Violence of Youth and the Youthfulness of Violence

Abstract

This chapter considers how conceptualizations of youth are used to remember, articulate, and give meaning to violence, by those who have perpetrated it. It does so by analyzing the memories and narratives of former insurgents in Sri Lanka, and is anchored in a period of violence known as the Terror (Bheeshanaya), which convulsed Sri Lanka’s central and southern regions in the late 1980s. The chapter suggests that former insurgents draw on the construction of “youth” as a narrative strategy to mediate morally discomforting memories of violence. Former insurgents use the cultural idiom of “youth” to explain their own involvement in the perpetration of violence, and to comprehend their own past experiences of violence. The chapter argues that through their narrative manipulation of “youth,” former insurgents reconstruct their violent pasts and project a particular representation of the self in moral terms. This allows them to disassociate themselves from violence, and to deflect moral culpability for it.