Post-War Tamil Ethnic Identity in Sri Lanka

What is it about?

This article examines how the ethnic identities of Sri Lankan Tamils changed after the ethnic conflict ended in 2009. Tamils in Jaffna, Batticaloa and Colombo revealed how the end of the war acted as a pivotal moment that led to the disruption of their pre-war and war era ethnic identities, giving rise to three different conceptualizations of what it meant to be Tamil (and what the future should and could look like for this population).

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Why is it important?

This article focuses primarily on intra-group differences in a post-war conflict without centralizing the LTTE (Tamil Tigers or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) as being most important variable to ethnic identity formation. The article's findings indicate that the creation of multiple ethnic identity configurations among Tamils in Sri Lanka must be taken into consideration during any post-conflict reconciliation efforts.