims, return-remain is an oscillation and not an either/or option. Using "frames of recognition" to analyze policy documents and data from fieldwork, the paper critically unpacks the category of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) – the displacement-related frame applied to the Northern Muslims – to reveal the multiple subject positions respondents navigate in presenting their own stance to this category. Calling for recognition of the circumstances of their displacement, the respondents' footing to the IDP frame holds in it both needs-based and justice-based discourses and demands that Northern Muslims be recognized as political subjects. Return-remain is complicated by issues respondents face as they travel between their current home in Puttalam and origins in the North. The paper concludes that while the Northern Muslims are denied full recognition by the NPDSCAD, their complex experiences continue to contest the frames deployed by the policy. ; peerReviewed ; publishedVersion