‘Give War A Chance’: All-Out War as a Means of Ending Conflict in the Cases of Sri Lanka and Colombia

Abstract

This article investigates the military approach as a means of solving protracted civil conflicts, in particular focusing on the cases of Sri Lanka and Colombia in comparison. The approach adopted is to study the emergence of these military options within the context of each country's history and to assess whether the call for war was merely a consequence of the international 'war on terror', or driven by internal elements. The article explores the epistemological groundings and pitfalls of the all-out war theory informing this approach, before reassessing the significance and validity of the theory in relation to Sri Lanka and Colombia.

Textbooks, Gender, and Conflict in South Asia: Building the Nation

“…Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war between the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhalese majority government had its origins in the postcolonial tensions between these two ethnic groups (Diaz and Murshed 2013). Sri Lanka is comprised of three predominant ethnic groups: Singhalese (74%), Tamils (16.5%), and Moors (8.3%) (Cardozo and Hoeks 2015).…”

Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict management

“…The term 'realist peace' was usually understood in terms of its contribution to international systemic stability (Newman, 2009), although Megoran has argued that the vision of realist peace held by early 20th-century thinkers mirrored their commitment to internal policies of coercion (Megoran, 2013). Other analysis focuses solely on the use of military force: cross-national studies of civil war termination typically code such outcomes as 'military victories', without much attention to authoritarian political initiatives that accompany the use of force (Diaz and Murshed, 2013;Kovacs and Svensson, 2013;Toft, 2010). However, at the country level, several recent studies have begun to address this gap in the scholarship, offering a more detailed study of authoritarian practices, characterised as 'illiberal peacebuilding' in Indonesia (Smith, 2014), 'illiberal peace' in Sri Lanka (Lewis, 2010) and Chechnya (Russell, 2014) and 'authoritarian peacebuilding' in Angola and Chechnya (Baglione, 2008;Soares de Oliveira, 2011).…”

Protest Campaigns and Civil Wars: Can Continuous Processes Be Studied with a Discretee Theory?

“…country (Diaz & Murshed, 2013). The start of the peace process with the FARC-EP in 2012 brought an increase in the capacity of the state to embrace dissent.…”

“…In the early 2000's another escalation phase in the confrontations came in the form of an "all-out war" by the Colombian government, under the sponsorship of the "Plan Colombia", developed during the late part of the failed peace process in the late 90's between the Colombian Government and the FARC-EP (Diaz & Murshed, 2013).…”

“…As the peace process between the Santos Government and the FARC-EP unfolded, a series of social mobilizations and protests (not protests campaigns) by truck drivers, peasants, judges, teachers and other constituencies emerged. This was preceded by the exit of an authoritarian regime in power between 2002 and 2010, during which dissent was perceived as supportive of the guerrilla groups, and an all-out war military policy was followed in order to defeat armed groups and oblige them to negotiate with the state (Diaz & Murshed, 2013).…”