This research analyzes the construction, negotiation and maintenance of social ‘space’ amongst rural women belonging to the Sri Lankan Muslim, Sinhalese and Estate Tamil ethnic communities in Yahalathenna-west, by using a combination of ethnographic research techniques, together…
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The United Nations Charter includes provisions for the peaceful settlement of conflicts and the use of collective security to ensure international peace and security. In practice during the Cold War, the United Nations failed to implement collective security provisions largely b…
This dissertation explores the agency of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) in social change in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The roots of organizations similar to contemporary NGOs are traced to Christian missionary organizations in the early Nineteenth Century. Since then, NGOs…
Major secessionist movements are currently ongoing in Russia, Spain, Canada, Nigeria, India, and Sri Lanka, among others, and these movements have had a strong impact on international security. The ongoing secessionist movement in Kashmir, for example, is a major threat to secur…
The study examined the causes of high male/female child ratio in South Asia. Three theoretical perspectives are considered: modernization theory, dependency theory, and dual systems theory. Macro data from four South Asia countries—Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—betw…
The dominant mechanism through which maternal employment is thought to affect child development and survival is mother-worker roles incompatibility [Meyers and Indriso, 1986]. This implies that working mothers may not be able to provide adequate care for their children. Hence, t…
The thesis is concerned with an examination of Islam in Sri Lanka. It argues that while Sri Lankan Islam shares an ideology with the Islamic world, it has a specificity which may only be understood with reference to its particular historical and cultural context. As an Islamic c…
Global events in the post-World War 2 era demonstrate that the security threats stemming from the intensification of intra-state conflicts put a premium on the development of conflict management techniques. While such internal conflicts assume different forms, this dissertation …
This study scrutinizes the drug-terrorism nexus critically with intent to conceive possible remedies for the problem. The vast turnover of the global illicit drug industry constitutes the largest portion of organized crime enterprises' income. According to different circles thes…
The modern problem of “national integration” is the problem of constructing a community—or a `nation'—out of the disparate, constitutive elements contained within the physical borders of a particular state. These elements are often themselves historically bound, culturally defin…
This study explores the phenomenon of de facto statehood in contemporary international relations. In essence, the de facto state is almost the inverse of what Robert Jackson has termed the "quasi-state." The quasi-state has a flag, a capital city, an ambassador, and a seat at th…
Why do some states hold onto territory no matter what the costs, while others allow secession with apparent ease? I argue that governing elites make calculations about territorial policy in one of two ways--by ideology or by contract. Ideological territorial policy results when …
Ethnicity has come to be recognized as an important, and in some cases a dominant factor in the search for regional peace and security. This dissertation examines the linkages in South Asia among ethnic conflict, the state and regional security. Our analysis of the Sikhs in the …
This thesis addresses the implications of ethnicity for development and its neglect by development management and administrative strategies. It explores the basic issues of ethnicity in developing countries and its effect on development projects, industrial organizations, and pu…
This dissertation questions the assumption that there is an inherent link between music and identity. In Part One, I provide an historical anthropology of the global dissemination of identity discourses on the arts and their development on the island nation of Sri Lanka, to demo…
When do ethnic civil wars last especially long? This dissertation examines when, why, and how ethnicity affects the length of civil wars. Two-thirds of civil wars pit ethnic combatants against each other; the duration of these conflicts varies considerably. Existing work on ethn…
This dissertation focuses on the interactions of armed groups that challenge the sovereignty of a state and raises the question: under what conditions do rebel groups cooperate or compete with each other? It deviates from the standard explorations into political, economic and so…
My dissertation discusses refugee rights and post-repatriation integration in South Asia in the context of debates over "citizenship." Postcolonial state-formation processes in South Asia have profoundly shaped questions of belonging and membership. As a result, official citizen…
My dissertation is a cross-regional, mixed-methods comparison of the causal effects of changes in the level of economic liberalization upon the onset of ethnic conflict. The conventional wisdom, both in economics and political science, has argued that there is a strong linear re…