An innovation in this book is the introduction of the mediation staircase as a way to estimate the “success” of mediation efforts by connecting achievements to mandates. The steps in this staircase (levels 0 to 5) extend from establishing direct contacts to arriving at accords between the warring parties and include participation in agreement implementation. Most of the Nordic cases that had been terminated by the end of 2024 are assessed in this way. It is hoped that this approach to evaluating success will provide a better understanding of what mediation wants to – and can – achieve. The chapter shows that mediation is more than a one-person commitment, as it involves a more long-term effort. It also discusses the impact of military developments on the outcome.

The subject of insurgency explores how and why armed groups confront the state, their political and ideological claims, their links to society – including the support they have and their recruitment practices – and their political and military tactics. Rebel governance explores the behavior of non-state armed insurgencies in the territories they control – or partially control – and their attempts to provide public services, gain the support of the population, recruit members, manage economic policy, and gain legitimacy. Counterinsurgency involves efforts by state actors – sometimes with international assistance – to challenge and defeat rebel groups by military and political means and reassert the authority of the state in areas where rebel groups have influence. This chapter explores the relationship between insurgency and civil war, and the main theories of why insurgencies emerge and grow, their endurance, and their impact. As a part of this, it considers the provision of “governance” by some rebel groups in the territories in which they have some control, the services they attempt to provide, and the objectives that motivate this on the part of rebel leaders. Based on this, the chapter then explores the lessons of “rebel governance” for counterinsurgency campaigns and for peacebuilding after conflict.

This chapter analyses the spiritual ideas on universal peace developed by Sri Lankan teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in terms of their South Asian and North American cultural syncretism and his development of classical Sufi ideas of the microcosmic ‘Perfect Man’ into a globalised but decidedly anti-modern ‘cosmopiety’.

The Colombo Port City Project (CPC or the “Project”) is the most prominent Chinese direct investment in Sri Lanka. The case study highlights the prospects and resilience of a BRI project in the cyclical process of democratic decay and consolidation in a host state with democratic dispensation and welfare commitments. It traces the geopolitics of the day and dynamics between the transnational discourse on human rights and investment. From a Chinese perspective, it reveals the contingencies of each BRI project and the inherent entanglement between the politics of the Chinese state and its corporations involved in the BRI with the sociopolitical realities of a host state. From a Sri Lankan perspective, this study reveals the different political and legal narratives around the Project, the challenges these generated, and the resilience of the Project. It combines a legal doctrinal approach with commentary on its political economy, focusing on the litigation and legislation concerning the CPC. Further, it offers insights into the prospects for dealing with foreign investment-related legal disputes through the public law of a host state, thereby capturing the methods by which the domestic legal sphere of a host state responds to the BRI.

This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the principal testimonia and fragments of Skylax of Karyanda (late 6th century BC), arranged as fourteen extracts. Skylax, we are told by Herodotos, was recruited by King Darius of Persia to explore the Indus. The chapter introduction assesses recent studies that trace the echoes of his travel narrative in Philostratos’ Life of Apollonios (3rd century AD) and suggest that Skylax descended the Ganges to the east coast of India, perhaps voyaging as far as Taprobane (Sri Lanka). A specially drawn map indicates the area within which he most likely travelled.

Chapter 2 shows that Jiaozhi, the southernmost province of the Han empire was a cosmopolitan at the forefront of overseas contacts and influences. Many monks set out from here for the South Sea, India, and Sri Lanka, from where exotic plants were introduced and where they became cash crops. The aromatic economy gave Jiaozhi all the earmarks of a commercial-based economy that characterised cash-cropping of the Mekong delta. By the seventh century, Jiaozhi became the leading aromatic refinery of the South China Sea region. Production of aromatics, silk, and ceramics were organised by the hybrid Sino-Viet elite. This alone challenges the image of the ‘traditional Vietnam’, being essentialised into a rural and village Vietnam.

This chapter examines the development of public law in South Asia: a legal family that has been defined by its history of British colonialism and continued adherence to the common law legal tradition. It traces the evolution of constitutionalism in four countries – India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – since their independence from Britain, focusing on two common regional themes. The first is the judicialisation of politics through the adoption (or at least consideration) of the basic structure doctrine, which permits courts to define and enforce implicit limits on constitutional amendments. The second is the centralisation (and abuse of) executive power, which has imperilled democratic rule in all four countries. While neither of these developments is specific to South Asia, the interplay between them, resulting in separate spheres of unchecked judicial and executive domination, is perhaps unique to the region and warrants further attention from comparative scholars.

Buddhist nationalism has emerged again as a topic of scholarly and media attention, driven primarily by campaigns of violence and expulsion against Muslims in Myanmar, but also by similar dynamics in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recent research on the intersections between Buddhism and nationalism not only follows the scholarly critique of methodological nationalism – resisting the urge to naturalize the nation and read it back anachronistically into history – it also questions assumptions of Buddhism as a unitary or even stable object of inquiry. “Buddhist nationalism,” where it exists, does not necessarily follow a set pattern; moreover, it is the conscious and largely intentional creation of actors with the relevant authority and stature to frame the two components as intrinsically connected. In doing so, they construct it through narratives and symbols of legitimation that are recognizably Buddhist and linked to particular cultural, ethnic, or political configurations.