Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

The political geography of wars end: Territorialisation, circulation,

and moral anxiety in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
Bart Klem*
Political Geography, University of Zurich, Room Y25L70, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland

a b s t r a c t
Keywords:
War
Territorialisation
Circulation
Transition
Resettlement
Sri Lanka

This article argues that territorialisation and circulation are centrally important to the transition that
takes place at the end of a war. It does so with a case study of Trincomalee, a multiethnic region on Sri
Lankas east coast, after the end of the ethno-separatist war in 2009. Post-war territorialisation comprises the consolidation of the governments military victory through the establishment of military zones
and sacred sites, the construction of strategic roads and shifts in the ethnic settlement patterns. There
are, however, a number of contingent counter-forces that unsettle the common interpretation that this is
orchestrated Sinhala colonisation. The angle of circulation directs us to ows and inuences that
become manifest when the curtailment of war (checkpoints, frontlines, collapsed infrastructure, surveillance) comes to an end. This propels a peace dividend - access, security, mobility - but also incites
concerns among all ethnic communities about exposure to the moral decay of a globalised world. While
territorialisation and circulation may appear to be opposites, they are in fact a conceptual pair. The two
terms expose a eld of tension that has much to contribute to the geographical literature on war endings,
which has neglected the signicance of postwar shifts in circulation thus far.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The end of war is a confusing time. It marks the closure of a

period of tremendous human suffering and the beginning of an
uncertain future. New rules of the game are articulated, and this
produces winners, losers, new forms of order, and unforeseen
consequences. This article uses the case of post-war Trincomalee, a
multi-ethnic region on Sri Lankas east coast, to highlight the
importance of two inter-related geographical processes in the
transition after war: territorialisation and circulation.
The literature on war endings and so-called war-to-peace
transitions has burgeoned since the mid-1990s. Geography has
followed suit with several insightful forays into different dimensions of such transitions, including return and resettlement
processes (Dahlman & Tuathail, 2005), securitised post-war forest management (Peluso & Vandergeest, 2011), the spatial erasure
associated with genocide (Tyner, 2009), and the spatial politics of
post-war power sharing (Jeffrey, 2006). While we are far removed
from a consolidated body of work on the geography of war endings,
these scholarly contributions provide a useful springboard for
exploring the many spatial changes spawned by a military victory, a
peace accord, or a combination of both.

* Tel.: 41 766803401 (cell); fax: 41 446356848.

E-mail address: bart.klem@geo.uzh.ch.
0962-6298/$ e see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.10.002

This article aims to deepen this geographical scholarship by

putting territorialisation and circulation at the heart of the equation. In the case of post-war Trincomalee, territorialisation comprises the consolidation of military victory through the
demarcation of zones, claims on religious sites and the construction
of strategic roads. Circulation refers to the opening up of a previously isolated region to external inuences due to lifted restrictions
and improved infrastructure. Both dynamics create anxieties and
controversies, but in rather different ways. Paradoxically, the regions transition encompasses forms of enclosure through the
spatial consolidation of military victory, as well as a process of
opening up. While territorialisation has received some attention in
the literature on war endings, circulation has largely been neglected. My central contention is that the conceptual pair of territorialisation and circulation is pivotal to understanding the great
diversity of processes that take place at the end of war.

The political geography of war endings

Geographical research on war has gained new momentum in
recent years. Alongside attempts at unravelling the global interconnections, boundaries and spaces of exception associated with
the War on Terror (Gregory, 2010; Gregory & Pred, 2006;

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B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Kobayasyi, 2009), scholars have explored contextualised empirical

landscapes of armed conict. Military offensives, displacement,
hardening of societal fault lines, settlement politics, and symbolic
apportionment of space are among the processes that shape wartime geographies. At the extreme end, political violence may
completely overhaul or erase human landscapes, through ethnic
cleansing (Dahlman & Williams, 2010; Tuathail, 2010; on BosniaHerzegovina), terror-induced deterritorialization (Lunstrum,
2009; on Mozambique) or genocide (Tyner, 2009; on Cambodia).
But landscapes of war may be shaped in more gradual, structural
ways as well. Studies have appeared of Israeli government actions
in relation to Palestine, including the construction of the wall,
settlement schemes and land tenure (Alatout, 2009; Yiftachel,
2002), which have been criticised as attempts at biopolitical control (Parsons & Salter, 2008), and graduated incarceration (Smith,
2011). Another well-studied case e not an all-out war, but very
violent nonetheless e concerns the urban landscapes of HinduMuslim violence in India: the way riots and attacks on religious
sites erase adversarial spatial markers, harden boundaries, and
purify spaces (Banchetta, 2000; Berenschot, 2011; Chatterjee,
2009). These studies of the landscapes of violence are complemented by conceptual work on the way competing forms of
order and sovereignty become manifest in armed conict. The
convoluted geographies of armed conict have been characterised
as multifarious governable spaces (Watts, 2003) and warscapes
(Korf, Engeler, & Hagmann, 2010).
To sum up, common spatial orderings that surface in these
diverse geographical case studies include securitised landscapes
(frontlines, walls, checkpoints, and interrupted ows), competing
forms of spatialised authority (adversarial territorial claims,
governable spaces and projects of sovereign rule) and embattled
demographic geographies (displacement, settlement politics, and
hardening social boundaries).
What does the end of war do to spatial orderings? Is there
something specic about post-war geographies? Interestingly,
there is no established body of work that confronts these questions
directly. There are, however, several good scholarly starting points
for exploring them. The edited volume Reconstructing Conict by
Kirsch and Flint (2011) is perhaps the most encompassing effort to
date. The volume carries the subtitle Integrating War and Post-War
Geographies and it rightly posits that the war-peace dichotomy is
a false one. There are manifestations of peace in war zones, and
peace may comprise a thin veneer for suppressed conicts and
imposed pacication. Rather than an objective difference in conditions, the divide between war and peace is a discursive expression of power (Kirsch & Flint, 2011, pp. 13e19).
Several authors have pointed out that post-war societies
embody hegemonic power relations: military might translates into
more domesticated forms of order and subjectivity. In line with the
literature on liberal peace (Dufeld, 2001), countries undergoing
international efforts of post-war reconstruction or state-building
may be seen as frontiers of global neoliberal capitalism. Post-war
governments also craft geographies through surveillance and
control, the nurturing of state institutions and citizenship, or more
subtle spatial means, such as the use of urban planning for
nationalist bravado: street names and reconstructed archaeological
sites glorifying victorious versions of history, while projecting
stable and orderly futures (Nagel, 2002; Robinson, Engelstoft, &
Pobric, 2001). Much in line with the blurred boundaries between
war and peace mentioned above, Stephen Graham (2009) argues
that any urban environment is a potential battle space today. After
all, contemporary security doctrines now conceive of any global
citizen as a potential threat and high-tech surveillance techniques
travel with ever-greater ease from long-time war zones like
Palestine to Western airports and neighbourhoods.

State territorialisation in peripheral areas tends to emphasise

control and surveillance as well. Peluso and Vandergeests (2011)
research on Southeast Asia examines how military strategies like
depopulating forests, encouraging in-migration of loyalist groups,
changing land use and vegetation, and surveillance infrastructure
(roads, high-tech maps) cumulate into a post-war geography that
benets state interests: clearly demarcated and largely unpopulated forests, the concentration of potentially oppositional populations in administered settlements, and established military
presence in strategic locations. Brottem and Unruhs (2009) work
on post-war Liberia complements these conclusions: war-time
displacement left forests empty, thus enabling land use planners
to work with a clean slate, disregarding customary land mechanisms. Similar research on Laos (Baird & Le Billon, 2012; Lestrellin,
2011) reminds us that domination and state territorialisation are
never absolute, however. Localised land struggles, steeped in
genealogical memories, may interfere with centralised programming, and peoples everyday practices produce contingent counterterritorialisation.
The moving around of people and the reshufing of struggles
over land has political ramications. This becomes particularly
clear in the geographical scholarship on the post-war transition of
former Yugoslavia. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the internationally
imposed Dayton accord prescribed ethnic cohabitation. In an
attempt to redress the legacies of enmity and ethnic cleansing,
internationally supported schemes ventured to remix ethnic populations and craft a democratic state with functioning liberal institutions and federal checks and balances. However, these efforts
got entangled in socio-economic counter-forces, persistent concerns about insecurity, and electoral pressures that mobilised
against the spirit of Dayton (Dahlman & Tuathail, 2005; Jeffrey,
2006). Similar tensions over boundaries, ethnic enclaves, and
violence aimed at consolidating sovereign spaces occurred in
Kosovo (Dahlman & Williams, 2010).
The scholarship on the geography of war endings thus covers a
wealth of issues, but is also rather fragmented. Cutting through
the variety of thematic insights and the contextual diversity, three
important observations stand out. Firstly, war endings comprise
shifts, transitions and uncertainties, but also involve structural
continuity. The power congurations manifest in military victories
or peace agreements shape the political geography that follows in
their wake. Secondly, the location of populations plays a central
role in post-war spatial politics. The settlement patterns of identity groups are pivotal to visions of peace and national unity (e.g.
ethnic remixing), claims to sovereignty, territory or autonomy (e.g.
ethnic enclaves; administrative boundaries; electoral geography)
and the surveillance of unruly peripheries (e.g. moving people
from forests to administrable villages). Thirdly, attempts at crafting post-war hegemony are prone to contingencies, counter-forces
and localised variegation. People after all, are not simply pawns of
the states bio-political schemes or military calculus. They are also
social, cultural and economic actors who navigate different kinds
of force elds. Post-war landscapes are therefore not simply a
derivative of the order that prevails on the battleeld or the peace
summit.
The concepts territorialisation and circulation are wellpositioned to bring together and further develop the diverse
geographical literature on war endings. Territorialisation touches
on many of the above-mentioned studies, though the term is not
always invoked explicitly. The notion of circulation, however, barely
features at all in any of the geographical writing on societies
emerging from war. This is peculiar. Given that the regulation and
crafting of ows is central to warfare (smuggle, propaganda,
checkpoints, frontlines), it seems strange to neglect the role of
circulation in the post-war context.

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Territorialisation is an established theme in political geography,

but it means slightly different things to different authors and there
tends to be some slippage with related terms like territory and
territoriality (for discussion, see Elden, 2010; Klauser, 2012). I use
the term territorialisation to refer to: efforts of demarcating spaces
and regulating peoples presence and activity within these spaces,
through practices of boundary-making, forging (dis)connections,
surveillance and enforcement, which are rationalised, naturalised
and legitimised through moral, ideological or genealogical claims.
Let me elaborate on this denition with three observations. Firstly,
the rst part borrows the key terms (demarcation, regulation,
practices) from Robert Sacks seminal denition of territoriality
(1986: 19), chap. 1. It is important to add here that demarcations
may not be crisp and rigid, and it is not uncommon for there to be
several different kinds of territorialisation taking place in the same
space. Secondly, territorialisation is not just about practice, but also
about interpretation and legitimation. The registers, rituals and
justications of rule and belonging interact with spatial practices to
reproduce a particular spatial order as natural, indispensible and
legitimate. Thirdly, territorialisation is not a state prerogative. State
claims to sovereignty and territory are certainly important (and
indeed dominant in the case of post-war Sri Lanka), but the state is
not a singular actor and non-state forms of territorialisation may
challenge or compromise the spatial order embodied by the state.
I use the term circulation to refer to the way ows (mainly those
of people, goods and ideas) permeate and inuence places, thus
altering and compounding inter-connections between them. At
rst glance, circulation appears to be the antonym of territorialisation. After all, territorialisation is about demarcating spaces and
keeping people and things in or out, while the ows of circulation
are all about reaching out across such divides. The two, however,
are not conceptual opposites. Territorialisation is about regulating
and inuencing ows, rather than mitigating them altogether
(Elden, 2010: 12). And circulation does not encompass ows that
simply radiate through space. They ow through networks. Circulation and territorialisation may be viewed as a conceptual pair.
They inuence each other.
Trincomalee at war: attenuated circulation and competing
territorial projects
Scholarly interpretations of Sri Lankas ethno-secessionist war
foreground the problematic role of the state and ethnicised identity
politics. In short, the islands post-colonial democracy and associated state institutions and policies fuelled the confrontation between Sinhala majoritarianism and Tamil separatism (Spencer,
2008; Uyangoda, 2011; Wickramasinghe, 2006, chap. 5e7). Geographers have studied the moral territorial underpinnings of these
contentions (Brun & Jazeel, 2009). The Tamil separatist ideology of
Tamil Eelam pivots on a traditional Tamil homeland in the northeast (the Muslim community, which also speaks Tamil, is often
incorporated into this category, be it quite instrumentally).
Conversely, the Sinhala-Buddhist claim on an undivided Sri Lanka
spawns a Sinhala kind of geography in which genealogical, technological and ecological arguments converge to pacify the islands
northeastern frontier and refute the idea of a Tamil homeland (Korf,
2009).
The war (1983e2009) transformed Sri Lankas political geography. The insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the
government institutionalised and territorialised their competing
claims to sovereignty. The LTTE drove Muslims and Sinhalese out of
areas under their control. The government created an elaborate
system of checkpoints, transport restrictions, curfews, round-ups,
shing bans and High Security Zones. This resulted in a highly
convoluted geography of overlapping and competing projects of

35

rule (Goodhand, Klem, & Korf, 2009; Klem, 2012; Korf et al., 2010;
Korf & Fnfgeld, 2006; Parasram, 2012). These violent attempts at
shaping Sri Lankas geography interacted with peoples coping
mechanisms, cultural registers of belonging and social fault lines
(Brun, 2001; Hyndman & De Alwis, 2004; Korf & Fnfgeld, 2006).
When I rst visited Trincomalee, in 2000, I encountered a
compartmentalised geography of enclaves, frontlines and military
surveillance. Part of the district was under LTTE control (see Map 1).
Trincomalee town and smaller towns were under army control, but
they were heavily inltrated by the rebels, particularly in Tamil and
Muslim settlements. The remainder of the region was a contested
borderland. Most roads were considered army-controlled, but only
during daytime, and the vast swaths of forest were considered safe
passage for the LTTE.
Political claims and military control were inter-connected with
controversial changes in the regions ethnic geography. As part of
the late colonial and post-colonial effort of making Sri Lankas
northeastern Dry Zone suitable for irrigation, large parts of Trincomalees scrub had been converted into irrigated agriculture.
People from elsewhere were brought in to work these lands, which
effectively meant increasing the Sinhala presence in the previously
Tamil and Muslim dominated northeast e in the case of Trincomalee from 3.8% in 1911 to 33.4% in 1981 e with concurrent electoral consequences (Gaasbeek, 2010a, pp. 76e82; Peebles, 1990).
These changes undermined the Tamil claim of a geographically
contiguous traditional Tamil homeland and were fuel to the separatist re. Some of the LTTEs rst attacks in the Trincomalee region
targeted the Sinhala colonies in the 1980s (Peebles, 1990).
During my initial eldwork in 2000 and 2001, circulation was
highly restricted by checkpoints, military frontlines, and the fear of
going to unfamiliar places. The roads were bad, there was little
public transport and many areas were only accessible with
ramshackle ferries. Leaving the district was a different matter
altogether. Most people had to register with the police to get a pass.
The two roads to the inland were the only way out; the coastal
roads to the north (Mullaitivu) and south (Batticaloa) passed
through LTTE territory and were practically closed. Public buses ran
during the day only and the journey to Colombo took up to twelve
hours, because of the degraded roads and the many checkpoints.
Many people had family members in the sizable diaspora across the
globe, but few outsiders came to Trincomalee. In most of the region,
cell phone networks were shut down on military order, and few
people had access to the internet.
Methodology
This article builds on a series of eleven research visits to eastern
Sri Lanka from 2000 onwards, but focuses on the period after the
war ended (May 2009). The main body of eldwork took place in
2010 (three months) and 2011 (two weeks). The data gathered in
this period were used for three related articles (Klem, 2012,
forthcoming; and this one). This article draws on the 74 interviews that were directly relevant to the question of territorialisation and circulation. It pivots on a detailed study of three
locations. I revisited two of my research sites from before the end of
the war (Veeramanagar and Nilaveli), and added a third one, which
had been a desolate place earlier (Lankapatuna). During these
visits, I made observations about visible changes taking place, and
interviewed villagers about these and other changes (29 interviews). For these interviews in Tamil and Sinhala, I used a
translator. I also interviewed relevant civil servants (18 interviews,
mostly in English) and other people who had sufcient oversight to
place developments in broader political, cultural and historical
context, such as schoolteachers, religious leaders, businessmen,
journalists, and local politicians (27 interviews, mostly in English).

36

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Map 1. The Trincomalee region in 2001. Note: Maps 1e5 were composed by the author, using eld observations and Google Earth satellite imagery, supplemented with policy
documents and Gaasbeek (2010a), pp. 257e260. Spheres of military control are estimated on the basis of eld observations, but leave some space for variance since there was no
clear frontline. Forested surface areas are a rough estimation using satellite imagery. Special icons (temples, camps, military installations, relocation sites) only depict the places that
are discussed in the article.

While some of these respondents were approached through my

own network and snowballing, I also sought deliberate contact
with people with different backgrounds who were likely to provide
a different or opposing view. Reecting the ethnic composition of
the regions coastline, the majority of my respondents were Tamils
and Muslims, though I obviously interviewed Sinhalese as well.

Post-war Trincomalee: Triumphant territorialisation and

increased circulation
The surveillance, severed ties, and competing territorial claims
that were characteristic for Trincomalees wartime geography were
unsettled in the turbulent decade after my rst visit in 2000. The

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

37

Map 2. The Trincomalee region in 2011.

government and the LTTE signed a ceasere in 2002. The subsequent peace talks produced no political breakthrough, but there
were remarkable changes on the ground with the lifting of restrictions and (most) checkpoints (Gaasbeek, 2010a, pp. 176e184;
Korf, 2006; Korf & Fnfgeld, 2006). Violent incidents continued to
occur, however, and this deteriorated after a split in the LTTE in
2004, which resulted in erce attacks between the renegade
eastern faction and the northern core of the movement. Violence

temporarily subsided after the December 2004 tsunami, but the

subsequent aid response got heavily embroiled in political
competition and struggles over relocating victims in places with
different ethnic and caste compositions (Hasbullah & Korf, 2009;
Hyndman, 2007; McGilvray & Gamburd, 2010; Ruwanpura, 2008).
Open warfare resumed in 2006 with a battle over the TamilMuslim town Muthur and the LTTE hub Sampur (see Map 1).
Heavy bombardments pushed both the militants and civilians

38

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

southward. In 2007, the government declared the east liberated,

and initiated reconstruction efforts to consolidate its victory
(Goodhand, 2010). Trincomalee continued to be subject to tension
and LTTE inltration (particularly in the northern half of the district) as the war continued in the north of the island. The nal offensives culminated in a government victory at the cost of a human
massacre. A special UN panel writing about the violations of human
rights and humanitarian law during the last months of the war in
Sri Lanka cited a possible number of 40.000 civilian casualties in
this period (UN Panel of Experts, 2011: 41). While the end of the
war can be clearly pinpointed in Sri Lanka e the LTTE was
comprehensively annihilated on 19 May 2009 e Kirsch and Flints
(2011), pp. 13e19 observation about the continuities between
what is declared war and peace is no less valid. Peace remains a
highly controversial term in Sri Lanka and as we will see below, the
post-war landscape is riven by war-time legacies, antagonism and
unresolved tensions.
The political geography of the Trincomalee region changed in
profound ways following the defeat of the LTTE. As shown on Map
2, the division between LTTE and government controlled territory
disappeared; roads were repaired or newly built; bridges replaced
ferries; deserted settlements came back to life; new settlements
were created; special zones and sites were declared.
How do we make sense of these diverse changes? How are they
meaningful for the people undergoing them? My respondents
perceived these developments as inter-related and political geography was central to their interpretations, which propelled territorial claims, rendered people and processes in or out of place, and
voiced political anxieties about preserving local purities and
traditions.
Territorialisation: the spatial consolidation of military victory
The defeat of the LTTE ended a long period of competing projects of territorialised sovereign rule. The erasure of Tamil Eelam
(Parasram, 2012) opened up space for the Sri Lankan state to
normalise its rule and integrate the northeast into an undivided
Sri Lanka. Many of my Tamil and Muslim respondents were concerned about the declaration of special zones (which were
controlled by the military), and the appropriation of specic religious sites for celebrating Buddhism (the prevalent religion among
the Sinhala majority). They were suspicious about the inux of
Sinhala people and the militarys role in road construction. They
saw these processes as the consolidation of a longer history of
Sinhala colonisation. The present transition was enabled by the
military victory over the Tamil separatists. And that victory was the
capstone to a long history of ethno-politics and controversial state
interventions in the northeastern Dry Zone.
Why are they building all these roads? Because they want to put
down this uprising forever, an old Christian priest said (interview
May 2010). A Tamil lecturer who recently retired from university
added: Trincomalee was systematically colonised, through irrigation schemes, roads, the creation of new villages, land politics
and the discovery of ancient Buddhist sites. These interventions
continued with full vigour after the LTTE defeat, he explained and
the spatial pattern was clear: theres a [Buddhist] shrine, an army
camp, a [Sinhala] village (interview September 2011). A prominent
Tamil businessman: people feel as if our place is invaded by
another force. He acknowledged that the government has the right
to bring some people in, but not to change the demography, to
change the political scenario (interview September 2011).
The scholarly literature on Sri Lanka discusses ample historical
precedent for changing ethnic demography paired with development schemes (Gaasbeek, 2010a, pp. 76e82; Korf, 2009; Peebles,
1990), purication of sacred spaces at politicised archaeological

sites (Nissan, 1988; 1989) and cultural appropriation of nature for

nationalist ends (Jazeel, 2005; Tennekoon, 1988). The war disrupted
these processes, but we see them reincarnated in the post-war era.
Other processes, conversely, have war-time antecedents, which are
now normalised. For example, the security regimes around roads
(Hyndman & De Alwis, 2004) and security zones have generally
become less restrictive and intrusive (fewer checkpoints, more
mobility), but some of these spatial schemes have now adopted
more permanent forms.
The government development discourse associated with many
of the above interventions has historical antecedents too (Korf,
2009; Peebles, 1990; Spencer, 2003; Tennekoon, 1988). In this
modernist outlook, the cultivation of remote forest in the northeast
by rural poor from the south is a double-edged sword: exploiting
the under-utilised agricultural potential of the sparsely populated
northeastern Dry Zone, while easing demographic pressure in the
overpopulated southwestern Wet Zone. The problem, a retired
Sinhala administrator explained with incontrovertible simplicity, is
we have population growth, but no land growth (interview April
2010). The government has the duty to provide land for the poor, he
argued, so people are settled, mostly the majority Sinhala, but
Tamils and Muslims as well. They used to live together peacefully,
until the ethnic problem stirred them up. It is communalism that
caused trouble, he concluded, not the clearing of forest for the poor
(ibid). Seen from this perspective, post-war development interventions and the freedom to move around were the hallmarks of
peace, and it was in fact rather ethno-centric of the Tamil-speaking
minorities to claim the whole northeast for themselves.
This tendency to subsume the ethnic under a harmonious
discourse of development and national integration was clearly
manifest in government planning documents: Mahinda Chintanaya
(Mahindas plan, nationally), Negenahira Navodaya (Reawakening
of the Eastern Province) and the plan for a Metro Urban Development Area (around Trincomalees harbour area). These plans projected an image of a developmental state inspired by the success of
countries like Singapore and Malaysia. They steered clear from the
ethnic problem and political reforms. In similar vein, President
Mahinda Rajapaksa negated these contentions when he announced
the military victory in parliament: he called for peace, development and good governance, and argued there would no longer be
any minorities, only those who love Sri Lanka and those who do not
(for critical discussion, see Jazeel & Ruwanpura, 2009).
The consolidation of the government victory over the LTTE was
thus a central plank in prevalent interpretations of post-war territorialisation in Trincomalee, but the values attached to it were
diametrically opposed. The basic political binary was one between
the states development agenda, which could be taken forward
after the military victory, and the counter-narrative of Sinhala
colonisation of the historic homeland of the Tamils (and the
Muslims). The former tends to render interventions technical, thus
circumventing sensitive issues around ethnic demography and
political rights. The latter does the opposite: it renders post-war
changes political, thus attributing a whole set of changes to a
state-engineered scheme of Sinhala-domination.
Trincomalee is undergoing many of the processes of territorialisation that we encountered in the geographical literature on wartorn regions. Interestingly, the case of post-war Trincomalee reminds us that e supposedly peace-oriented e landscapes of ethnic
(re)mixing (Dahlman & Tuathail, 2005) may converge with less
harmonious forms of territorialisation: securitised landscapes of
surveillance (Alatout, 2009), the depopulation of forests for strategic reasons (Peluso & Vandergeest, 2011), and the creation of
pure religious spaces in conjunction with violence (Banchetta,
2000). These are quite diverse phenomena with quite different
connotations, but in eastern Sri Lanka these aspects of

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

territorialisation occur together, and they are interpreted in close

connection to each other, be it as post-war order and development
or as Sinhala colonisation.

39

Before, the mosque had the power to control everything, but

now our society cant be controlled so easily. The sale of alcohol
is high. The selling of cigarettes is high. Peoples use of public
places, also very high. They think, after freedom, we need
entertainment (ibid).

Increased circulation: cultural preservation and moral decay

Interestingly, the same process of integrating Sri Lankas
northeastern frontier into the Sri Lankan state also enabled
increased circulation in a previously isolated region. This raises an
entirely different set of issues: moral anxiety about the inux of
new cultural practices after the war.
My respondents were generally very appreciative of the
increased mobility and security. They were being reconnected with
the world and that made life easier. It provided better access to
education, services, and livelihoods. After the war, we are blossoming, a Sinhala school principal said (interview September
2011). But the lifting of the barriers also exposed the region to the
world. A world that was seen to threaten the cherished sense of
being a community of chaste, devout and dignied people. In the
words of the Sinhala Buddhist monk at one of the village temples:
the opening up also brings drugs and internet and mobile
phones. Unnecessary [implying bad] things come. We are closer
to the world. So those things are also closer to us (interview
September 2011).
Signicantly, these concerns around the decay of dignity and
morality were shared by Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim leaders alike.
The arrival of Sri Lankan and foreign tourists (a rare phenomenon
during the war) was often mentioned as an example. Tourism will
bring so many cultures, a Muslim journalist predicted. We may
lose our cultural values. Narcotics, child abuse, those things
(interview February 2010). Many people also complained about the
marked increase of litter with the inux of tourists. Massage parlours, a novelty in the region, were a particular source of concern.
The arrival of young Sinhala women who ran an independent
business by massaging strange men provoked rumours of prostitution. Sometimes, they do a second massage also, a Muslim civil
servant suggestively conded to me. Now, if people are talking
about a massage, we immediately think about the second massage
(interview September 2011).
These controversies were part of a wider concern with purity:
the cultural commandment of keeping things and people in place,
and the continuous work of purication required to shed impure
inuences. As is nicely captured in Mary Douglas (1966), pp. 44e51
famous dictum that dirt is matter out of place, it is not the existence of impurity per se that is perceived as the a moral threat, but
its ability to permeate, and thus pollute, supposedly pure places.
And this was what troubled some of my informants in the aftermath of the war. The account of a middle-aged career bureaucrat, a
respected Muslim from Muthur, is illustrative: Cultural wise, our
town was very isolated during the war (interview September
2011). The end of the war unleashed new threats to that culture.
Young people are taking alcohol. And when they are drunk, bad
things happen. Theft, for example. They are even smoking.
Because they are connected to the other areas. People are
worried about this, but we cant control that (ibid).
When the LTTE was there, Muslim people would not just go to
the next town. People were with their families. So children were
under close control of their father. Now, the youngsters are free to
go (ibid). Mosques e a primary source of surveillance in Muslim
settlements during the war e were losing authority.

Access to modern communication aggravated this sentiment.

Very few places had internet during the war, cell phone networks
were heavily curtailed by the state, and few people had a mobile
phone. After the defeat of the LTTE, these media became widely
available across the district. Computer use was seen as a welcome
hallmark of modernity, but the downside was obvious. The same
Muslim leader from Muthur said:
I cant control my son not to use the internet. I teach him to use
it for his future. But when he goes out, I dont know what kind of
internet hes using. What kind of pages he is watching. In Tamil
we say, we cant see the other side of the wall. We are thinking,
maybe that is better. However, we are trying to see what is on
the other side. Muslim youth may also want to see whats on the
next page (ibid).

Once isolated towns and villages were thus being absorbed into
a world of liquor, procrastination, tobacco, and pornography. Of
course, the region had never been cut off completely during the war
(transnational ties with the diaspora being the prime example), but
external inuences had been attenuated and constrained by
checkpoints, frontlines, curfews, lack of infrastructure, and
surveillance.
These observations bear striking semblance with the moral
anxiety discussed in a body of Sri Lankan scholarship that is not
primarily concerned with the war: anthropological work on
movement, looseness and exposure as a source of moral decay. As
Jonathan Spencer (2003) points out, the cultural pedigree of these
pre-occupations goes well beyond supposedly modern times of
globalisation, but it is in the wake of the drastic liberalisation of Sri
Lankas economy from the late 1970s onwards that concerns about
modernity and moral corruption become particularly pronounced.
This process drove an unprecedented form of e mainly female e
labour migration, both internally (often to garment factories in
newly established Free Trade Zones) and internationally (especially
to the Gulf). The cultural and political repertoires around this
movement include alcoholism, bad manners and even suicide in
village communities disrupted by the departure of young women
(Gamburd, 2000; Spencer, 2003), who in turn live modern, impure
and morally loose lives, working in far away factories (Hewamanne,
2008; Lynch, 2007). A detailed discussion of this literature is
beyond the scope of this article, but the observation that increased
circulation and exposure spawn moral concern with modern
lifestyles, female sexuality, and undignied behaviour suggests that
there are interesting parallels between the shock of opening up the
economy and the shock of ending the war.
The war shielded eastern Sri Lanka from some of these economic changes, but labour migration to the Gulf left important
traces, not least through shifts in the circulation of Islamic schools
of thought. The increased spread of Islamic movements like Tabligh
Jamaat and Tawhid created remarkable religious shifts and tension,
even during the war (Hasbullah & Korf, 2013; Klem, 2011). More
recently, the movements after the 2004 tsunami also produced
anxiety about external inuences threatening local purities, be it
fear for so-called unethical conversions by Christian agencies
(interviews October 2007; April 2008; Hasbullah & Korf, 2009), or
cultural indignation around the western lifestyle of foreign aid
workers (Gaasbeek, 2010b; Perera-Mubarak, 2012).

40

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Connections and contradictions: three sites in Trincomalee

Having discussed some of the prevalent contentions and anxieties around territorialisation and circulation in post-war Trincomalee, we now turn to the developments in my three research sites:
Veeramanagar, Lankapatuna, and Nilaveli. Apart from providing
concrete examples of territorialisation and circulation, this section
does two things. Firstly, it explores the contradictions and interconnections between territorialisation and circulation. And secondly, it exposes the inconsistencies of overly sweeping political
readings of these two processes in contemporary Trincomalee.
Site 1: Veeramanagar
This rst case illustrates some of the remarkable developments
taking place in what used to be LTTE controlled area: it is here that
we encounter the crudest form of territorialisation, and it is here
that the reconnecting with the outside world perhaps marks the
biggest change. Veeramanagar is a marginal village of about 180
families. When I rst visited in 2000, it consisted largely of huts
made of sticks and palm leaves, situated along a dirt road. There
was a small Hindu temple and a few wells, but no running water,
electricity, or telephone. Sources of income were scarce. People
survived on the collection of rewood, shifting (chena) cultivation
and shing, but all three were curtailed by the war. Access to the
outside was heavily constrained. The next town of any signicance
(Muthur) was on the other side of the frontline. Apart from the
trouble of questioning at the army checkpoint, that journey was
impaired by the bad state of the roads and lack of transport. Over
the years, the LTTE had become a professional army with a rm grip
on society. The youth were recruited for combat e with force or
persuasion. I never saw uniformed LTTE cadres moving around, but
when I studied the role of the local village organisation, it became
clear that all decisions and nancial transactions had to be accorded by the LTTE leader in Sampur.
The 2002 ceasere eased the tension and the many restrictions,
but war came back with a vengeance. Following the army offensives
of 2006, the entire population ended up in camps in the neighbouring Batticaloa District (Amirthalingam & Lakshman, 2009).
When the government declared the east liberated from the LTTE a
year later, the camps in Batticaloa were closed and people were
housed in a transfer camp in Kilivetti (depicted on Map 2 and 4).
When I returned to the village in 2010, Veeramanagars inhabitants had been resettled in their village. With foreign aid many
families had constructed small brick houses, roads were being
asphalted, and bridges replaced ferries. There was some controversy about the Outer Circular Road, from close to Veeramanagar
all the way up to Nilaveli (Map 2 and 3). This road was built by the
army and was seen to serve military purposes: it put ring around
the strategic town of Trincomalee, enabling troop movement and
surveillance if needed. But for the inhabitants of small villages like
Veeramanagar, the road enhanced mobility. They gained access to
the most rudimentary services and they could eke out a living with
wage labour or shing.
The disappearance of LTTE rule also opened up the village for
new religious movements. The insurgents had been strict with
regard to newly arriving organisations of any sort, and as a result
one would primarily encounter Catholics and Methodists (mainline churches in the vernacular) in the areas under their control.
These destitute areas e normally conducive to proselytising e were
thus insulated from the remarkable proliferation of evangelical
churches that took place elsewhere in Sri Lanka, but after the war
this changed rapidly. Veeramanagar, which is rather small, became
home to three evangelical churches, of which the Assembly of God
and the Calvery Church were the most successful. They converted a

house into a church, and spread the gospel in passionate services

with lots of chanting, the miraculous healing of sick people and
material assistance. About half the village community, both Hindus
and mainline Christians, had joined these new churches, one of the
village leaders told me (interview September 2011). A Catholic
priest conrmed to me that this was the prevalent pattern across
former LTTE areas (interview May 2010). Mainline churches were
losing members rapidly and had trouble coming up with an effective response. Post-war circulation comes in many kinds.
The biggest change in Veeramanagars environs was the
depopulated zone around Sampur (Map 3). The area had initially
been cordoned off as a High Security Zone, right after the military
conquered it from the LTTE, presumably to secure Trincomalees
navy harbour across the bay. It was then turned into a so-called
Special Economic Zone, with plans for a power station to be constructed by an Indian company. Ironically, the re-labelling of the
zone made little difference. The large swath of land remained an
inaccessible militarised area. There were local, domestic and international concerns about the legal process through which the
zone displaced a large number of people and about the fact that the
military continued to play a central role even though the security
imperative had clearly lost much of its validity (Fonseka & Raheem,
2009).
Even the local bureaucrats responsible for the area were not
allowed to enter the zone. They were nonetheless responsible for
dealing with the consequences of displacement. They tried to nd
alternative lands for those displaced by the zone (interview March
2010; September 2011), but many of Sampurs former inhabitants
rejected their suggestions (interviews September 2011). Over 1200
families remained in the Kilivetti camp (and smaller numbers in
three other camps), demanding a return to their lands. In line with
some of the recent geographical literature on camps (Ramadan,
2012), the Kilivetti camp was thus not just a site of disempowerment, but also a space of agency and protest. Even when the government was trying to make the camp redundant by settling people
elsewhere, the inhabitants kept it in place to protest against the
zone and mobilise domestic and international pressure against the
government. The spatiality of the camp thus provided the inhabitants with a very tangible and visual way of engaging in what
Ramadan calls everyday geopolitics (ibid: 10). Not all inhabitants
of the Kilivetti camp were so insistent, though. Most people from
Navaratnapuram e a shing village on the fringe of the zone (Map
3) e opted for relocation. About 120 families were settled in a new
village (which they named after the old one: Navaratnapuram),
right by the side of Veeramanagar.
Veeramanagar thus underwent a remarkable set of changes after the war. New forms of territorialisation turned a big part of its
environs into a depopulated, militarised zone, and a new village
emerged by its side. At the same time, the demise of LTTE rule and
new connections, exposed Veeramanager to new inuences, of
which the rapid growth of evangelical churches was one visible
example.
Site 2: Lankapatuna
The second site illustrates some of the non-military processes of
what my Tamil and Muslim respondents would refer to as Sinhala
colonisation. Some of the developments in and around Lankapatuna indeed lend credit to such interpretation, but we also see ssures and counterforces that offset the narrative of unimpeded
Sinhala territorialisation. Lankapatuna (Lankas Port; in Tamil
Ilankaithurai) is a small natural anchorage at the mouth of the
Ullackalli lagoon, with a small settlement on the southern bank and
a rock on the northern one (see Map 4). In the 1940s, a Buddhist
monk identied Lankapatuna as the place where Buddhas tooth e

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

41

Map 3. Veeramanagar in 2011. Note: Though lines of military control were somewhat fuzzy during the war, the approximate former frontlines on Maps 3e5 give a rough indication
of what used to boundary between government and LTTE-controlled area.

Sri Lankas most prominent relic e was brought to the island in 301
CE. During the war, LTTE cadres captured the rock and used it as a
gun post; if the air force would bomb them they would also destroy
the archaeological evidence of Sinhala-Buddhist historical presence.
Following government recapture in 2006, Lankapatuna became a
Buddhist pilgrimage site and a busy Sinhala tourist attraction.
The checkpoint at the foot of Lankapatunas rock and the large
military camp along the approach road (Map 4) provide physical
reinforcement for the sites symbolic signicance. According to the
government narrative, the site was rst occupied by Tamil terrorists, then liberated by Sinhala-Buddhist soldiers. Lankapatuna
thus ties together Buddhism, Sinhala genealogy, and heroic struggle over territory and as such, it forms a contemporary continuation
of Buddhist chronicles. Today, Lankapatunas history can be read on
a small memorial stone or on the postcards sold at the site. There
are important precedents for such a remarkable conjunction of
Buddhist archaeology, territorial demarcation, ethno-political
genealogical narratives and religio-political readings of nature
(Jazeel, 2005; Nissan, 1988; 1989; Tennekoon, 1988). The conversion of post-colonial Anuradhapura into a sacred city is particularly salient in this connection. Placed in a similar ethnic
borderland, 100 km inland from Trincomalee, Anuradhapura was
rediscovered as a site of Buddhist heritage and Sinhala kingship in
the 1940s and subsequently puried: the old town with all its nonBuddhist elements was razed to the ground, and the population
was relocated to New Anuradhapura. The sacred city itself was (re)
constructed with a peculiar combination of modernist order and
spiritual symbolism, and became a top pilgrimage and tourist

destination (Nissan, 1989). Parallels can be drawn to Kataragama in

the south, where a multi-religious space was transformed into a
predominantly Buddhist one in the 1960s (Nissan, 1988) and e
currently e Dighavapi in the (south)east, where signicant controversy and ethnically-coloured land conict precipitated over a
site similar to Lankapatuna.
And indeed, for many of the (mainly Sinhala) visitors of Lankapatuna, the site does not stand alone. It is part of a tour, which
includes the e much more established e Seruwila Buddhist temple,
the Somawathie Buddhist temple further south, and the (Sinhalised) ancient city Polonnaruwa, in the neighbouring district. The
latter part of the journey is a new possibility. The Somawathie
shrine lies in a vast, forested area and used to be poorly accessible,
but is now reachable on the new road from Seruwila to Polonnaruwa District. Signicantly, the road connects prominent Buddhist
sites on the coast with the Sinhala hinterland. Like the Outer Circular Road, this connection was created by the army. The Road
Development Authority had been bypassed entirely. One of the
RDAs staff members explained that the proper procedures (land
appropriation, environmental assessments, technical standards)
had not been followed (interview September 2011). He claimed
that neither the Somawathie road, nor the Outer Circular Road
served a clear developmental purpose. His ofce was not keen to
take responsibility for an army initiative that served to enable
surveillance and Buddhist pilgrimage. Because of that, both army
roads started to show signs of erosion.
The land along the Somawathie road belongs to the Seruwila
Buddhist temple and the leading monk ventured to invite poor

42

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Map 4. Lankapatuna in 2011.

Sinhala families from outside the district to settle there. In

September 2011, nearly one hundred families from neighbouring
districts had started a living in this erstwhile frontline forest. These
marginalised rural Sinhalese had left their far-away villages for the
prospect of free land, though the conditions were difcult. There
were wild elephants and drinking water was a few kilometres
away. Some of the settlers had in fact deserted their new homes
again. Weeds encroached on their neglected dwellings of clay,
sticks and asbestos. Along with the eroding army roads, these
collapsing houses bear tribute to some of the counterforces to
Sinhala colonisation. As is further elaborated in the case of Nilaveli
below, living conditions, economic opportunities, family ties, and
bureaucratic procedures at times worked counter to the inux of
Sinhalese settlers or returnees.
The majority of the new arrivals, however, deed the wild elephants, the heat, and the lack of facilities. They pioneered a life,
cultivated their crops, and sent their children to school. Moving to
the colony was not just a land deal to escape the poverty in their
home district. It was part of a bigger civilising effort of taming the
jungle and making the Buddhist shrines accessible. The monk told
us to come and help protect the pilgrims, a man from Badulla (some
250 km southwards) explained to me. I am here to cultivate and
contribute to the nation (interview September 2011). The settlers
provided a demographic mantle to this road in previously LTTEcontrolled forest. Much in line with the above-cited literature, the
sacred sites, the pilgrims and tourists, the army road and the new
settlers were thus understood as part of a larger political project.

Site 3: Nilaveli
The third site, Nilaveli, explores the role of tourism more
explicitly, and it brings forward the multi-layered struggles over
resettlement, access and land. It shows that what is circulation for
some amounts to the exclusion of others, and tussles over
belonging may get entangled with forces of capital.
Along the coast north of Trincomalee town, one nds small
Tamil and Muslim settlements. Further inland there are Sinhala
farming areas. Most of these farmers arrived with the irrigation
schemes that were developed between the 1950s and the 1980s.
During the war, big parts of this region were sparsely inhabited. The
LTTE drove Sinhala settlers away and many Tamils and Muslims
living along the coast ed towards Trinco town.
Some of the Tamils ended up in the Nilaveli Welfare Centre (see
Map 1), a camp just outside Nilaveli town, where I briey resided in
2001. There were about one hundred families, mostly agricultural
labourers and shermen, who either lost their homes, or could not
access it, because it was occupied by one of the many military installations. After the war, the camp was closed and its inhabitants
were relocated in a newly built housing scheme called Naval Cholai,
in Kumburuputty, 10 km to the north (see Map 5). This had long
been a relatively desolate area. Peculiarly, the relay station of the
Deutsche Welle (Voice of Germany) had continued to function, but
for common people, the area was considered insecure and the ferry
service across the mouth of the lagoon was unreliable. But with the
refurbishment of the roads, the newly constructed bridges, the

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

43

Map 5. Nilaveli in 2011.

disappearance of checkpoints, and the improved bus service, it was

only a short ride from Trincomalee town in 2011.
Relocation in Naval Cholai was met with a mix of appreciation
and complaint (interviews March 2010, September 2011). It was
good to have a fenced-off plot of land, with a brick house and
proper sanitation after spending years in palm-leaf huts. Yet, many
people in Naval Cholai were still struggling to survive. The shermen were dissatised with the long walk to the beach. Naval Cholai
was very close to the sea, but the adjacent coastal strip was largely
off-limits; not because it was already inhabited, but because the
government had installed a large tourism zone: the Nilaveli
Kumburuputty Tourism Resort (Map 5).
The beaches along the coast north of Trincomalee town have
long been known for their pristine beauty, but the few hotels that
survived the war were in a deplorable state. After the 2009 defeat of
the LTTE, the tourism potential of Nilavelis coast re-entered the
limelight. But this increase in circulation, the tourism zone shows,
resulted in territorial exclusion for the local shermen. It was hard
to get any public information on the newly declared tourism zone,
but I managed to have a look at condential documents through
one of my politically well-connected informants. The zone was to
cater for 48 hotels with a total of 3000 rooms. Emphasis was placed
on ve star or boutique hotels. The government thus thought big,
but in 2011, only one of these hotels was making visible progress.
The sign at the construction site read: Jungle Beach, a 50 key luxury
resort. Two other projects (outside the zone) had discontinued
construction efforts. This was because of the high land lease prices
levied by the government, a local bureaucrat explained to me
(interview September 2011). Many other lots remained empty for

the same reason, but the land continued to be cordoned off. Along
the road to Trincomalee town, smaller hotels, beach bungalows,
restaurants, and massage parlours mushroomed. Some hotels and
restaurants were run by the armed forces; in other cases local
families or newly arrived Sinhala entrepreneurs responded to the
emerging market. Foreign tourists and the Colombo elite stayed in
Trincomalees luxury resorts for US$250 per night. Busloads of
middle and lower class Sri Lankan tourists found a place to rest with
relatives, in cheap guesthouses, or in Buddhist temples. Despite the
grossly under-utilised tourism zone, these travellers transformed
the environs of a sleepy town like Nilaveli e a junction with a
school, a church, and an army camp e into a more lively place. The
evening silence used to be interrupted by the mosque azan only;
now there were occasional late-night parties with drums, singing,
and young men getting drunk on the beach.
Alongside tourists and day-trippers, the area witnessed an
inux of Sinhala returnees. Their parents or grandparents had
settled in Nilaveli and Kumburuputty from the 1950s onwards, but
they were displaced by the war. The government victory over the
LTTE paved the way for their return, but many had built up new
lives in places with better infrastructure and schools. Social networks had moved and unlike their bi-lingual parents, the children
no longer spoke Tamil. The government had put up a camp at
Irrakandy Sinhala Vidalaya (Map 5) for returnees. Its inhabitants
explained to me they were driven by personal misfortune or
poverty (interviews September 2011). Though they were not altogether homeless, the government provided these returnees with
temporary shelters and food rations. Many families decided to send
one or two people only. The children stayed behind to continue

44

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

their education, while a parent or grandparent settled in the camp,

with one main objective: to reclaim their lands.
The problem was, however, that in most cases the land was no
longer theirs. They had sold it during the war, because it was hard
to imagine returning to the war zone. Some also claimed they had
been tricked or pressured into selling their land. Several returnees
had initiated court cases to sort out these matters, but their expectations were low. Since the present inhabitants of these contested plots were unlikely to vacate it for Sinhala returnees, the
local government administrator identied an alternative site for the
returnees to settle down. And that brings us back to Naval Cholai,
Kumburuputty, the scheme where the former inhabitants of Nilaveli Welfare Centre had been relocated. The administrator, a Tamil
who was sceptical of both the tourism zone and Sinhala land claims,
selected the scrubby area right behind the Naval Cholai scheme (see
Map 5) for the Sinhala returnees (interview September 2011). Unsurprisingly, the returnees were unhappy with his suggestion.
Sixteen out of the twenty-seven families residing in the Irrakandy
Sinhala Vidalaya camp declined the offer altogether. The proposed
relocation site was remote, and drinking water was hard to come
by, but most importantly: many returnees had a better place to stay.
They had come back to claim their parents land e to live there or to
sell it e but not to be relocated in a desolate jungle area (interview
September 2011).
These conicts over land titles, social pecking orders, placemaking and belonging, and protracted struggles with the bureaucracy over entitlements (often complicated by political interference
and the activities of development agencies) are common themes in
Sri Lankas elaborate experience with displacement and resettlement (Brun, 2001), particularly after the tsunami (Perera-Mubarak,
2012; Ruwanpura, 2008). These dynamics resurfaced in Naval
Cholai in a particularly pronounced form, because of the post-war
context. As elaborated before, Sinhala return was accompanied by
a sense of post-victory triumphalism, and the Tamil (and Muslim)
community perceived the inux of returnees, settlers, tourists, and
pilgrims as threatening. The Tamil respondents in Naval Cholai
were less adept in providing a sophisticated discourse of state
oppression and Sinhala domination, but they did see the above
developments in that light. Little by little, they are taking, a
middle-aged woman summarised the anxiety (interview
September 2011).
Conclusions
This case study of post-war Trincomalee suggests that territorialisation and circulation are centrally important processes in a
post-war society. In this case, territorialisation comprises the
spatial consolidation of the governments military victory over the
LTTE. This includes the creation of demarcated zones for economic
and military purposes, strategic road construction, the refurbishment of sacred sites and contentious changes in the ethnic
demography. With regard to circulation, the defeat of the LTTE
ended the curtailment of ows that had characterised the war. This
rapidly increased the regions exposure to external inuences,
ranging from evangelical churches and Buddhist pilgrims to
(drunken) tourists, and massage parlours.
The productive tension between territorialisation and circulation helps account for the apparent paradox that we encounter in
contemporary Trincomalee. We see both processes of territorial
closure, control and order as well as processes of opening up and
unsettling, due to increased circulation. New roads may serve
military interests, but also channel new inuences. The moving
around of people may result in Sinhala claims on land, but also in
evangelisation and changed economic opportunities. This diversity
of processes unsettles overly simplistic political readings of post-

war developments in Trincomalee. While some developments

certainly suggest powerful forms of state territorialisation to the
detriment of ethnic minorities (such as the depopulated zones), a
plain discourse of unhampered Sinhala colonisation sits uneasily
with the counterforces that became manifest. Economic forces
prevented hotel companies from buying into the tourism zone, and
the Special Economic Zone failed to attract much economic investment. Some of the Sinhala settlers were leaving the region
again, because of the tough living conditions (Somawathie Road) or
because a Tamil bureaucrat assigned them to an unfavourable plot
(Naval Cholai). As in other cases (Lestrellin, 2011), these counterforces complicate Sri Lankas historical script of the Tamil and
Muslim minority being oppressed by a Sinhala-dominated state.
Moreover, some of the controversy around circulation escaped the
ethnicised logic altogether. Concerns about external inuences
were shared by all groups: Sinhala Buddhist monks, Muslim leaders
and Christian priests all expressed dismay over the corrupting inuence of modernity. And threats to local purities did not only
come from the ethnic other: for example, mainline Christian
disapproval of evangelical proselytisation was essentially an intraTamil affair.
As an analytical pair, the terms territorialisation and circulation
open up analytical space to conceive of Sri Lankas future in a more
open-ended manner. It is true, the present political playing eld is
fundamentally uneven; the government has neutralised opposition, cold-shoulders international pressure and rather than
addressing the minority question it has further centralised power.
But increased circulation in the northeast may transform the region
in unpredictable ways. The literature on war-to-peace transitions
is a little threadbare in this regard, but there is a useful body of
work on cultural responses to liberalisation and globalised exposure. In the Sri Lankan context, there is valuable anthropological
research on cultural controversies following the opening up of the
economy in the late 1970s. Indeed, the concerns over moral decay
and disorientation resulting from increased circulation and exposure to modern inuences ring remarkably similar (Gamburd,
2000; Hewamanne, 2008; Lynch, 2007; Spencer, 2003). In the
east, concerns over the preservation of pure Muslim spaces
(Hasbullah & Korf, 2009; 2013) and indignation around the modern behaviour of post-tsunami expatriate aid workers (Gaasbeek,
2010b) provide recent analogies.
While these historical parallels deserve to be examined in detail,
the emphasis on circulation raises a more fundamental point. The
concerns over increased exposure suggest that the current transition in eastern Sri Lanka should not only be branded as a war
ending that lends itself to comparison with other countries
emerging from violent conict. It is also a case of a region that
grapples with a relatively suddenly exposure to new inuences and
forms of modernity, and thus lends itself to a rather different set of
comparisons: to regions that get (re)connected with the outside
world. In terms of everyday place-making and moral anxieties over
circulation, it is worth exploring whether post-war Trincomalee
perhaps has as much in common with post-communist spaces (e.g.
Eastern Europe in the early 1990s), landscapes of disaster aid (e.g.
Kashmir after the 2005 earthquake), and frontier regions undergoing imperial or state integration (e.g. northwestern China or the
Amazon region today), as with former war zones.
Acknowledgements
Valuable support during eldwork from Shahul Hasbullah,
Jasmy and Lansakara is gratefully acknowledged. For constructive
criticism, the author wishes to thank Sarah Byrne, Rony Emmeneger, Georg Frerks, Urs Geiser, Jonathan Goodhand, Jennifer
Hyndman, Deborah Johnson, Agnieszka Joniak, Benedikt Korf,

B. Klem / Political Geography 38 (2014) 33e45

Timothy Raeymaekers, Jonathan Spencer, and Oliver Walton, as

well as ve anonymous reviewers and James Sidaway. The research
was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (ProDoc,
grant no. PDFMP1-123181/1).

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