Religious Nationalism, Strategic Detachment and the Politics of Vernacular Humanitarianism in Post-War Sri Lanka

Abstract

In this article, I am concerned with the ways different ethnic and religious groups in contemporary Sri Lanka use rhetorics of humanitarianism. Exploring a range of examples drawn from an inner city community, humanitarian foundations and national government, I show how different actors deploy cosmopolitan and nationalist humanitarian rhetorics to obfuscate claims of war crimes and communal favouritism on the one side, and to encourage allegiance to a national Sri Lankan identity on the other side. I introduce a concept of strategic detachment to help illuminate the ways minority groups in particular seek to cultivate distance from their contested ethnic and religious identities and in so doing re-signify their humanitarian practices as self-consciously non-partisan.