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).