In Pursuit of Hegemony: Politics and State Building in Sri Lanka

Since the late colonial period, Sri Lanka has been subject to modern democratic state building experiments. The number of challenges this project has encountered is rising. Many of these challenges have been identified alongside the multi-ethnic character of Sri Lanka’s population, illuminating the antagonistic inter-ethnic relations between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. The various policy measures designed endogeneously and exogenously focused on building a democratic state where the rights of the ethnic minorities could be guaranteed. However, the outcomes of these policy measures have not reflected this goal. These policy measures have not sufficiently contributed to a guarantee of rights for ethnic minorities and paid ill attention to numerous other tensions that are of a non-inter-ethnic nature in Sri Lanka’s state building project. By focusing on the broader state-in-society relations and privileging hegemonic formations in Sinhalese politics through historical and contemporary times, this thesis re-problematises the issue of Sri Lanka’s state building. This thesis also aims to answer the following key questions: what are the key hegemony building processes identified in Sri Lanka’s state building project?; how do the dynamics in Sinhalese politics and the broader political and economic context influence these processes?; what were the main tensions between hegemony building and state building in Sri Lanka?; and how did they affect democratic state building? These questions are examined by applying a qualitative method of inquiry. The data for this study has been collected through a series of field interviews conducted in Sri Lanka in 2009 and 2011, as well as a preliminary literature survey conducted between 2005–07. The in-depth field interviews were carried out with the aim of gathering primary data on the perceptions, first hand experiences and narratives of the trajectories of elite and subaltern politics and state building. The primary data gathered through an extensive literature survey that was further complemented with the field interviews and a process of observation. Based on critical analysis of the data gathered from the above mentioned multiple sources, the research argues primarily that state building in Sri Lanka has been a struggle for hegemony of the right, in which the Sinhalese political elites and the broader Sinhalese community have played a decisive and an equally important role. The empirical inquiry identified four hegemony building processes – Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, a political party driven and a patronage system institutionalised at the state level, and events and discourses of war, peace and conflict that were used by the dominant Sinhalese political elites in their attempt to build political alliances in order to obtain consent and legitimacy for their rule, which essentially influenced the trajectories of Sri Lanka’s state building. The findings of this research suggest that, due to the underlying principle of inequality and right-wing political ideologies present in the above hegemony building processes, the state building project has consequently been drifting away from the path of democratic state building and fermenting the conditions for realising hegemony of the right. The results of this study show several implications for state building at the scholarly and policy level. At the scholarly level, it shows the relevance of examining politics as usual and politics taken for granted. Further theoretically and methodologically this research shows the relevance of enaging with class and the dynamics of class relations for the study of Sri Lanka’s state building. At both the policy and scholarly levels, this study shows that in understanding the paths and dilemmas of state building, particularly in the contexts of civil war and post-civil war scenarios, it is not only the much debated and antagonistic inter-ethnic relations that should receive attention, but also the subtle hegemonic relationship formations and the hegemony building strategies taking place at the intra-ethnic community level. Last but not least, this study highlights the need for re-examining policies aimed at state building by considering state–in-society relations in the broadest possible manner, which is done by tracing the seemingly disconnected strategies that are being pursued by the political elites under changing social, political and economic contexts in both the local and global spheres.