ABSTRACT
The depletion of coastal fish resources and a marked increase in fishing households on the east coast of Sri Lanka have negatively affected west coast fishing communities’ seasonal migration to fish off the northeast and east coasts during the southwest monsoon in Asia. East coast communities whose livelihoods were destroyed by civil war claim the right to local fish resources and contest migrants’ access to them. Using a multicausal, multilevel approach to resource conflict and on the basis of primarily qualitative data from four fishing communities in Puttalam District (west coast) and Trincomalee District (east coast), the chapter analyses the contestation manifested in two discourses: migrant fishers’ right to continue a tradition of migration for work and host fishers’ right to their own resources. The perceived inequalities and marginalities underlying the horizontal contestations are exacerbated by vertical conflicts between fishing communities and regulatory institutions, which increases the tendency for conflicts to be ethnicized or regionalized.
