Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka

Violence, Torture and Trauma in Sri Lanka explores how people live with the aftermaths of violence, decades afterwards. Anchored in a violent event that took place in southern Sri Lanka in the late 1980s known locally simply as ‘the Terror’ (Bheeshanaya), during which 40,000 to 100,000 people were killed and thousands more disappeared, the author analyses the memories and narrative representations of a people who have perpetrated political violence. It explores how violence is negotiated and lived with in the aftermath, and its implications for the self and social relationships, from the perspectives of those who have inflicted it.

This book provides an important understanding of the motivations, meanings, and consequences of violence. It further contributes an understanding of how people who have carried out violence against members of their own community (of the same ethnic background) make sense of, and come to terms with, their own troubling pasts, and it shows how the violence of the terror is still an important factor in people’s everyday lives.

This important and significant book appeals to a wide range of readers in the fields of South Asia, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Geography, Psychology, Postcolonial Studies, Trauma Studies and War Studies.

Dhana Hughes is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. She is currently working on an ESRC funded collaborative project on the politics of educated unemployed youth in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.