The Production of Knowledge on Peace, Security and Governance in Sri Lanka

Abstract

When speaking about knowledge and knowledge transfers, it is important to locate one’s self in this global flux. On a personal plane I am in between two worlds: I grew up and spent my formative years in the North but chose to live my adult life in the South and work in a state university. I am by training a historian of modern Sri Lanka. This particular social space forms my archive and is my privileged site of analysis although I have tried to move towards a more Southern or even global perspective whenever possible. My thematic focus has been on the construction of identities in a variety of settings taking examples from material culture and social history. My other hat is one of a social scientist who has critically engaged with the frames given to us by modernity to create knowledge today. Needless to say all the concepts I use whether, power, hegemony or justice in order to reflect upon citizenship, state, civil society, human rights, security or governance bear the burden of European thought and history. It is with these ‘handicaps’ as it were, that I am going to offer you some of my thoughts on knowledge production in the field of peace, security and governance in Sri Lanka. 2 The first part of the paper will look at asymmetries in knowledge between North and South taking the fields of peace, security and governance as entry points; the second will consider the decline of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences in Sri Lanka before questioning the resurgence of a drained term ‘local knowledge’ in development discourse.