Peace in Sri Lanka is increasingly an international legal fiction – an assumption contrary to ground realities. The ebb of peace in the palm-fringed, tourist-friendly island is indexed in the return of 'dirty war', a rising body count, trickle of refugees to South India, as well as suicide bombings and barricades in Colombo. For the first time, there have been coordinated attacks on international aid agencies. As the head of the Scandinavian peace Monitoring Mission noted recently, there is an ongoing low-scale, low-intensity war.
Even though neither the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), nor the government has formally withdrawn from the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), the new war continues the spiral of the (para-) militarisation of civil society, with a 'war economy' sustained by terror, taxation and international post-conflict and post-Tsunami reconstruction assistance. These trends point to the possibility that the current conflict may also achieve a self-sustaining momentum beyond ethnic minority grievances as it has done in the past.
In this context, it is important to analyse the role of the international community, which, though a set of apparently external observers, has become intrinsically embedded and intertwined in Sri Lanka's conflict and peace process over the past decade. Given the massive international aid industry and bureaucracy in the country, the return of war despite the best efforts of Norway raises fundamental questions about their relevance and impact on conflict transformation.
A recent study of peace processes has noted that, of 38 internationally mediated peace efforts in the decade between 1989-1999, 31 had returned to conflict within the first few years. International assistance in low-intensity armed conflicts and peace processes may either ameliorate or become part of a renewed conflict cycle. As such, the attempt here is to develop a structural analysis of the three principal actors in Sri Lanka – the government of Sri Lanka, the LTTE and the international community – and their relationship, based on study of the political economy of the international aid industry and bureaucracy.