ABSTRACT
Tamil nationalists, human rights defenders and civil society activists are able to stage street demonstrations, often criticizing the government. Before the emergence of the Tamil armed struggle, Sri Lanka’s war to biopolitically transform the island into an ethnocracy manifested through law and ‘lawlessness’. With the emergence of the Tamil armed struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, the state’s war to ‘defend’ the Sinhala Buddhist race/species that it managed/fostered and secure the ethnocratic state order expanded into the terror of law and military action, complemented by a reformed state of ‘lawlessness’. In the 1990s, economy, in the form of an economic embargo on the liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam-held territories of the North, became another means of producing the effects of battle for Sri Lanka. The Sirisena–Wickremesinghe regime has also reversed the statist economic policies of the Rajapaksa regime and curbed some of the powers of the executive presidency, transferring them to the prime minister and the island’s legislature.
