Securitization and its discontents: The end of Sri Lanka’s long post-war?

In the 5 years after the 2009 defeat of the secessionist insurgency by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan armed forces expanded in numbers, moving into unexpected niches – tourism, urban planning, training university students. With the defeat of the Rajapkasa government in 2015, this process of ‘securitization’ or ‘militarization’ appeared to go into swift retreat. This paper considers the experience of the post-war years and asks what was permanent and what was less permanent in Sri Lanka's post-war experiment in securitization. The paper is a revised version of the Keynote Lecture delivered at the 29th Annual Conference of the British Association of South Asian Studies, held at the University of Portsmouth in April 2015. The theme of the conference was the securitisation of South Asia.