Sri Lanka has always been a fascinating case study due to its gradual transformation from a model democracy to a case of perpetual political violence. The aim of this book is to present a nuanced account of Sri Lanka's trajectory of politics of state-building by situating it in the intersections of state-building and hegemony-building. The book delves into a number of social categories and relations, mainly class, caste and gender, beyond the usual analyses centred on ethnic and inter-religious identity conflicts. It discusses four key state-building processes that came to be converged with Sinhala right-wing hegemony-building processes that were invented and nurtured by the majority Sinhalese elites who occupied state power throughout the post-colonial period. Paying close attention helps analyse how these processes have come about and have been utilised and adapted according to the prevailing global and national ideological and material conditions at a given historical moment. The book aims to re-problematise Sri Lanka's trajectory of state-building by redrawing attention to class relations, specifically intra-ethnic class relations of the majority Sinhala-Buddhist community as a perpetual source of violence. The primacy given to a class-based analysis of the roots and manifestations of social and political violence is aimed at a deeper and multi-level analysis, weaving historical–contemporary, material–ideational and global–national–local elements into one coherent and complex whole.

The book is written from a critical, reflective and interpretivist perspective. It is situated within critical approaches to politics and the state, specifically influenced by the Gramscian concept of hegemony. This is central to the analysis, which shows how ideological hegemony was pursued by the ruling class through the use of various ways of combining coercion with consent. These strategies for securing hegemony were often resisted and contested by countervailing social and political forces, ultimately manifested as a series of violent encounters, protests and forms of opposition. The book has its origins in the author's PhD thesis, defended in 2013. It benefits from in-depth field interviews conducted as part of doctoral work, and subsequently up to 2020, across Sri Lanka, with a wide range of actors, including high-profile political actors, civil servants, civil society actors, non-state armed groups and ordinary citizens from the north to the south. Many interviews were conducted under extraordinary conditions, at the height of civil war in the first quarter of 2009 and then in its immediate aftermath.