This article explores the backdrop of the engagement between the International Community (IC) and the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) over the conduct of the military during the last stages of its engagement with the secessionist

There is an ongoing debate between the neo-positivist researchers who insist that IR research should follow positivist methodologies and the post-positivist researchers in subfields such as feminist and critical studies in IR who insist that the very selection of a methodology is a positioning of power and a validation of a truth through the knowledge the methodology enables. The selection of methodology, the process used to create knowledge, is therefore a decision to position a particular body of knowledge over another. The selection of a particular method over another is an act of enabling a body of knowledge, a truth, and therefore an act of power that can disrupt an entrenched order or destabilize it. This paper explores Coxian critical analysis in IR research and discusses the use of Coxian analysis in exploring the Sri Lankan conflict in a setting of liberal peacebuilding critique. The paper concludes that a critical methodology such as Coxian analysis enables a researcher to question the epistemological and ontological assumptions that have been prevalent in analyzing the Sri Lankan conflict.

This paper examines the key global debates on liberal peace and peacebuilding and their nexus with the Sri Lankan conflict, the efforts to resolve the conflict and the ensuing local discourses. The end of the cold war heralded the possibility of a liberal world order. This triumph of the liberal order underlined a normative assumption of "the end of history", not as a static closure, but as embodying an ideology with the potential for delineating the optimal form of governance for a state, its economy and citizens 1 . Since the end of the cold-war, liberal peace has become the main policy framework that has been used by the International Community (IC) to engage with and intervene in conflict ridden states as a means for creating global peace by stabilising states and strengthening global markets 2 . However, the liberal peace thesis and the attendant liberal peacebuilding interventionist frameworks for local and global peace have spurned a critical discourse that questions the validity of the thesis and the effectiveness of its policy and practice outcomes. Sri Lanka mirrors the global debates and policy impact of the ideological framework of the global thesis, as it has a history of liberal governance (traceable to the 19 th century) and liberal peacebuilding (traceable to the 20 th century).

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