In the Eye of the Storm: Sri Lanka's Front‐Line Civil Servants in Transition

Abstract

This article narrates how bureaucrats in eastern Sri Lanka operated during and after the war. They managed to keep minimal state services running whilst being locked between the government and the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). When the government defeated the LTTE in 2009, civil servants were freed from rebel coercion, but they also lost their counterweight against unappreciated policies from the capital and interference by local politicians. The article links the thinking on armed conflicts with the literature that conceptualizes ‘the state’ not as a coherent entity, but as a subject of continuous negotiation. The state's insigne provides a sense of legitimacy and supremacy, but governments have no monopoly on using it. Other powerful actors capture state institutions, resources and discourse for contradictory purposes. This perspective helps us reconcile the appearance of bureaucratic order with the peculiar and hybrid forms of rule that emerged in the war between rebels and government, and it sheds light on some of the surprising changes and continuities that occurred when that war ended. Public administration is neither just a victim of war, nor plainly a victor of the post‐war situation.

Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition: The return of ‘normal’ politics in Nepal and Sri Lanka?

“…This article emerged out of a dialogue between the two authors, each having written separately about the politics of post-war transition in Sri Lanka (Klem, 2012;Klem, in press) and Nepal (Byrne and Shrestha, 2014). This dialogue was driven by some fascinating parallels, contradictions and complementarities between our analyses.…”

“…Political leaders from all ethnic groups continued to operate in the northeast, but their ability to bend rules, re-direct resources, or intimidate opponents was more limited than usual. The end of the war thus heralded an important change (Klem, 2012). Politicians made a conspicuous come-back in local communities and their ability to strong arm patronage opened up larger space for crafting legitimacy and 'doing something for the people'.…”

Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

“…This practice of using buffer institutions to blur the lines around the LTTE was followed by large parts of the Sri Lankan civil service in the northeast of the island. As we have described elsewhere (Klem 2012;Klem and Maunaguru n.d. ; see also Stokke 2006), many Tamil administrators of government institutions, as well as health personnel and teachers, continued to function in LTTEcontrolled territory and thereby served both the Sri Lankan state and the insurgent counter-state.…”

Transitional Local Governance and Minority Political Participation in Post War Sri Lanka

“…A number of researchers have examined the role of patronage in the political order and functioning of institutions and processes. Klem (2012) and McCourt (2007), documented its role in the civil service and within politics. Moonesinghe (2007) made the connection in relation to both public administration and service delivery, as well as its ethnic connotations.…”