Mrs Viyanga Gunasekera1
1Australian National University, Australia
Biography:
Viyanga Gunasekera is a PhD candidate at RegNet, ANU. Her research focuses on women's community-making in post-war Sri Lanka with a special reference to border areas. Viyanga is trained as a social science researcher and is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka. Her previous research includes women’s land rights and empowerment, women’s representation in politics, psychosocial wellbeing of ex-combatants, and pluralistic memories of post-war Sri Lanka. Viyanga has a BA and MPhil in Psychology from the University of Peradeniya. Viyanga’s research interests are memory, peacebuilding, border studies, vulnerability and wellbeing, and gender.
Abstract:
Interethnic coexistence is a widely used concept in peace and conflict literature globally. It is also a popular term in Sri Lanka, where it is used to describe the presence of multiple ‘ethnic communities’, and peace established after three decades of ‘interethnic violence.’ However, how relevant is this concept to a situation where communities have always lived together blurring the lines of ‘ethnic community’? Focusing on everyday interactions and encounters in the so-called border villages in Sri Lanka, where the conventionally understood ethnic communities of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims come together, my study questions the politics of ‘ethnicity’ and the relevance of the concept of ‘interethnic coexistence’ for local communities after the war. I draw from qualitative interviews conducted with 50 local women from five ‘border villages’ in Sri Lanka and ethnographic observations carried out in 2024. The communities I studied have lived in these spaces for generations, experienced violence and displacement, and eventually resettled in more or less the same spaces after the end of the war. The shared languages, economic activities, festivals and events, intermarriage, intergenerational relations, care activities, and formal networks both before and after the war show that the communities share(d) a deep sense of belongingness that is beyond coexistence. I argue that not only is the ethnic marker in the idea of community troubling, but ‘interethnic coexistence’ increasingly limits how we understand community as well as peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka and beyond.