Local International: State-society relations and international-local interactions in post-war states

This proposed project builds on the main contributions of my thesis, contending that in recent years in Sri Lanka and other post-war states, understandings of 'state', 'society', 'local' and 'international' have created perceptions that are inaccurate to the reality on the ground. The project approaches this problem by interrogating literatures around the state and sovereignty (Caporaso 2000; Gainsborough 2010; Scott 1998) and the postcolonial nation (Chatterjee 1993; Harris-White 2003; Jalal 2002) to form a robust critique of the post-war state generally, and the Sri Lankan state specifically. Sri Lanka was deeply divided by a war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam between 1986 and 2009. My PhD analysed the resultant post-war context during three fieldwork periods, the last of which was in 2014.
For this PDF, I will conduct one further fieldwork period in March 2019, interviewing new and established contacts in civil society, the state and international donor organisations. With the new Government now in power and much more accepting of foreign researchers, I will have much greater access to state actors (the lack of access in 2014 being a limitation to my PhD that I overcame through documentary analysis). Therefore I will deepen and broaden my understanding of society-state and international-local interactions through this fieldwork period. The project unpacks ideas of civil society, particularly exploring the ideas of resilience (Duffield 2010: 459; Evans 2013: 39; Reid 2009). Employing interview material, the project analyses the human side of these ideas and the intricacies surrounding how resilience and exhaustion are experienced. This project asserts that the component parts of the state and society-and the individuals within them-must be analysed separately, as sweeping arguments based on the idea of 'the state' behaving in a certain way toward 'the society' are inaccurate to the Sri Lankan post-war context. The project argues that the difference between state and society actors depends much more on their individual backgrounds and objectives than on which sphere they 'belong' to. Thus, individuals belonging to NGOs perceived as 'anti-government' may well have close working and personal relationships with public servants (Evans 1996: 1122). Equally, employees of the state may hold highly critical views of that state (Stepan 1978: xiii). And while 'the state' as an effect may close-down civil society activities deemed to be anti-state, in Sri Lanka's case this has arguably only occurred where the activity in question clearly aimed to influence the electorate's views. These ideas are substantiated with interview material.
This project will interrogate the idea of there being a fixed 'international' in relation to a fixed 'local'. It will contend that the state is more an effect caused by an assemblage of practices and power relations-that the state is not a unitary physical entity but the projection of multiple physical entities (even though these individual departments or actors often disagree with each other). Mitchell terms this the effect of the state (1991: 94-95). It is further argued that similar projections occur for civil society, local actors and international actors alike, an oversimplification which has only served to confuse those analysing the post-war environment. Through this analysis, the project illuminates the detailed human interactions taking place often in contravention to these categorisations. This analysis is applicable to other states (including the UK), as it helps us to understand far more about why individuals who are members of externally-homogeneous organisations in fact have heterogeneous views. However, testing it on a range of post-war environments will pave the way for this to be developed into a much larger research study, the findings of which can be operationalised by civil society organisations, governments and international actors.