U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
Overview • Previous NCS Programs • NCS Scholar List • NCS Brochure • 2002-2003

Rajasingham-Senanayake Darini

Senior Research Fellow
International Centre for Ethnic Studies
Unmaking Multiculturalism in the Post-Modern War Machine: Transnational Networks, War Economies, and New Identities in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka

Dr. Darini Rajasingham is an anthropologist and Senior Fellow at the Social Scientists Association and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has written extensively on multiculturalism, identity politics and gender transformations in conflict situations and in South Asia. Her recent research is on developmentalism and the political economy of post/conflict reconstruction. Her Ph.D. is from Princeton University.

Selected Publications:

Ethnic Futures: The State and Identity Politics in Asia, Sage Publishes. 1999. (Co-author)
Building Local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka. New Delhi, Macmillan, 2003. (Co-editor with Marcus Mayer and Yuvi Thangarja.)

Unmaking Multiculturalism in the Post/Modern War Machine: Trans-national Networks, War Economies and New Identities in Sri Lanka

Study of how transnational networks - criminal, diaspora, and humanitarian - structure violence in the global south, may help us to rethink the causes and solutions to modern identity conflicts. My hypothesis is that the dynamics of the "ethnic" conflict and current peace process between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) cannot be understood without a grasp of how transnational networks, discourses, and practices, have structured and indeed institutionalized violence in an island that was once famous for its multicultural and hybrid social fabric.

This research project then asks: how and why are historically mixed and multicultural local communities with ancient modes of co-existence between diverse religious and linguistic groups transformed into mono-ethnic constituencies, enclaves, and perhaps nation-states based on modern ethno-national partitions? Drawing from ethnographic research in the north east of Sri Lanka where the war has been fought, and populations displaced and ethnically cleansed, the proposed research will study the making of a war economy, the unmixing of people, and new identities in violence. The project would also investigate how processes leading to such a complex conflict may be reversed for reconstruction of a multicultural civil society and sustainable peace?

The proposed research project combines cultural anthropological and international political economic modes of analysis. I draw from ethnographic research as well as policy work on the humanitarian emergency in the conflict zones of Sri Lanka. My International research visit would be at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University at the Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict, which critically examines the history of post/Cold War globalization and how it affected, structured and contoured violent conflicts in many parts of the world including the global south.

Working with the New Century fellows program would provide an important comparative dimension to my research on the trans-national dimensions of war and peace in Sri Lanka. Simultaneously, this research would bring an international political economy perspective to the analysis of a conflict that is usually glossed as ethnicity, religion, or identity based.