The Temptations of Evenhandedness

The Trouble with Evenhandedness: On the Politics of Human Rights and Peace Advocacy In Sri Lanka

[Written summer 2006; published early 2007]

Alan Keenan

Since the fall of the Soviet empire and the apparent global triumph of liberal capitalism, much hope has been placed in civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as engines of liberalization and democratization throughout the world. Despite the existence of many persuasive critiques of the transformative power of civil society, especially in postcolonial (which are often also neocolonial) contexts, “civil society building” remains a popular goal and practice for international donors from the wealthy nations of the global north. This has been particularly true in situations of protracted civil conflict, especially during internationally sponsored peace processes or in the period of postconflict reconstruction. Foreign states and international organizations seeking to encourage political stability and integration into the global economic system are in need of organizations and institutions that can contribute to the range of activities that have come to be known as “peace building.” While civil society and NGOs have been asked to play important roles in numerous transitions out of violent conflict, the jury is still out on just how effective they can be as agents of lasting and democratic change.

This essay hopes to contribute to debates over this question. It is part of a larger study that examines the roles that NGOs and civil-society networks have played during the Sri Lankan peace process of 2002–6. The larger study seeks to understand what forms of political action and critique are open to various kinds of organizations within civil society and what approaches hold out the most promise for effecting sustainable and democratic change in situations of protracted identity-based conflict, especially during peace processes supported by foreign governments and international organizations. Of special importance to the pages that follow here is the question of what, if any, democratic political potential lies in the discourse of human rights. Claims that human rights have been violated obviously have great power as partisan political weapons, especially in situations of violent group conflict. It is less clear, however, that the discourse of human rights as a whole actually contains the potential for advancing positive democratic political change, especially in deeply divided societies. Is it possible for human-rights advocacy by NGOs and networks of activists to promote democratic practices in such a context? What would be required for such groups to be able to help transform the dynamics of violent conflict in sustainable and democratic ways?

Over the past decade, and especially over the past five years of intense international involvement to help resolve Sri Lanka’s twenty-year-old civil war, the political activities and interventions of liberal and democratic civil-society groups and activists in Sri Lanka have increasingly been shaped by the ideas and practices of conflict resolution. With the sponsorship and encouragement of international donors, the discourse of conflict resolution has brought with it a particular model of political transformation and conflict reduction. This model has been adopted by NGOs and other civil-society organizations with important effects on how they imagine their own political roles and possibilities and how others in society see them. As part of a larger professionalization, even bureaucratization, of civil-society political activity, Sri Lankan NGOs and activists have been encouraged to take up practices of “peacebuilding” and “conflict transformation” that are generally quite technical, even apolitical. However, they have rarely been encouraged to engage directly with the power structures and ideological formations that sustain Sri Lanka’s various violent conflicts.

As part of the increasingly hegemonic discourse of conflict resolution, the principle of remaining evenhanded with respect to the two main negotiating parties — the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers — emerged as a powerful influence on political discourse and on the interventions undertaken by many different actors in the Sri Lankan peace process, including foreign governments, multilateral organizations, international NGOs, and various Sri Lankan NGOs. Despite its obvious attractions in a situation of violent conflict, I argue that the ideal of evenhandedness has played a destructive role in Sri Lanka’s peace process. More specifically, I contend that the concern with being evenhanded with respect to the positions of the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers has contributed to a neglect of crucial human-rights protections. The neglect of rights has, in turn, undermined trust and security between different ethnic and political groups. Furthermore, the imperative to be evenhanded has weakened the democratic and transformative potential of Sri Lankan NGOs, civil-society organizations, and activists. Promising a nonpolitical — because nonpartisan — means of transforming violent conflict into peaceful relations, the ideal of evenhandedness has in fact involved such groups in interventions that are highly political, even if this political aspect is disavowed.

After examining the various factors that have made evenhandedness so counterproductive — both those factors specific to Sri Lanka’s peace process and those basic to the ideal of evenhandedness as such — I describe an alternative, more explicitly political model of engagement and critique that can be seen in the work of a small number of Sri Lankan human-rights activists. This approach, which I call “the politics of neither/nor,” allows allegiance to basic democratic rights and principles to guide nongovernmental political interventions, rather than the ideal of balance or evenhandedness. By actively defending human rights, these activists attempt to reclaim the fundamental right of average, unarmed citizens to speak freely and engage in independent political activities, against the deliberate destruction of political space by the violence and arbitrary rule of both the state and counterstate agents. A neither/nor approach, I argue, ultimately holds out the promise of better integrating human rights and conflict resolution efforts. For this promise to have a chance of being fulfilled, however, the neither/nor approach must be incorporated into a broader, democratized social movement of NGOs and other political forces within civil society.

Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflicts and the Crisis of the State

The violent struggle by the Tamil Tigers (officially known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE) to establish a separate state in the name of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka began in the mid-1970s. It had its origins in the failure of Sri Lanka’s postindependence political leadership to agree on a political system that would grant citizens of all ethnicities equal access to the resources and protections of the state. By the mid-1950s, Sinhalese politicians had discovered the power of a discourse that pledged to use the state to rectify what many average Sinhalese and Buddhists (roughly 75 percent of the population) saw as the humiliations and disadvantages they had suffered under British colonial rule. Their grievances centered on the loss of prestige accorded to Buddhism, the dominance of English as the language of the elite and of economic opportunity, and the disproportionate number of Tamils holding civil-service jobs and gaining entrance to universities. Exploiting popular conceptions of democracy as unrestrained majority rule and popular myths about the essentially Buddhist character of the island, Sinhalese politicians passed a series of laws — with regard to language, education, religion, and land use — that effectively defined the state as Sinhalese and Buddhist. From 1956 onward, nonviolent Tamil protests against their second-class citizenship were met with increasingly violent repression by government forces. Thus, original demands by Tamils for limited forms of political autonomy for the Northern and Eastern Provinces, where Tamil speakers (mostly Hindu, but also Christian and Muslim) combine to form a majority, eventually became demands for a separate state. Small-scale antistate violence by various groups of Tamil youth in the north exploded into full-scale war in 1983 after a Tamil Tiger ambush of an army truck triggered massive state-sanctioned anti-Tamil violence throughout the island.

The separatist war has since led to the deaths of an estimated seventy thousand people and displaced upwards of one million others, out of a population of less than twenty million. Atrocities have been committed by both the government and the LTTE, including LTTE violence against other Tamils. Even as the Tigers have fought the Sinhalese-dominated state, they have also been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Tamils aligned with rival political and militant movements. The Tigers’ claim to be the sole representative of the Tamil people has been enforced through violence and fear, including the assassinations of the most prominent Tamil politicians of the past three decades. Tens of thousands of Sinhalese were also killed in the course of two separate insurrections, in 1971 and 1987–90, by militants of the left-wing nationalist People’s Liberation Front, or JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna). The violence by both the state and the JVP was merciless in the extreme. Sri Lanka’s small Muslim population has also suffered violence at the hands of the Sri Lankan state, and, to a much larger degree, from the Tamil Tigers, who in 1990 forcibly expelled some ninety thousand Muslims from the northern Jaffna peninsula then under their control. The violent and unaccountable power of the Sri Lankan state, in other words, ultimately bred ruthless and totalizing forms of counterstate resistance, in the form of the LTTE and the JVP, both of which have gone on to sow further destruction and hatred along lines of ethnicity, religion, and class.
The past several decades have witnessed a series of attempts to find a negotiated settlement of political demands made in the name of the Tamil people. Various proposals for constitutional reforms that would grant some degree of self-rule to the Northern and Eastern Provinces have come and gone with no success, because they offered either too much autonomy to gain consensus among Sinhalese or too little to win acceptance from the LTTE. The Norwegian-brokered cease-fire of February 2002 is the longest-running cease-fire to date, though at the time of this writing, in mid-2006, it survives in name only. Despite close involvement by governments of the European Union, the United States, and Japan and promises of billions of dollars of aid for postwar reconstruction should a negotiated settlement be reached, talks between the Tigers and the government have failed to resume after the LTTE’s withdrawal in April 2003.

Thanks in part to the stresses of the peace process itself, including the many violations of basic human rights that have accompanied it, political divisions between Sinhalese parties and within the LTTE have effectively paralyzed attempts to restart negotiations. Tiger proposals for an LTTE-run interim administration in the north and east have to date not been discussed. Soon after its unveiling in November 2003, the fragile interparty cohabitation of the Sri Lankan government collapsed, which ultimately led to elections in 2004 that brought to power a new coalition of parties — now including the resurrected JVP — which took a much harder line on negotiating with the Tigers. Almost simultaneously, the LTTE suffered the defection of its Eastern Province military commander, Colonel Karuna. His initial defeat by the main body of the LTTE has been followed by guerilla resistance of increasing intensity, as the remnants of Karuna’s forces have benefited from increasingly strong assistance from the Sri Lankan military. Since the election in November 2005 of a new Sri Lankan president, who ran on a platform opposing any changes to the “unitary” character of the Sri Lankan state and any concessions to the Tigers, violence between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military has escalated to dangerous levels, with civilians of all ethnicities being targeted from all sides.

Evenhandedness and Balance on the Sri Lankan Road to Peace

By the spring of 2006, with the Sri Lankan peace process on the verge of collapse into full-scale war, accusations of bias and a lack of evenhandedness — directed both at the so-called international community as well as at domestic political actors — had become central to Sri Lankan political discussions. This was especially true just before and immediately after the European Union’s decision — in reaction to repeated cease-fire violations and political assassinations attributed to the LTTE — to add the Tamil Tigers to its list of banned “terrorist organizations,” which prevents the Tigers from conducting any activities in EU countries. Even prior to this, however, the concern with being evenhanded and with revealing and criticizing “bias” and “partiality” on the part of others had been present on all sides of Sri Lanka’s complicated political conflicts.

The intuitive attractiveness of evenhandedness, especially in an environment riven by explosive human-rights charges, is not hard to understand. It is especially appealing for those who take up the role of mediators or for any outside party that wants to assist others to escape a destructive cycle of conflict. It would seem almost in the nature of their role to resist taking sides and instead to try to treat the various parties equally and impartially, without adding to the sense of disadvantage or insecurity generally felt by those in conflict. Indeed, the desire by outsiders to remain evenhanded is likely to be encouraged and intensified by the natural resistance of groups within a conflict to accounts of their activities that they deem unfair or biased, especially when such accounts take the form of human-rights criticisms that can be used as potent political weapons against them. The desire for evenhandedness would seem to flow directly from the obvious appeal — even to would-be peacemakers within the society in conflict — of a model of conflict resolution or transformation that seeks to get outside of the conflict and see (the truth of) all sides, none of which, so the thinking goes, is either entirely blameless or entirely to blame, since “there are always two sides (or more) to every story.”

In Sri Lanka, however, the desire to be evenhanded has in fact contributed to the slow, but steady collapse of the cease-fire. As I will argue below, the ideal of evenhandedness is a risky guide for political work in any situation of protracted violent conflict. In the case of Sri Lanka, however, the quest for evenhandedness became especially destructive because it accentuated certain underlying assumptions of the official Norwegian-facilitated peace process — assumptions that ultimately proved not only incorrect, but counterproductive. If one thinks of conflict-resolution initiatives as generally aiming to transform a zero-sum or either/or conflict between identity-based groups into a win/win, or both/and, process, the problems plaguing the Sri Lankan peace process had much to do with whom the both/and approach aimed to bring together and on what terms.

The basic design flaw in the peace process was its highly exclusive nature. That is, it brought together and aimed to satisfy the interests of both the Tamil Tigers and the government, each of which was presumed to adequately represent their “own” people: the Tamil minority concentrated in the north and east of the island and the Sinhalese majority concentrated in the south, center, and west. Left out of this limited and binary structure, and thus from any ideal of evenhandedness that followed its parameters, were other important constituencies whose acceptance of the process would be a crucial factor in the sustainability of any agreements between the warring parties. Those denied any meaningful role in the process included the Muslim minority, concentrated in the volatile Eastern Province, Tamil parties and activists that rejected the Tigers’ claim to be the “sole representative of the Tamil people” (including the renegade faction of the LTTE led by the Eastern Province military commander Karuna, who broke away two years into the process), and, finally, more strongly Sinhalese nationalist parties and others who didn’t feel themselves adequately represented by the Sinhalese-dominated government.

The second major problem with the peace process was that engagement in it involved no serious commitment on anyone’s part — not from the government, the Tigers, the Norwegians, or from other international supporters of the process — to transforming the antidemocratic activities of the two major antagonists. Whether with respect to the fundamental issues of constitutional reform at stake in the conflict or with respect to the ways in which each party governed its “own” populations, questions of justice — directed toward the past, the present, or the future — were off the table. Instead, the peace process was structured as a purely pragmatic deal meant to empower each entity in its current incarnation while preserving the balance of power between them. In effect, the two parties agreed that they would not challenge each other’s power and position for the time being, but made no promises about or showed much interest in a principled process that would transform either their long-term relationship or how they treated those under their political control. Instead of a process designed to move toward a just settlement based on meaningful democratic power sharing and accountable governance, there was a simple exchange: the government was to get the peace and quiet necessary for economic development based on international investment, while the Tigers were to get international recognition and investment, together with the consolidation and expansion of their military and political control over the Tamil-speaking areas they claim as their homeland.

Equally damaging was the fact that the peace process included no mechanisms designed to enable others to pressure the two major parties to change their modes of governance, to act as checks on their behavior, or to develop independent initiatives for reconciliation or accountability that might ultimately transform the larger political environment. Thus, the cease-fire monitoring mission, staffed by representatives of Nordic countries, was given no powers of enforcement or remedy in the event of cease-fire violations. Nor did the monitors or the Norwegian government show any interest in interpreting their mandate to include the prevention of human-rights violations against the civilian population. The Norwegian government and other foreign states involved in the process actively resisted calls to establish an independent human-rights monitoring mission that would have been less concerned with maintaining the confidence of the two parties involved in the cease-fire agreement. Nor was there any international support offered to those in Sri Lankan nongovernmental organizations who attempted to develop their own independent monitoring procedures.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the entire structure of evenhandedness between the two parties was built on top of a cease-fire agreement that in various ways allowed the Tigers to expand and deepen their coercive control over the north and east of the island, as well as over Tamils living in other regions. The cease-fire agreement required non-LTTE Tamil political parties to disarm, even as it allowed the Tigers to establish “political” offices for work in government-held territories. Yet it granted no reciprocal right for government forces or for cease-fire monitors to enter areas controlled by the Tigers. The result was the expansion and further entrenchment of Tiger control throughout the north and east, aided by a range of coercive methods: the assassination of hundreds of members of rival Tamil parties, the murder and harassment of Muslims who rejected LTTE control of the north and east, the forcible recruitment of thousands of underage fighters, widespread extortion from the civilian population, the manipulation of elections in 2004 and 2005, and the near-complete destruction of all independent political spaces in the north and east of the island.

In this context, in which the Tamil Tigers violated the cease-fire at will and exploited many opportunities available for the expansion of their rule through coercion and intimidation, the ideal of evenhandedness and the principle of balance between the two parties that underlay the whole process had devastating effects. Particularly damaging was the interpretation of evenhandedness that informed many people’s responses to cease-fire and human-rights violations. According to this view, one was only allowed to criticize the violations of one of the two parties (generally the Tigers) so long as the other party (generally the government) had committed equivalent violations. Given that each side was violating different rights to varying degrees — the vast majority, and certainly the most egregious, cease-fire and human-rights violations being committed by the Tigers — focusing on the violations of the Tigers was seen by many, both within Sri Lankan civil society and within the world of international organizations and the diplomatic community, to be “unbalanced” and therefore both unfair and destabilizing. (Many were afraid that highlighting Tiger violations would run the risk of scaring them away from the peace process.) As a result, for the first three and one-half years of the peace process, until the Tigers’ assassination of the Sri Lankan foreign minister in August 2005, only a handful of local and international groups were willing to speak out publicly against such violations.

The years of widespread Tiger violence and intransigence, especially in the context of a noninclusive process, ultimately provoked Sinhalese, Muslim, and even Tamil “spoilers” who felt disrespected, disempowered, and in many cases, physically endangered by the direction that the peace process had taken. Their growing resistance, both violent and nonviolent, to the terms on which “peace” was being offered has ratified the long-standing resistance of the Sri Lankan state to real reforms. That the Tigers were allowed to get away with murder not only weakened support for a peaceful and just settlement among Sinhalese and Muslims. It has also fueled a desire for righteous payback in similar currency by violent Sinhalese supremacists and their supporters in the Sri Lankan government, a government that has continued its long tradition of using violence to quell dissent and maintain ethnic and class hierarchies.

In other words, the closures and counterproductive forms of evenhandedness that characterized the Norwegian-led peace process, both with respect to the “balanced” structure of the formal process and with respect to how cease-fire and human-rights violations were downplayed, have merely ratified and legitimated impunity on all sides, with destructive effects in all directions. They have also undermined the legitimacy of the Norwegian facilitators among many Sri Lankans, who view their reluctance to criticize Tiger “terrorism” either as a sign of weakness or as evidence of their pro-Tiger bias and bad faith. Since democratic and liberal elements in Sri Lankan civil society have been discouraged from raising human-rights issues, both by the ideal of evenhandedness and by the direct instructions of their international donors, the job of denouncing such violations has increasingly been taken up by Sinhalese hardliners who have no interest in the reform of the Sri Lankan state. Their highly partisan use of human-rights language has had the effect of delegitimating such claims in the eyes of many. In the end, then, the lack of effective human-rights protections has meant that all constituencies — Tamil, Muslim, and Sinhalese civilians, government soldiers and police, LTTE fighters and anti-LTTE militants — have been made to feel less secure over the past four years. It is thus no surprise that violence of all kinds and from all sides has now escalated to the point that the cease-fire is effectively dead, even if it has not, as of this writing, been explicitly abrogated.

The Limits of Evenhandedness as an Ideal

The inadequacy of evenhandedness as an ideal for intervening in violent identity-based conflicts or for judging such interventions goes beyond the specific design flaws and mistakes in mediation that have undermined the Sri Lankan peace process. As I will show with reference to current Sri Lankan controversies, the danger of using evenhandedness as a guide to intervening in such conflicts, whether these are carried out by international or local actors, goes much deeper. Attempts to respect evenhandedness as a guiding ideal inevitably depoliticize fundamental aspects of a conflict, even as they necessarily depend on — and help naturalize — particular and contestable political interpretations of what the conflict is really about.
The idea that it is important not to be biased or partial as a mediator in a conflict would seem, on the face of it, to make sense. Avoiding bias or partiality presumably includes not ignoring the legitimate interests of one or more group or party to the conflict and not having the interests of only one party at heart. But given that one can never fully satisfy all the interests, needs, and concerns of all the parties involved in a conflict, respecting this principle requires one to make choices about which interests, needs, or positions to attend to, to determine whose claims seem important and whose not, which are legitimate and which excessive or mistaken. Making such choices, however, amounts to making judgments that are fundamentally political and go to the heart of the conflict(s) in need of resolution. In short, while trying not to be biased or partial makes sense, it can have value only as a negative injunction, as a reminder of the ease with which one’s interventions can be interpreted as favoring one side over another. When one attempts to give it positive content in the form of evenhandedness or impartiality, however, one is immediately forced to take a political stance on the conflict, a stance that is almost certain to appear less than evenhanded to one or more significant stakeholders or constituencies.

To put this point another way, the ideal of evenhandedness relies on a conception of balance. But imposing a balanced framework on a conflict that is certain to be unbalanced in multiple and incommensurable ways threatens to impose a particular vision of what the conflict is about and what its settlement should look like, precisely those issues that should be open for debate and discussion by all parties. Conflict resolution is certainly facilitated by recognizing that all parties and communities have suffered, that representatives of all communities have done terrible things in their names, and that the entirety of this suffering and violence, from all sides, needs to be recognized and taken into account. One can do one’s best to respect this form of impartiality, however, without in any way holding that responsibility for past or present injustices lies in equal measure or in any kind of measure that one can ultimately hold evenly in one’s metaphorical hands. Once again, then, the danger is that in the guise of a balanced, evenhanded, impartial intervention, a particular and contestable political vision is smuggled into conflict-resolution initiatives without public acknowledgment.

Asymmetries in Violations

A more specific form of this problem rests in the fact that the ideal of evenhandedness offers no resources for negotiating the basic asymmetries that exist between the parties, whether they be the different forms of rights violations that each party commits or their distinct modes of power and domination. Ultimately, the ideal of evenhandedness founders on the absence of a common standard for judging the urgency or importance of rights violations, injustices, and antidemocratic forms of power.

As mentioned above, the cease-fire violations that received the most publicity over the course of the Sri Lankan peace process, especially during its first three and one-half years, were those committed by the Tigers, which included political assassinations, the recruitment of underage fighters, extortion, attacks on rival political parties, election fraud and enforced election boycotts, and the forcible control over civil society. These are all violations of civil and political rights considered fundamental, such as the right to life, freedom of movement, the right to and property, and the right to vote, speak freely, and organize politically.
Although Tiger violations were publicly criticized to a limited extent, many Tamil nationalists and supporters of the LTTE responded by strongly arguing that other violations needed to be discussed alongside, and in some cases, instead of, Tiger violations. These LTTE supporters cited a host of other rights that they felt were of equal or greater importance and that were being violated by the government and ignored by many human-rights advocates and critics of the Tigers. Violations they cited included the continued existence of the Sri Lankan military’s so-called High Security Zones, which have displaced Tamils from their land and thus violate the property rights of tens of thousands of families; the right of internally displaced and war-affected people to humanitarian assistance and to longer-term rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts; the denial of socioeconomic rights, including the right to health care, education, sanitation, and housing, suffered disproportionately by Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces; the continued denial of the language rights of Tamil speakers; and, most important of all, the denial of the right to self-determination that belongs to the Tamil nation, the demand for which is at the heart of the Tigers’ liberation struggle.

Unfortunately, the ideal of evenhandedness cannot help us work our way through these disputes. Even if one agrees that all of these violations — whether of property rights, language rights, the right to life, or the right to organize politically — are all of equal importance, which many would dispute, they simply cannot all be addressed in the same way, or at the same speed, or starting at the same time. The violation of most civil and political rights, for instance, can in principle be ended immediately, as long as the violating party has the will to change its behavior. But the same is not true of other kinds of violations. For example, returning the property of those with houses in army-controlled High Security Zones would require reciprocal and negotiated demilitarization by both sides or risk destabilizing the balance of military forces on which the cease-fire rests. While many of the rights to humanitarian assistance at issue should, in principle, be amenable to relatively quick practical interventions, the actual experience of the peace process revealed that serious progress on these issues can be achieved only through sustained cooperation between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government and the through establishment of new administrative mechanisms. With respect to violations of internationally recognized socioeconomic rights, this is a problem that plagues the whole of Sri Lanka, and it requires major institutional and economic changes in order to be overcome. Even in the (unlikely) best-case scenario, such reforms will take years, though they could certainly begin quite quickly, in part through attempts to address the especially high levels of poverty and lack of economic opportunities in the north and east. Finally, even if the right to self-determination of the Tamil people were accepted by all major parties as a legitimate claim — which is far from being the case — this right to self-determination would, by definition, require being elaborated and defined in institutional terms over the course of a long and complicated negotiating process. It is certainly not something that can be granted in any meaningful sense at the beginning of a peace process.

Trying to apply an evenhanded approach to disputes over the existence, value, and priority of the various rights said to be violated over the course of a given conflict is, then, ultimately destined only to provoke frustration and endless, unproductive debates.

Asymmetries of Power

Debates over the priority of different kinds of rights violations are particularly difficult to resolve, in part because they are generally informed by essentially political judgments about which entity, given its specific forms of power and domination, is the greater threat to justice and to peace — in the case of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers or the Sri Lankan state.

On the one hand, the Sri Lankan state is formally democratic and preserves certain democratic features, such as regular competitive elections that produce changes in the ruling parties; freedom to organize politically, up to a certain point; media that are relatively free, though deeply — even ferociously — divided along ethnic and partisan lines; and a formally independent judiciary. The formal legitimacy of the Sri Lankan state thus garners it some degree of sympathy, along with material benefits, from fellow members of the international community of states.
Nonetheless, the Sri Lankan state has for the past fifty years effectively been an ethnocracy. Utilizing a definition of democracy as pure majoritarianism and dispensing with safeguards for minorities whose concerns are consistently outvoted, government policies have systematically favored the majority Sinhalese in both symbolic and material ways. Moreover, the Sri Lankan state has proven itself capable of the most terrible forms of extralegal political violence in defense of both the ethnic and the class hierarchies on which it is based. Maintained by an increasingly politicized and violent police force and a judiciary largely unwilling to challenge either elected authorities or powerful interests, the Sri Lankan state has proven itself able to resist all calls for legal accountability. In terms of its basic features, the Sri Lankan state and political system are effectively immune to political challenge and reform.

The political closures of the state, however, are matched, if not exceeded, by those of the Tamil Tigers, who are more ruthlessly and fully antidemocratic and are easily labeled as “terrorists” by foreign states and by local critics. More important than their use of standard terrorist forms of violence such as attacks on civilian targets is the terror produced by their desire for total control over the “Tamil nation.” This desire for control is evidenced by the human-rights violations committed over the course of the peace process, including the murder and exile of dissenting voices, the elimination of rival political groups, the forcible recruitment of child soldiers, and the effective control over the activities and statements of organizations ostensibly part of civil society. The University Teachers for Human Rights, Sri Lanka’s longest-lived and best-known human-rights group, which is composed of a small number of Tamil academics, describes LTTE violence in the following terms:

The terror [felt by members of Tamil political parties forced to align with the Tigers] is an object lesson in the LTTE’s methods of terror. Its terror has a dimension beyond being simply vindictive and irrational. One cannot play safe with the LTTE. The TULF MPs killed by the LTTE thought themselves to be playing safe. They all but acknowledged its totalitarian claims, never criticised it publicly and remained obligingly silent when their own colleagues were picked off by LTTE killers, one by one. People are thus driven to be cautious to the point of not risking doing anything that may be taken amiss by the LTTE. It is a degree of terror that a state cannot match.

And yet, many Tamils still see the LTTE as their best defender and their only source of political respect and leverage, especially since the Sri Lankan state continues to brutalize Tamil civilians with impunity. Many also argue that, if given the proper support from the international community, the LTTE could slowly evolve into a more legitimate and statelike entity, able either to rule “Tamil Eelam” independently or to share power with a democratized Sri Lankan state. Indeed, many Tamil activists are reluctant to criticize the Tigers publicly for fear of undermining their struggle against the Sri Lankan state, which is considered to be the greater threat to their freedom and dignity.

Judgments about the different modes of power of the warring parties and the dangers they pose, in other words, are inevitably influenced by the forms and strength of a given critic’s ethnic identification and by his or her particular ideological beliefs. With no procedure available for bracketing out such beliefs and forms of identification, it simply makes no sense to speak of an evenhanded accounting of the respective crimes and the level of danger posed by the different entities.
However much one might want to be evenhanded, the choices one makes about these issues, whether as an international or a local actor, will inevitably have uneven effects. One’s interventions, that is, can never be neutral, because they will inevitably affect the balance of power, whether symbolic or material, between the parties in conflict. Nor would there be any way of knowing in advance what it would mean to be evenhanded in the sense of applying equal pressure to all sides.
In the absence of a coherent and workable practice of evenhandedness, then, advocates of human rights, democracy, and peace are left with the task of challenging and attempting to transform the different modes of power of the parties on the basis of complex, contextual, and fully political judgments. Such judgments will be concerned with how the different forms of undemocratic and arbitrary power characteristic of the Tigers, the state, and other armed groups can best be engaged, in what contexts, and at what speeds. More specifically, one must judge how to tackle different forms of rights violations, determining which ones are more urgent, how to sequence them, which are more open to redress, and so on. Far from bringing our awareness to these questions, much less helping us develop better ways of addressing them, the ideal of evenhandedness ignores or downplays the tactical, contextual, contestable, and risky nature of all forms of pressure and political intervention in conflict situations.

The Costs of Evenhandedness to Democratic Civil Society

The dangers of attempting to follow an evenhanded or balanced approach are particularly acute for civil-society organizations — whether in the form of NGOs, popular movements, or small networks of activists — that seek the democratic and/or liberal transformation of society. The ideal of evenhandedness can easily undermine the ability of both local groups and their international allies to take an independent stand in pursuit of their own critical political agendas. Under the spell of the ideal of evenhandedness, liberal and democratic civil-society activists and organizations are easily tempted and at times actively encouraged by their donors to play the role of the mediator. In doing so, their central concern becomes balancing the interests and maintaining the confidence of the various negotiating parties, rather than holding them to account and trying to transform their methods.
Such has certainly been the case in Sri Lanka. Thanks to the influx of relatively large amounts of international funding, the Sri Lankan peace process saw the proliferation of peace and conflict-resolution initiatives. New organizations emerged, and established organizations expanded and/or redirected their work in support of “peace” and “conflict transformation.” From small-scale grassroots community organizations holding peace rallies and undertaking interethnic community-service projects to Colombo-based elite research and advocacy groups sponsoring workshops on various aspects of the peace process, activities in support of “peace” proliferated. The goal for international donors in encouraging and funding this work was to tap into the peace-building power of Sri Lankan civil society. The job assigned to Sri Lankan organizations was to build peace by supporting the Track One process, which advocated a top-level both/and approach to the conflict. Thus, in the initial years of the Sri Lankan peace process, most civil-society activities in support of peace and conflict transformation primarily took the form of advocacy in support of the peace efforts of the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, who were assumed to be the only important players and whose efforts needed to be communicated and sold to the general public. The goal of these organizations was decidedly not to criticize either of these parties and their international sponsors or to articulate an independent political agenda of their own.

Unfortunately, these developments had a devastating effect on the work of human-rights activists and organizations. Most of the established organizations whose work had centered on the defense and promotion of human rights lost large amounts of their funding, as international financial support to civil society came to be directed almost exclusively to groups doing “peace-building” or “reconciliation” work of various sorts. Indeed, human-rights criticisms were particularly frowned upon by international donors and by many of the most prominent Sri Lankan civil society supporters of peace. Given that it was impossible to present a fully balanced list of charges against all parties in the conflict, the popularity of the ideals of evenhandedness and balance paralyzed critiques of human-rights abuses by making them seem unfair and/or destabilizing.

Had the two main warring parties shown real interest in changing their ways, one might argue that public advocacy and engagement with them in support of Track One negotiations — rather than active criticism and resistance — made political sense. Unfortunately, many donor-funded civil-society organizations were so wedded to a model of conflict resolution that gave pride of place to evenhandedness and to supporting the negotiating parties that they failed to shift tack even as these parties actively continued to destroy the space for independent political activity and to protect their ability to violate rights with impunity. This was most obviously the case with the LTTE, whose use of violence was blatant and relentless. But it was also true of the Sri Lankan state, which during the initial years of the process failed to criticize or try to prevent the LTTE’s violence and which actively worked to preserve its own impunity for its past and ongoing rights violations.

The lack of response to human-rights violations by those supporting the peace process, including civil-society groups, international organizations, and foreign states, had the effect of ratifying, in the name of peace, the underlying patterns of impunity with which the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government had been able to maintain their domination for decades. Failure to address their systems of unaccountable power not only seemed to endorse a very violent form of “peace,” it also helped to undermine security and trust on all sides of Sri Lanka’s multiple conflicts. Moreover, this lack of attention to abuses of power had the unintended effect of leaving the role of speaking in defense of basic human rights to Sinhalese supremacist groups. While they were legitimately outraged at the Tigers’ repeated cease-fire and human-rights violations, these groups nonetheless had little interest in a just settlement of Tamil grievances. Their increasing prominence in debates over human-rights issues has reduced the discourse of human rights to an arsenal of rhetorical weapons used by partisans who refuse to apply the same human-rights principles to each side.

The failures of the Sri Lankan peace process reveal, among other things, that human-rights protections are a necessary aspect of effective and sustainable conflict-transformation initiatives. The ideal of evenhandedness undermines the ability of civil-society activists to articulate human-rights concerns. By doing so, it can also cripple effective peace work, which requires weaning people from their identifications with the warring parties, or at least from their acceptance of militarist nationalism and antidemocratic violence. Ultimately, for it to be effective, peace advocacy needs to argue against militarism and exclusive forms of nationalism and in support of democracy and human rights.

From Both/And to Neither/Nor: Toward a More Fully Political Practice of Human-Rights and Peace Advocacy

From among a small, but increasingly influential number of Sri Lankan political activists, there has emerged a different, more critical style of political intervention, one that appeals to human-rights principles to support the development of deeper, more sustainable forms of peace. Articulated through overlapping networks of supporters inside and outside the island, rather than through established donor-funded organizations, a shared style of political critique may be found in reports by the long-established network of activists known as the University Teachers for Human Rights, the work of the recently established and increasingly influential Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, and the interventions by more ad hoc initiatives such as the Collective for Batticaloa, the Multi-Ethnic Coalition for Child Security, and the Coalition of Muslims and Tamils for Peace and Coexistence. Their shared approach abandons the ideal of evenhandedness in favor of more confrontational and more fully political forms of critique, adopting what might be called a neither/nor approach. As we have seen, the both/and approach of the Norwegians and other international supporters of the Sri Lankan peace process allowed the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state to define the two (and only two) “sides” that were in conflict and that needed to be brought together. In contrast, the neither/nor approach uses the language and principles of human rights to challenge the militarism and exclusive nationalism of both the Sri Lankan state and the Tigers. This approach also challenges other groups that are party to the conflict to the extent that they share these militaristic characteristics, such as the breakaway faction from the LTTE commanded by Karuna and the Sinhalese-supremacist JVP, which has a long history of brutal, terror-filled insurrections and continued militarist and antidemocratic practices.

Seeking to defend and expand the space “in between” the various warring parties and in solidarity with all those who are literally caught in the middle of the violence from different sides, the politics of neither/nor invokes basic principles of human rights so as to say “no” to all forms of arbitrary, unaccountable, and antidemocratic power. This politics demands instead that the people themselves be allowed to reenter and re-create the political space itself, enabling them to share power in nonviolent ways.

The central principle of the neither/nor approach is that in their distinctive ways, both the Sri Lankan state and the Tigers have violently usurped the constitutive power of the people to govern themselves and to determine their shared fate and common policies. The underlying claim is that the people themselves — of all ethnicities — have political priority over both the state and those fighting to create a new state of their own. Thus, proponents of the neither/nor approach have explicitly rejected the idea that either the LTTE or the government represents those for whom they claim to speak — “the Tamil nation” and “the Sri Lankan people,” respectively — and have rejected their right to monopolize the limited political space opened up in the name of “peace.”

The neither/nor approach is thus clearly not evenhanded with respect to the major protagonists or their particular acts of violence and injustice, since it explicitly aims to weaken and undermine their power according to whatever political means are available. It does, however, consciously aim to challenge all human-rights violations, regardless of the agent, particularly those that destroy the fragile political space through violence, fear, and the deliberate targeting of dissenting voices. It aims to expand and democratize the tenuous space “in between” partisans, making it more inclusive, more equal, and more open to question. Nonetheless, it recognizes how fraught, uncomfortable, and unstable this middle position is: it’s not the middle of evenhandedness or balance, but of being “caught in the middle” — as in, “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

The neither/nor approach, then, in its ideal form, would be a quintessentially democratic mode of nongovernmental politics to the extent that it would be an independent project aimed at defending the democratic rights of all citizens against arbitrary, abusive, and illegitimate power, whether that of the state or of counterstate entities, and at resisting the closure of political space. While such a political practice would not claim to be the sole legitimate approach in situations of violent, identity-based conflicts, its proponents argue that it is the specific task of at least some significant portion of civil society to challenge and ultimately delegitimate the warring parties by naming their modes of power as one of the primary sources of the collective crisis that must be addressed.

Such an approach is political in another sense, too. While it is grounded in respect for basic rights for all and in principles of political openness and plurality, its universalism is a minimalist one and doesn’t claim to offer neutral principles to resolve the dilemmas of democratization and peacebuilding. Instead, it consciously accepts the need to make strategic choices about which set of rights to defend and to emphasize at any given moment, recognizing that these choices will have political consequences that inevitably affect the course of the macrolevel conflicts, even as these consequences will be largely incalculable in advance.

The Promise of a Neither/Nor Approach

The argument here, then, is not that the neither/nor approach, through its attachment to basic democratic principles and to the fundamental rights to the political space, can overcome the problems and dilemmas that plague the ideal of evenhandedness. Indeed, the neither/nor approach is a more fully political practice precisely because it accepts and publicizes the inevitability of these dilemmas and the risks that come with having to negotiate them. The wager of this approach, however, is that such acceptance makes it possible to handle the dilemmas somewhat more effectively and thus offers an important resource for conflict transformation of a different, hopefully more democratic, sort.

How is this the case? First, a neither/nor approach helps define a minimal common ground of basic (democratic) rights that Sri Lankans from all ethnicities should, at least in principle, be able to agree on, given their shared vulnerability to arbitrary and violent forms of political power. In the case of Sri Lanka, as in so many other parts of the world, members of all religious and ethnic communities have suffered from — or are presently threatened by — abusive power from unaccountable political groups, both from their own and from other communities.

Second, a neither/nor approach aims to strengthen this sense of common rights by tapping into the power of political opposition that defines an “us” — Sri Lankan citizens and agents of democratic change — and a “them” — antidemocratic militarists, violent nationalists, and rights violators — that allows Sri Lankans to identify along new, political, differently ethnicized lines. The claim here is that any movement for political change requires a negative, critical edge that allows it to be against something, in part so as to clarify for people the deeper sources of their political suffering and in part to draw together otherwise divided constituencies. Citizens and agents of democratic change cannot re-create the political space destroyed through violence and fear without their own symbolic forms of negativity and exclusion. It is crucial to their political engagement to have an opponent that they want to defeat.

Third, a neither/nor approach offers a position from which to criticize, challenge, and perhaps transform the antidemocratic nature of governance in Sri Lanka, which is at the heart of Sri Lanka’s multiple conflicts, maintaining and aggravating polarized, violent group relations thanks to the universal impunity for gross violations of human rights. A neither/nor approach clarifies the nature of the political phenomena that need to be addressed for there to be a sustainable and just peace. By directly naming and challenging the violent and unaccountable modes of power characteristic of both the Sri Lankan state and its counterstate challengers — today, the LTTE — a neither/nor approach allows one to see more clearly the extent to which Sri Lanka’s ethnicized violence was originally a manifestation of state crisis and still is to a large degree. The ethnopolitical divisions and violence that dominate political discussions are the product of that crisis, at least as much as its cause. This is true even as the two strands have, in practice, become inseparable as polarized and exclusive communal identifications take on a power of their own in reaction to violence and social exclusion done in the name of one group or the other. In order to address effectively the specific role played by the dynamics of antidemocratic power and governance, a neither/nor approach offers resources that the both/and ideal of evenhandedness cannot.

Fourth, Where evenhandedness depoliticizes the nature of conflict transformation and operates on the terrain of good or bad faith, a neither/nor approach is more fully political and strategic; debates about how to pursue such an approach can follow accordingly. A neither/nor approach is rooted in a strong democratic project of reestablishing a political space freely and equally open to all and in a set of principles that are laid out as clearly and as persuasively as possible. Hence, a neither/nor political practice of human-rights advocacy makes considerations of how best to challenge and change undemocratic power the central criteria for doing their work and judging others’ interventions, rather than the balance, bias, or good faith of the intervener.

Finally, there are advantages that come from acknowledging that all political interventions, especially those in the name of basic rights, will have diverse consequences that can’t be predicted in advance, consequences that might, in some cases, benefit those whom one wishes to weaken — for example, when human-rights critiques of the Tigers embolden the Sri Lankan state and Sinhalese supremacist parties to continue denying the role each plays in perpetuating the systematic injustices suffered by Tamils. By acknowledging the open-ended, unpredictable, and risky character of political interventions, a neither/nor approach opens up the possibility of more honest and productive debates about the politics of human-rights and peace advocacy, debates that would be focused on the likely costs and benefits of different styles of human-rights interventions and of particular rights claims and critiques.

Reframing the Uses and Limitations of Evenhandedness

A neither/nor approach thus ultimately aims to use human-rights principles to achieve a distinct form of both/and politics in which Tamils, Sinhalese, and Muslims can struggle together to create and control their own inclusive, nonviolent, and democratic forms of politics in the space “in between” and in opposition to the various warring parties. Developing this form of political struggle, however, is necessarily a long-term and exceedingly complex process. In particular, it is only through the slow and careful working through of conflict dynamics within and between different organizations and political groupings within civil society that one can have any hope of successfully generating common political identifications in opposition to unaccountable, antidemocratic, and illiberal power. Building a shared sense of being equal members of the same political community united by a shared set of rights requires acknowledging and reconfiguring, to some degree at least, existing — at times competing — ethnic and ideological identifications.

By articulating a larger ideological and strategic framework within which LTTE and government violations of rights can be battled together and where this shared struggle is accepted as necessary to making progress with either group, an effective neither/nor politics both requires and enables a sharper attunement to conflict dynamics than has sometimes been the case among human-rights advocates over the course of the Sri Lankan peace process. Just as proponents of peace need to recognize that defending basic human rights is indispensable for the achievement of their own central goal, so, too, human-rights advocates and proponents of a politics of neither/nor need to learn from conflict-resolution practitioners. Despite its challenge to the dominant modes of conflict resolution work in Sri Lanka, then, a neither/nor approach can be successful only to the extent that its proponents — and human-rights advocates in general — are better attuned to the play of ethnopolitical identifications and conflict dynamics when making their critical interventions. As part of this, something that resembles a practice of evenhandedness and balance is indispensable.

For example, during the first three and one-half years of the Sri Lankan peace process, many Tamil political activists were inhibited from joining the small number of human-rights advocates who were speaking out publicly against LTTE violations. This was not only because of fear of LTTE reprisals or simply because of ideological allegiance to the LTTE, but also because many Tamil activists saw the dominant approach of human-rights advocates as overly fixated on the crimes of the Tigers and insufficiently critical of the Sri Lankan government and military and their deep ties to Sinhalese supremacist conceptions of the Sri Lankan state. From this perspective, many Tamils remained silent in the face of Tiger killings and child recruitment out of a desire not to provide further ammunition for the propaganda work of Sinhalese nationalists.

Irrespective of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the criticism that most human-rights advocacy was “unbalanced” in its criticisms, the widespread nature of that impression among many Tamils suggests that human-rights advocates would have done well to frame their criticisms of the LTTE more clearly in terms of a global, neither/nor critique of all forms of violent, exclusive, antidemocratic power, which would also have put the structural and specific injustices of the Sri Lankan government front and center. Making clearer and more forceful criticisms of the government and/or the state, even in a context where the Tigers were the more frequent and bloody violators, would have provided greater cover for Tamils who might have been tempted to add their voices to such criticisms. It would have done so in part by undercutting the ability of Sinhalese supremacists to interpret the violations of the Tigers as evidence of a “terrorist” threat so urgent that it obscures the necessity of reforming the state and addressing Tamil grievances.

A neither/nor approach to peace and human rights, then, doesn’t rule out all concern with evenhandedness or balance. Yet the evenhandedness at work here is different in important ways from the evenhandedness of the official peace process that was forced onto or adopted by so much of Sri Lankan civil society. Rather than aiming to respect the interests of the negotiating/warring parties, it aims to address the concerns of nongovernmental political activists across different ethnic and ideological identifications. This form of evenhandedness works to facilitate, rather than to shut down, criticisms of human-rights violations without any pretense of producing equivalent effects on the different parties. What appears as balance in this context is perhaps better understood as an attempt to expand the space in between the warring parties. By making clear the full range of those actions, institutions, and parties open to criticism in the name of democratic and human rights, a neither/nor approach better illuminates the historical and structural context for understanding specific violations. It aims, in short, to make it more possible for everyone, regardless of their present ethnopolitical identifications, to criticize all closures of political space.

In another sense, too, evenhandedness should not simply be ruled out from serving as a useful tactic. However clear the advantages of the neither/nor approach, the argument here is not that it could or should be the sole mode of intervention in situations of protracted identity-based conflict. Indeed, were one truly to accept the risky, contextual, and tactical nature of all interventions in the name of peace or human rights, one would have to recognize that in some cases the risks of adopting the ideal of evenhandedness might themselves be worth taking. In other words, the theoretical critique of evenhandedness sketched out above doesn’t require the rejection of evenhandedness as a political tactic. For some organizations or political actors, invoking the ideal of evenhandedness might bring important enough benefits for its risks to be worth taking. This would most clearly be true for those organizations for whom maintaining access to the various parties in conflict is especially important, for example, representatives of foreign states that might usefully maintain channels of communication necessary for negotiations between warring parties, humanitarian NGOs and development organizations that work on both sides of a cease-fire line, or even local NGOs or activists who take on the role of maintaining contact across conflict lines in particularly tense times or locations.
For this sort of political work, it is generally necessary to adopt a nonconfrontational posture and to convince the relevant parties in conflict that one’s interventions aren’t going to weaken them vis-à-vis other parties and that one recognizes their basic interests and has no interest in challenging or undermining their power. In such cases, the language and tactics of evenhandedness are clearly very useful.

For such interventions not to be counterproductive, however, it is important that evenhandedness be recognized as a particular tactic for intervention, rather than a goal that can actually be achieved. The idea and language of evenhandedness, that is, needs to be understood as a sometimes useful fiction, but a fiction that can be dangerous for all the reasons argued above. Its risks need therefore to be clearly understood by those who choose to adopt it for tactical reasons, and measures need to be taken to reduce those risks to a minimum. Equally important, evenhandedness must not be allowed to monopolize the political space and to present itself as the only legitimate mode of intervention (as happened with such disastrous effects in Sri Lanka). More confrontational and critical approaches must not be silenced.
Indeed, the argument here is that the risks of tactical evenhandedness are in fact manageable only to the extent that such interventions are placed in a larger, more political, and more critical framework. According to this framework, the overall aim of all those working for peaceful and democratic transformation of a given conflict — whether foreign states and multilateral organizations, international NGOs,[Query ] local NGOs, or small-scale networks of activists — should be to defend and expand the space for democratic, nonmilitarist forms of politics that can challenge the hold of warring ethnonationalisms and the unaccountable power of their various representatives. The neither/nor approach is a crucial means to attain this goal, but not the only one: attempts at tactical evenhandedness or at “constructive engagement” designed to work in a balanced way with the warring parties can at times assist in this quest. But such attempts at evenhandedness need to be carried out with the overall goal of expanding the possibilities for democratic politics clearly in mind and only to the extent that one’s best judgment actually holds that such engagement is necessary to and consistent with this goal.

Fulfilling the Promise: Democratizing the Institutional Conditions for Human-Rights and Peace Advocacy

Since the Sri Lankan cease-fire collapsed further into de facto war in late 2005 and early 2006 and the “peace process” has become more and more of a misnomer, there have occurred a variety of international and local human-rights interventions that follow the general contours of the neither/nor approach sketched out above. These have included various reports and interventions by local human-rights groups that challenge Tiger, government, and other armed groups’ killings and disappearances, as well as a long and detailed report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. The latter report clearly states that the purpose of political killings over the course of the cease-fire “has been to repress and divide the population for political gain. Today many people — most notably, Tamil and Muslim civilians — face a credible threat of death for exercising freedoms of expression, movement, association, and participation in public affairs. The role of political killings in suppressing a range of human rights explains why members of civil society raised this more than any other issue.”

While increase in human-rights interventions is encouraging, they continue to have very limited effects. The force of the neither/nor approach remains primarily at the level of critique, so far without tangible effects, either on the warring parties or in terms of increased public protest or expanded opportunities to express oppositional views in public or to act in ways that defy the warring parties. Interventions that follow neither/nor principles remain the work of a very small network of activists, largely without official support or endorsement from established local NGOs or prominent members of civil society.

For the democratic promise of the neither/nor approach to be fulfilled, it will have to move beyond this small band of activists and ad hoc networks and begin to shape the discourse and practices of the larger world of professionalized civil society concerned with political reforms along liberal-democratic lines. But for the neither/nor approach to be taken up by this wider range of organizations and for the transformation of their political discourse and political strategy, in turn, to have meaningful democratic effects on Sri Lankan society, professionalized liberal-democratic civil society must itself first be significantly democratized. Without more inclusive, representative, egalitarian, and contestable institutions and practices, Sri Lankan NGOs, intellectuals, and activists who invoke the principles of peace, justice, and human rights while pushing for liberal and/or democratic political reforms will remain cut off from the broader popular support base needed to give them their democratic energies and credentials. It is only by being in close physical, intellectual, and political contact with those actually caught in the space in between the warring factions that Sri Lanka’s liberal-democratic civil-society organizations can come to understand and identify with their concerns in such a way as to speak for and defend them effectively.

In its present form, the world of established liberal-democratic reform-minded civil-society organizations suffers from severe democratic deficits. Primarily staffed and controlled by Sri Lanka’s small, cosmopolitan, internationally connected, and English-speaking middle-class (read elite), this community of activists and organizations is neither socially nor politically representative of or very in touch with the experiences of the larger Sri Lankan public. Elite civil-society NGOs are also generally quite disconnected from the lower-profile, less professionalized, and more grassroots NGOs and popular movements that work on human-rights, justice, and governance issues outside of Colombo, as well as from the larger public with whom they work.

In part because of this lack of sustained social and institutional connections to non-elite Sri Lankans, established, politically reform-minded NGOs and activists find their primary sources of financial and ideological support in foreign states, multilateral organizations, and international NGOs, rather than in their own fellow citizens. This nondemocratic relationship at the heart of reform-minded civil society — a relationship of mutual, but unequal dependence between more and less powerful elites —helps undermine the democratic potential of Sri Lankan civil society in a number of interconnected ways.

Most obviously, it does so by giving international donors the power to set the overall political agenda of professional liberal-democratic civil society. Despite the rhetoric of and in some cases genuine belief in civil society as an independent source for transparency, accountability, and other democratic values, the financial leverage of donors means that much of the time, Sri Lankan NGOs function as the implementing agencies for policies devised elsewhere, without the knowledge or input of Sri Lankans. This instrumentalization of local civil-society organizations can take different forms. It can, at times, be fairly direct, as when NGOs are funded to perform specific tasks that they would not independently choose to pursue, or, as we have seen, when they are effectively restrained from being anything other than loyal agents of the donor ideology of evenhandedness and related models of peacebuilding.
The transformation of putatively independent NGOs and activists into instruments of nondemocratic donor agendas also takes place through the very form of the internationally financed projects they are funded to carry out. According to the implicit logic of such work, political change is imagined to come from discrete, short-term interventions carried out by Colombo-based elite organizations and shaped by the bureaucratic norms of proposal writing, budgeting requirements, monitoring and evaluation reports, reviews by consultants, and so on. But rather than aiming at or facilitating the long-term political organization and empowerment of marginalized communities or those who have suffered injustice, such projects generally seek to train or to produce knowledge about non-elite populations (refugees, farmers, child soldiers, etc.) so that their needs and actual or potential crises can be better managed by others (the Sri Lankan state, INGOs, or other international organizations). With their work shaped to a large degree by the imperative to produce and disseminate this sort of knowledge, and with the bureaucratic management and control it makes possible, local NGOs and activists have little room to develop or pursue their own democratic agendas, but instead find themselves incorporated into the larger apparatus of global governmentality.

Finally, the dependence of professionalized liberal-democratic NGOs on foreign support over the course of the violence-filled peace process has provoked an anti-NGO backlash among many Sri Lankans, most strongly from Sinhalese, but including those from all ethnicities and religions. Among many Sinhalese, there are grave and growing suspicions that NGOs are the covert agents of international forces designed to destroy Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity (by dividing the island along ethnic lines), to weaken its sovereignty (through forms of neocolonial economic exploitation), and to undermine its cultural traditions (through increased Christian conversions of Buddhists and Hindus). Unfortunately, the anti-NGO and anti-Western backlash from Sinhalese (and to a lesser extent Tamil) nationalists — born of colonial humiliation and half a century of majoritarian hegemony and now exacerbated by fears of loss of sovereignty due to economic globalization — has been misread and underplayed by international donors and their elite brokers in professional liberal-democratic civil society. This is in part due to an insufficient appreciation of the roles that Sri Lanka’s colonial legacy and resentment at class inequalities continue to play in Sri Lanka’s conflicts and in part due to the lack of social contact between elite Colombo NGO leaders and the proponents — and non-elite recipients — of anti-NGO ideology. This social and ideological gulf severely limits the ability of established liberal-democratic NGOs to reach out beyond Colombo to a larger audience of potential supporters.

For all these reasons, then, if they wish to do more than preach to the small world of the already converted, Sri Lanka’s elite, liberal-democratic, reform-minded NGOs must begin to open up space — inside their organizations, between different organizations, and between the world of elite NGOs and the rest of Sri Lanka — in which their institutional forms and political priorities are open to question and to change. They must begin to address directly the widespread suspicions about their foreign connections and elite status; they must diversify their staffs and actively seek greater contact with and support from non-elite NGOs and the wider public, in part through adopting different modes of political organizing and different forms of rhetoric and dissemination of information; and they must devise ways to challenge their donors to take seriously their own liberal-democratic ideals of transparency, autonomy, and accountability so that the specific political agendas of international donors, as well as the bureaucratic and governmentalized organizational forms they insist upon, are open to criticism and change.

It is only when these democratic deficits begin to be addressed that a politics of neither/nor and human-rights interventions more generally have any chance of gaining the political traction necessary to pose a real challenge to established modes of power. As it now stands, especially with violence and fear reaching ever greater levels, the most one can hope for is for the small community of activists already attached to a neither/nor approach to continue to plant their seeds of critique and challenge and to continue to make use of what remains of free political space and of democratic energies and habits to see their ideas and practices further accepted and institutionalized. The hope must be that someday, sooner rather than later, the political and organizational context will shift in ways that allow for the growth of something resembling a democratic neither/nor movement for social and political change, one that could increase the chances that Sri Lanka’s next “peace process” will be both peaceful and sustainable.