Profile of a Weak State: Sri Lanka
The 9th Failed States Index for 2013 ranks Sri Lanka, out of 178 countries, at 28th place in the 'warning' category with a total score of 92.9/120. The state's most pressing issues are listed as: "group grievance," "human rights," and "factionalized elites."(www.foreignpolicy.com/).
Sri Lanka is a small country with lots of inhabitants. Formally, the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is about the size of West Virginia with only 25,332 square miles and a population of 20.9 million people. (topics.nytimes.com).There is a constant clash of two different ethnicities; the Hindu Tamil and the Buddhist Sinhala. A civil war broke out in 1983 when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan, a separatist group led an insurgency against the government because they wanted to break off into their own state. (www.bbc.co.uk). The UN says that both sides in the Sri Lankan civil war committed human rights violations and calls for an investigation into possible war crimes. "The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit." (www.nytimes.com/2013).
The civil war was devastating to the people and environment and Sri Lanka continues to struggle picking up the pieces. Economically, the state is recovering but the wealth is not evenly distributed. The Passekudah Bay area is trying to help boost the economy by building new luxury hotels that attract tourists while many poor people are landlocked. (www.bbc.co.uk). Currently, the UN is still urging Sri Lanka to put war criminals to justice, and Sri Lankan officials often just say that its country's rehabilitation process is underway and that the western view of their issues is a biased one.
So, thinking about what we have been discussing in week two with political violence, what exactly is the relationship between war and state weakness?
ReplyDeleteFrom your research, does it seem like Sri Lanka was a weak state where war broke out, or is it that the war made the state weak?
I think the war made the state weaker than it already was. I don't remember Sri Lanka ever being that economically well-off/ stable. I think weak states are prone to civil wars because there is pressure from the population on the ruling regime and vice versa. Weak states are prone to corruption, and imbalance of wealth and resources which are major contributors to the development of civil wars.
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