An Uneasy Hegemony

Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits is assistant professor in Conflict and Peace Studies at International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests lie in the intersections of conflict, peace and development.

• Dedication; Preface; List of Tables; List of Acronyms; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Politics of judgement; 3. From nationalism to ethnic supremacy; 4. Political patronage: Underbelly of everyday politics; 5. State institutions and patronage politics; 6. War and peace as politics by other means; 7. What came after war?; Bibliography; Annexes; Index.

'Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits An Uneasy Hegemony: Politics of State-building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka is a welcome addition to the growing body of new scholarly literature on Sri Lanka' politics that has emerged after the end of the protracted ethnic war. The war and violence that engulfed the entire society for over three decades had also shaped and defined the possibilities as well as the limits of the agenda and orientations of the country's social science scholarship for some time. Being able to move out of the shadow of the conflict, Jayasundara-Smits reframes and then re-examines the problematic of state building in post-colonial Sri Lanka by focusing on the connections between the hegemony building processes and the politics of the state-building project. The book provides refreshingly new material as well as interpretive insights into the inevitable tensions between the two parallel projects, hegemony building and state building.' Jayadeva Uyangoda, Professor Emeritus in Political Science, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka