In March 2004, a man known as Karuna Amman announced his defection from the
LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), an armed group seeking the formation of
an independent Tamil state in the North and East of Sri Lanka1
. Six months after his
defection, along with that of thousands of fighters under his command, Karuna
launched a new political movement – the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP) 2
-
entering mainstream politics while still engaged in counterinsurgency operations
against his former rebel partners. Five years later, in May 2009, the Sri Lankan civil
war came to an end, by when Karuna - just a lustrum back, the military commander
of one of the world’s most sophisticated insurgencies - was part of the Sri Lankan
Government, initially serving as Minister for National Integration and Reconciliation.
In this book, I will argue that Karuna’s defection and TMVP’s formation were crucial
factors in bringing the Sri Lankan civil war to an end. At the same time, I will also
maintain that TMVP is a collective embodiment of the intergenerational transmission
of violent practices and legitimising narratives through which the war was
perpetuated and altered. Thus, TMVP condenses both a socio-political
transformation and a cross-generational knowledge transfer, reflecting two key
processes that I claim sustain and change any war over prolonged periods of time.
Therefore, the documentation and critical analysis of TMVP’s formation provides a
unique opportunity to expand and challenge current debates, particularly in conflict
studies and anthropology, and arguably represents the reason why this investigation
is of considerable value to scholars interested in any case of collective armed
contestation or identity politics around the world.