Charan Rainford and Ambika Satkunanathan

With the apparent military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May of 2009, the Sri Lankan government was presented with an opportunity to craft a political settlement that would go some way to meet the decades' long grievances of the Sri Lankan Tamil community. But as is evidenced by the speech quoted above, President Mahinda Rajapakse outlined a post-war (as opposed to post-conflict) Sri Lanka ‘without minorities,’ that effectively eschewed ethnicity in favour of a single identity. While effectively denying the need for a political solution, President Rajapakse and members of the regime have equated peace, and stability, with economic development, which they claim will address the concerns and grievances of minorities.

The peace through development paradigm presupposes that economic development is the primary approach to generating peace, by alleviating minority grievances without any explicit state reform. This approach has fundamentally underestimated the overwhelmingly political nature of both peace and development.