ABSTRACT
Introduction With the promise of nonviolent action – and, more specifically, of nonviolent intervention/unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) – sparking my curiosity, I went to Sri Lanka looking for a type of action that could stop the fighting on the “battlefield” of the renewed Sri Lankan war – something resembling the physicality of military intervention but without the weapons. During the months of my field research in Sri Lanka (September to December 2008) and those immediately following my departure, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) was in the midst of its final military assault on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – an assault that killed, in addition to combatants, somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians (AI 2012; UN 2011; Thaheer et al.) 1 – culminating in the GoSL’s military victory in May 2009. Over the course of ethnographic field research and interviews with staff members of Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka (NPSL) 2 – an INGO engaged in UCP in Sri Lanka from 2003 until 2011 – I began to recognize a shift in my own question-asking, an acknowledgement of the fact that NPSL’s intervention operated on a different level than that of the armed confrontation on the “battlefield.” 3 This slow realization crystallized in a comment made by one NPSL staff member at a meeting of HFOs (Heads of Field Office) in Colombo in mid-October. She shared with us that, when asked by people outside of NPSL why the fighting between the GoSL and the LTTE had resumed over the course of NPSL’s tenure in the country, implying that this meant NPSL’s work was ineffective, her response was that the resumption of warfare is a completely different matter from people’s ability to function safely at the ground level in the midst of violence (NP-MN 10/14/2008 4 ). In other words, she saw NPSL’s role as being less about actually stopping or preventing so-called “Track One” (high-level political) violence and more about guarding against the effects that such a resumption of violence would entail for the civilian population. The point, in other words, was to help Sri Lankans feel and be safer – and hence more apt to carry out their own efforts for peace and justice – in the midst of whatever horrible things might be happening on (or off ) the battlefield between the GoSL and the LTTE (and other armed actors). From this perspective, the war between the GoSL and the LTTE was seen as something like a natural disaster – beyond the immediate control
of many ground-level actors, including NPSL – and so the best that could be done was to mitigate its effects and the harm that it caused civilians. Although this way of thinking about NPSL’s work in relation to the war made a certain amount of sense – stopping the combatant-on-combatant violence of war was not its objective – the fact remained that NPSL was still not capable of protecting those civilians who were experiencing the worst effects of that war, trapped as they were on the battlefield, to which NPSL and other INGOs had no access.
