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Summary of 5 pages for the course War and the International at School of Oriental and African Studies (Coursework material)
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1. ‘War destroys, but also connects and produces.’ Discuss with reference to state and society in aglobal perspective. Illustrate your answer with reference to either Sri Lanka or the US.
Words: 2000
War is conventionally understood as an armed conflict between different belligerent parties whose actions
result in violence and death. This popular conception of war focuses on its destructive effects and on its
disruptive force as well as on the negative impacts it has on society, on the economy and on the
environment, especially when ‘slow violence’ is employed. However, it is possible to analyze the
phenomenon of war from a different perspective, which focuses on its productive and connective properties.
Thus, the essay will engage with this transformative and generative conception of war by relying on its
liberal understanding, which introduces the definition of war as a system of social interactions and
processes.
The essay will first demonstrate how notions of identity can be constructed through time and space
according to specific historical and political contexts and how social relations can change in the international
arena as a consequence of war. New connections among people, states and institutions are produced, new
social orders are created on the global stage, world politics is shaped and transformed accordingly. The
analysis will rely on Sri Lanka as its case study to support these arguments and to explain the generative and
transformative effects war has in the international panorama. By considering how war ‘produces and
connects’, the analysis will ultimately focus on war as a form of discourse and communication able to shape
and fix meanings, thus influencing popular culture and public opinion.
The analysis will start the discussion by focusing on the formulation and reformulation of identities through
warfare. War implies a self-other understanding of the conflict where a ‘friend-enemy’ dimension is created.
The process of identity construction is linked to a stronger identification of the ‘self’ (indigenous identity) as
in direct opposition to what is perceived to be the ‘other’. It is relevant to mention that each collective
identity is based on shared values, customs and traditions. Thus, the open confrontation of collective
identities that occurs in warfare as a self-other relation imply a clash of those very sets of ideas and beliefs of
the parties involved in the conflict. The generated resistance to protect their own respective identities result
in their very reformulation. As identities are created and reinvented through war activity, ideologies and
values on which those identities are based, change accordingly. The outcome is the construction of new
identities along ethnic, religious and tribal lines, ultimately leading to sectarian, political and national
identities.
As the base of the analysis is the Sri Lankan case, the point will be illustrated with reference to the region by
looking at identity formation process during the colonial and post-colonial period. Resistance against colonial
rule led to the reformulation of indigenous identity. Colonial dominance was identified with Christianity
while Buddhism became synonym of home rule, which had increasingly been taken on by Sinhala
nationalism. Constant attacks on Buddhist monks and institutions led to the emergence of a Sinhala-Buddhist
identity, thus strengthening religious-ethnic divisions which were further reinforced by a British system of
political representation and colonial censuses. Anti-colonial struggles resulted in a semi-independent system
(1948) and ultimately in freedom, generating independence and historical agency (1972). However, the
country had been deeply transformed by colonialism. The region, before divided into kingdoms, had been
unified and the colonial presence left the state-system as its political heritage. A new territory was produced,
a new identity was created, independence emerged through fights of conquer and liberation.
On the other hand, by adopting a global perspective as well as a long view, England reproduced its own
identity during the age of colonialism: not only British lives of soldiers and civilians sent to Sri Lanka to
conquer and administer the region were modified and transformed through processes of integration, but
, also the British Empire exported its own apparatuses of administration and employed Ceylonese people to
fulfill tasks of administration. As a result, many Ceylonese refugees who migrated to England during the civil
war used their knowledge of British administration system to take up jobs in the civil service, thus
administering those very people who used to govern them.
After independence was achieved in 1972, a new social order was established. Both the Sri Lankan flag and
constitution symbolically represented the new hierarchy of values that had been created; Sinhalese at the
top of the hierarchical social structure and Buddhism as their ideological base. The process of identity
formation and ethnic division continued as the political construction of Sinhala nationalism led to the
marginalization of the Tamils through policies such as the 1956 ‘Sinhala only’ Act as well as in the
employment and education sectors. Indeed, a new collective identity emerged demanding independence
and the recognition of a Tamil State. Violent pogroms against Tamils led to Tamil insurgency and to the
creation of LTTE. Not only Tamils gained self-consciousness as an identity ethnic group, but also promoted
feminists’ ideas through women’s enrolment in the army as well as by promoting notions of equality and
gender rights.
It is interesting to notice that women’s enrolment in LTTE organization had been mainly generated by war-
produced violence specifically targeted against women in the form of sexual abuses. Production of feminists’
movements and transformation of a traditional societal gender order through warfare is clear when
considered as direct consequences of war activity. Women-targeted violence, for instance, took the form of
networks of prostitution, which were established through governmental policies and collusion of security
forces to construct soldiers’ morale and masculinity on daily bases in civil-military cultures. Sri Lankan
conflict and post-conflict are not the only example of gendered-violence and harm; Belize, Hawaii,
Philippines, Singapore are all examples of prostitution industry motivated by economic profit. It is clear that
war destroys; it destroyed women’s bodies and identities, but it also connects and produces. On one hand, it
connected Latina and Afro-Belize women to British soldiers in the Guatemala-Belize conflict during the Cold
War for instance. On the other, it produced awareness, which led to military base closures and the end of a
politics of prostitution (the non-prostitution formula adopted during the Gulf War and imposed by the Saudi
regime can be a valid example) as well as led to significant changes with regard to the role of gender.
Women became actively involved not only in military organizations, but also in the public arena, thus
challenging the traditional gendered order of society. War reformulated women’s identities worldwide for
better and for worse and reshaped society and notions of gender as well as global military policies.
Additionally, it is important to notice that identity formation can either be considered as a by-product of
warfare, as in the case of diaspora or refugee identity formation, or as the aim of war itself, as in the case of
sectarian conflicts whose efforts are channeled towards the “construction of unidimensional political
identities” as the basis of “oppressive and authoritative power”. Attempts to construct these ‘totalitarian
identities’ and whose aim is to gain power and establish a regime-system are the conflicts of “Serbs and
Croats in the Balkans, or of Sunnis and Shi’a in Iraq, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, or Azeris and Armenians in
the Caucasus”. The link between identities and politics is clear: as identities are created and reinvented
through warfare, it logically follows that policies are shaped in accordance to these new identities. Thus, war
activity can be strategically utilized to manipulate identities and formulate policies based on those
manipulated identities, in order to ultimately produce new social orders and hierarchy of values. Hence, the
importance of war in shaping and transforming world politics as the result of a strategic process of decision-
making. The Cold War period can be an example, as it clearly shows how through the construction of a
liberal and a communist ideology that produced two distinct identities, the world had been politically shaped
and geographically divided in two blocks. Policies of ‘containment’ through alliances, proxy wars and
strategies of intervention in the form of foreign aid were adopted by the liberal American-led block to limit
the communist expansion in Eastern Asia, China, Korea and Vietnam, linking the West to the East. The need
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