Between exclusion and political engagement: Conceptualizing young people’s everyday politics in the postwarsetting of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Drawing on findings from research on youths in postwar eastern Sri Lanka, the aim of this chapter is twofold: first to develop a framework for understanding young people’s everyday engagements with politics in the context of the transitions that a postwar setting involves and second to develop an understanding ofyoung eople’s political everyday engagement in a context where the state has clearly and quickly moved from a postwar stage to a development stage. The authors find that the different experiences of the violent past and a politicized postwar setting continue to play a role in young people’s lives and form a constrained context in which their political engagement is shaped. Unemployment and lack of involvement in ongoing development initiatives by the state exclude Tamil and Muslim youths from political spaces and from having a political voice at the national level. Instead they are enmeshed in societal and spatial power relations in a political environment hat impacts negatively on their identity construction and subjectivities.