One could start the story of an insurgent movement with a vignette of the frontline or a first encounter with some enigmatic rebel office. In fact, the deleted text that was once on this page did precisely that. While such an initial vantage point helpfully offers the reader a glimpse of the convoluted ground reality of an emerging state, it also risks depicting these territories as exotic and the author as an adventurous protagonist with privileged up-close knowledge of dangerous outposts. Indiana Jones turning to the camera to look his audience in the eyes one more time, before he enters a land of mystery and peril. To start on this footing would disguise that the depiction of these supposedly quaint and anomalous places derives in part from the peculiarities of international perceptions and from the compromised knowledge curve of people like me who seek to understand insurgencies. Let me therefore not start in Sampur or Omanthai or Jaffna but at the picturesque gardens on the northern outskirts of The Hague.

These parklands are home to the Clingendael Institute. As a junior researcher of the institute – perhaps best described as an academic outboard motor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – I had been put on a team of consultants that had been commissioned by a group of aid donors to write a ‘Strategic Conflict Analysis’ about Sri Lanka. It was 2005, and these donors had enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had started three years prior. However, the process appeared to be going off the rails, and donors were desperate to consider their options. Hence our assignment. Having completed several visits, interviews and consultations in previous months, I was sitting at my desk overlooking the ponds and greenery of the Clingendael estate to write up our report when the phone rang. In hindsight, my struggle with the interpretative problems around the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka that has become this book started with that phone call