About Book

This book offers a historically grounded and analytically rich account of Sri Lanka’s separatist conflict between the government and the LTTE, framed within ethnicity, political economy, and global security dynamics. Bandarage challenges simplistic Sinhala–Tamil binaries by presenting a multi-layered framework involving intra-ethnic cleavages, caste structures, international diaspora networks, Cold War legacies, and post-9/11 counterterrorism narratives. The study positions the LTTE as a modern prototype of terrorism—highlighting its innovations in suicide bombing, paramilitary governance, and even the acquisition of an air wing—while arguing that ethnicity alone cannot explain the conflict’s persistence. Its relevance to the contemporary era is substantial: it provides an instructive template for analyzing how identity politics, political-economic grievances, external sponsorship, and counterterrorism discourse interact in modern separatist movements, making it valuable for understanding contemporary insurgencies from Chechnya to Kashmir to the Sahel.Bandarage’s strength lies in her integrated framework that fuses ethnicity with political economy and international dimensions, moving beyond reductive ethnic determinism. The book effectively dismantles the idea that cultural difference mechanically produces conflict and instead shows how power, class, diaspora financing, and global geopolitics shape violent outcomes. Its criticism of both LTTE militarism and state responses is balanced and empirically grounded. However, the work has an implicit structural-functionalist bent that may underplay lived Tamil civilian experiences and may appear state-centric to some readers. Some scholars argue that the book foregrounds LTTE extremism more than systemic human-rights issues committed by Colombo, though Bandarage acknowledges state excesses. Despite this, it remains one of the most comprehensive academic treatments of the Sri Lankan conflict.A conceptually powerful and deeply researched monograph ideal for scholars of terrorism, ethnic conflict, and political-economic approaches to civil war. Its multipolar analytical method makes it exceptionally useful for comparative global conflict studies. Strongly recommended.