Inscriptions and erasures, grief, hope and rights: a struggle for truth and justice for disappearances in postwar Sri Lanka

Since the end of the Sri Lanka’s civil war between the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, hundreds of Tamil women whose family members (were) disappeared during the war have been waging a struggle for truth and justice. In this thesis, I tell the story of their struggle from 2009 to 2021. Drawing on theoretical conceptualisations of sovereign violence and the space of appearance, I argue that the Rajapaksa government, in power from 2009 to 2015, deployed a complex and contradictory set of discourses and practices to erase disappearances from history and memory without holding perpetrators to account. Characterising these discourses and practices as a repertoire of Manichean, necropolitical technologies of power, I argue that they were determined by Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and local and international human rights struggles and defined by inscriptions and erasures. I contend that these technologies shaped the public sphere, the historical record, and the possibilities of pursuing justice whether through ordinary courts or political pressure. Tracing this struggle beyond the Rajapaksa regime to the tenure of the United Front from 2015 to 2019, which came to power on a promise of truth and justice for disappearances, I explore why it failed in this task. I argue that what is at stake in this struggle is not merely guilt or innocence of perpetrators but the nation, national identity, memory, masculinities, and femininities. Moreover, drawing on conceptualisations of subaltern, dissident, and gendered citizenship, I explore the modes, sites, and scales of the struggle waged by family members of the disappeared and its effects. In so doing, I trace this struggle from commissions of inquiry to the street corner and from domestic courthouses to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. I show that it was underpinned by politicised grief, mourning, and hope as much as rights and took a multiplicity of forms—spoken, written, and embodied. This thesis throws new light on the state in postwar Sri Lanka, subaltern politics of mourning and the limits of internationalised justice