Even more sources!

Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004

Devotta makes an interesting argurment citing linguitistic tensions as THE single most important f actor fuelling the conflict. He goes back to the Sinhala Only Bill which many other scholars see as a watershed and argues that this is the definitive step that led Sinhala nationalism to such an extreme. He also speaks and Tamil linguistic nationalism being very important, which would explain why Tamils beings pushed out of the system via languages in 1956 led to such tumultous relations.

Dutta, Nandana. “The Face of the Other: Terror and the Return of Binarism.” Interventions 6, 3 (2004): 431-450.

I discussed her briefly earlier on but I wanted to elucidate her argument here because I am using her for my final paper.

Her work essentially answers the question: Why is the other constructed and what justification is being used for political violence?

Perpetrators of political violence use justifications based on narratives and it is within these narratives we find the “other”. She points to the creation of “grand narratives”; these narratives help simplify the complex world but unfortunately create binaries, that is to say every narrative has a sense that there is a group of protagonists and antagonists.

I feel it is important to note that these narratives are not always wild tales for deluded folk. There have to be some truths in the narrative in order to get to the point of political violence because most political violence is perpetrated with the expectation of some support from the ‘self’, the group being fought for.

Bankoff, George. “Regions of Risk: Western Discourses on Terrorism and the Significance of Islam.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26 (2003): 413-428.

This is obviously related to the Chechen conflict and how when something is framed as an "Islamic problem" it also gets tagged with the notion it is irrational and unjustified.

George Bankoff’s assertion that the West has created “regions of risk” throughout the last few hundred years, and the current risk or terror comes from the Islamic world[1] . Bankoff acknowledges the flaw in the Western creation of knowledge but does not prescribe a fix for that flaw.


Matthe Evangelista "Just and Unjust Words."Foreign affairs. 82,3 (2003):171 -172.

The causes of violence relate to lack of adequate provision of public goods and this mistreatment seems to stem from the fact that the Chechen population are seen as distinct from the majority. Matthew Evangelista points out that Chechnya is the poorest of Russia’s 89 regions and the intense violence inflicted by the state during the two wars in the past decade has greatly exacerbated the situation. Evangelista has described Grozny as been “pounded to rubble” obviously decimating any opportunities for economic prosperity while demoralizing the population. Hundreds of thousands have fled the area and the Russians have forced many to return to a hopeless situation. The populations themselves have not taken a unified stance on whether or not they want national self-determination. In the Chechen case there is much more momentum however even those who perpetrate violence are not from a single ideological camp.

Some more sources

An interesting article on gender and conflict I read was by Mary Caprioli "Gender, Violence, and International Crisis" Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 4, 503-518 (2001).

She discusses notions of masculinity and femininity on the international level and does a study to conclude that the more gender equality there is in a nation the less severe violence in a conflict will be. The indicators she uses for gender equality, such as fertility rates, have a very strong correlation with developing countries, so although her resulkts are interesting I am not entirely convinced, although it does seem as though developed countries tend to have higher levels of gender equality they also have a lower incidence of armed conflict.

She quotes Sharpiro Page in her article which I found to be a little humourous: ‘In practically all realms of foreign and domestic policy, women are less belligerent than men.’

Another article I have read on Chechen grievances and how legitimate the claim to independence was is my Michael Bowter entitled "Russia and Chechnya: The issue of secession. Nations and Nationalism 10 (4), 2004, 461–478.

Bowter argues that liberals tend to be muddled about a stance on independence struggles, having compassion for the minorities but also fearing the consequences of the war that may ensure.

A few books

Here a few books I have used in my paper that I have not yet posted about:

Cynthia Enloe The Curious Feminist: Searching for women in a new age of empire

Particularly useful in this book were the following chapters:

1. The Surprised Feminist
2. Margins, silences, and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations
7. All the men are in the Militias, All the women are victims: The politics of masculinity and feminity in Nationalist Wars
8. Spoils of War
16. Demilitarization- or more of the same? Feminist questions to ask in the postwar moment

What is interesting is that Enloe recognizes particular criticism of her work in IR from the get-go and addresses them throughout her book; for instance in the first chapter she assures that feminist work is not meant to "valorize" women but to focus on the experiences that are so often ignored. Feminism i) aims to take women's experiences seriously ii) has a hunch that political power is gendered. Some of this experiences she discusses in depth in following chapters when discussing womens roles in wars as soldiers, labourers in an industry supporting the war, spouses of soldiers and diplomats etc. Enloe acknowledges gender construction in obvious ways but does not EXPLICITLY seperate gender and sex the way most authors do. So although the link is obvious, I still think the reader could benefit from Enloe including a brief discussion on this.

Social construction has four components for Enloe: imagining, policy making, persuasion, and response.

Military culture for Enloe is "masculinized", in Chapter 7 for instnace the cleame she makes is that the militarization of ethnic nationalism is dependent on persauding the individual man that their manhood will be validated only if they serve as soldiers. She makes a convincing argument, however I think that simplifies the grievances present in ethnic conflict that drives particular groups to armed conflict as a result of non-response from the other party.

Steffan Wolf Managing and Settling Ethnic Conflicts

I used this book to define ethnic conflict for myself in a concrete way and to glean insight on commonalities between ethnic conflicts.

Wolff defines conflict as: two or more actors pursuing incompatible goals, are aware of this incompatibility and have justified cause for the pursuit of their goals

Ethnic conflict is perceived or existing discrimination along ethnic lines. I think that in both the Sri Lankan case and the Chechen case that the discriminated is in fact real, but I also think that when real discrimination is present it heightens the perceived discrimination as one already has evidence that they are being discriminated against so its easier to make the connection on other levels where it may not exist. Discrimination is also very context specific-for instance in the Chechen case discrimination is not only on an ethnic basis but increasingly on a religous basis as the image of Islam as a violent religino spawning all sorts of terror across the globe has been a dominant narrative since the Iranian revolution in recent times, but its root go further than that (for more on this see Uncovering Islam by Edward Said).

Another useful aspect of Wolff’s work is how he distinguishes ethnic minorities:
As i) external – from another state
ii) transnational – the Tamils of Sri Lanka fall under this category
iii) indigenous – the Chechen are indigenous to their own territory but there has been diaspora into Russia at large

Ananda Abeysekara Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference

This is a really engaging book on Buddhism in Sri Lanka, although there was only one chapter of direct use to me, Chapter 7: Violence and Religion, Terror(ism) and identity.

It basically outlines from the early 1980s on how the Buddhist identity was aligned with the Sinhala “race” and how it has effected the conflict. A particularly interesting phenomenon is how the “fearless monk” rose from these circumstances in the 80s as some monks redefined their role in society to” march forward fearlessly” to “protect the race that had fed them for 2000 years”. Other monks disagreed with this conceptualization of their role and as a result there were clashes, sometimes even violent ones, between the monks. Having religious authority support the Sinhala nationalist cause boosted its legitimacy as they held Jayawardene’s rule as the cause of the terrorist “river of blood” created as he did not protect the Sinhala race in their eyes.

Religion plays a very interesting roles in both conflicts in a few ways: how religious values actually influence various actors, how they define gender roles within society and within conflict, and how religion is perceived to affect conflict via its influence on the consciousness of various actors (as in the case of Chechnya in particular).

Types of feminism

During my presentation Prof Chan wanted me to talk more specifically about different types of feminism so I am making an effort to explicitly include this is the final paper.

An awesome resource I found for this was J. Ann Ticker's article in International Studies Quarterly from Dec 1997, entitled " You just don't understand: Troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists". She goes through the types of feminism that IR draws upon in a concise manner that has allowed me to sort of truncate in a way the different kinds of feminisms for my paper section on an overview of feminism.

There are also a bunch of articles that I have reviewed recently that I need to post about, which hopefully I will get to later tonite.