B Klem
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 46889 |
|---|---|
| NOME | B Klem |
| PRENOMES | B |
| SOBRENOME | Klem |
| ASSINATURA | KLEM B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7491-3994 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 189 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Bootstrapping sovereignty
The literature on contested states and other sovereignty claimants, from de facto states to governments-in-exile, has explored their predicaments, trajectories, and bids for recognition to grasp whether and how their sovereignty claims stick. In this article, we complement existing research by focusing on actors other than governments and international organizations, including ordinary people, field offices of UN agencies, and international court…
Contested citizenship in the liminal spaces of a divided Cyprus
Mental health issues, such as depression, are prevalent in Belgium, particularly among individuals with a migration background. General practitioners (GPs) may inadvertently contribute to these disparities through unconscious biases and stereotypes. This study investigates how Belgian GPs’ accounts reflect, perpetuate, or resist stigmatization toward patients with a migration background experiencing mental health issues and how these accounts are…
Legalizing Oneself
This article contributes to the anthropological scholarship on citizenship and unrecognized states by analyzing how people grapple with the convoluted legal landscape of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). I present four life histories to describe the diverse citizenship constellations among the TRNC's (de facto) citizens and its (de facto) migrants and refugees-and the shades in between. The article integrates and develops three conc…
Unravelling the constitutional settlement
Like other conflict-torn societies, Sri Lankans have long sought to build peace through constitutional re-design with devolution of power and minority protections. However, the preoccupation with legal norms and institutions runs counter to the widely-held conviction that politicians routinely transgress norms and twist institutions. It is thus imperative to study the lived political realities of power-sharing arrangements, rather than their inte…
Demos at war
This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different…
Legal identity in a looking-glass world
This introductory article, and the additional 11 contributions that comprise this special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals.It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or poli…
Victory’s Categories, Contingent Histories
Ahmed Hashim’s When Counterinsurgency Wins (2013) and Sharika Thiranagama’s In my Mother’s House (2011) may appear similar at first sight. Both books look back on Sri Lanka’s ethno-separatist war; both pay close attention to the rise and fall of Tamil militancy; and both are published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. However, in crucial ways, they are opposites. Hashim’s book is a military analysis focusing on the Sri Lankan government’s …
Sri Lanka in 2021
The Rajapaksa government consolidated its position with new laws, special task forces, and public-sector appointments. With the opposition wiped out, Sri Lanka now has a unipolar political landscape. Two successive waves of COVID-19 infections caused a rising death toll and necessitated severe lockdowns. The resulting economic problems exposed structural weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic constellation, with depleting foreign exchange and an…
‘A Garuda in my Heart, a Tiger in my Stomach’
This article studies the life histories of two broker figures from the Borneo highlands to explore the changing borderland dynamics of Krayan, an Indonesian region bordering on Malaysia. Rather than a lagging or rebellious periphery, the region can best be understood as a site of experimentation. Krayan’s history is strongly shaped by shifting patterns of infrastructural connectivity and mobile networks. This, I posit, has resulted in an indigeno…
Sri Lanka in 2019
Sri Lanka was confronted with three interrelated crises in 2019: the unresolved gridlock of last year’s constitutional crisis; the Easter bombings and their turbulent aftermath; and the coming to a head of fiscal shortfalls and debt burdens. Growth is stalling, living costs are rising, deficits are widening, and the price of Sri Lanka’s debt is weighing heavily on the government budget. In the presidential elections, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, heir of t…
Marginal placeholders
This study explores the political significance of peasant identities, rice cultivation and land struggles in the context of civil war. It comprises two agrarian settlements in Sri Lanka's former war zone: a state-sponsored Sinhala settlement colony (Weli Oya) and a village formerly ruled by the Tamil insurgency (Sampur). We conceptualise both communities as 'marginal placeholders' positioned in Sri Lanka's embattled Dry Zone frontier. Their conte…
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka: after the end." Contemporary South Asia, 26(3), pp. 363–364
The problem of peace and the meaning of 'post-war
The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not …
Public Authority Under Sovereign Encroachment
In this article, we compare two kinds of public authority under conditions of civil war. We study two villages in eastern Sri Lanka, both of which came under LTTE rule during the 1990s and 2000s. The first case study describes a rural development society, which was co-opted by the LTTE to rule the village. The second describes the leaders of a Hindu temple, who defied LTTE attempts to settle temple-related conflicts. Conceptually, we draw on the …
The Politics of Order and Disturbance
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation
This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to th…
Showing One's Colours
This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The …
Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque
Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition
The political geography of war's end
In the Eye of the Storm
This article narrates how bureaucrats in eastern Sri Lanka operated during and after the war. They managed to keep minimal state services running whilst being locked between the government and the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). When the government defeated the LTTE in 2009, civil servants were freed from rebel coercion, but they also lost their counterweight against unappreciated policies from the capital and interference by l…
Aid, Peacebuilding and the Resurgence of War
Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka
This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka's war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the e…
The gift of disaster
This paper analyses the commodification of post-tsunami aid in Sri Lanka, a process that 'contaminated' the 'purity' of good intentions with the politics of patronage and international aid. It argues that gifts are not just material transfers of 'aid', but also embodiments of cultural symbolism, social power, and political affiliations. The tsunami gift re-enforced and reconfigured exchange relationships among different patrons and clients in Sri…
The separatist conflict in Sri Lanka
Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation
This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to th…
Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition
In the Eye of the Storm
This article narrates how bureaucrats in eastern Sri Lanka operated during and after the war. They managed to keep minimal state services running whilst being locked between the government and the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). When the government defeated the LTTE in 2009, civil servants were freed from rebel coercion, but they also lost their counterweight against unappreciated policies from the capital and interference by l…
Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka
This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka's war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the e…
Religion, Conflict and Boundary Politics in Sri Lanka
The Politics of Order and Disturbance
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The political geography of war's end
Public Authority Under Sovereign Encroachment
In this article, we compare two kinds of public authority under conditions of civil war. We study two villages in eastern Sri Lanka, both of which came under LTTE rule during the 1990s and 2000s. The first case study describes a rural development society, which was co-opted by the LTTE to rule the village. The second describes the leaders of a Hindu temple, who defied LTTE attempts to settle temple-related conflicts. Conceptually, we draw on the …
The gift of disaster
This paper analyses the commodification of post-tsunami aid in Sri Lanka, a process that 'contaminated' the 'purity' of good intentions with the politics of patronage and international aid. It argues that gifts are not just material transfers of 'aid', but also embodiments of cultural symbolism, social power, and political affiliations. The tsunami gift re-enforced and reconfigured exchange relationships among different patrons and clients in Sri…
The problem of peace and the meaning of 'post-war
The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not …
Legal identity in a looking-glass world
This introductory article, and the additional 11 contributions that comprise this special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals.It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or poli…
Marginal placeholders
This study explores the political significance of peasant identities, rice cultivation and land struggles in the context of civil war. It comprises two agrarian settlements in Sri Lanka's former war zone: a state-sponsored Sinhala settlement colony (Weli Oya) and a village formerly ruled by the Tamil insurgency (Sampur). We conceptualise both communities as 'marginal placeholders' positioned in Sri Lanka's embattled Dry Zone frontier. Their conte…
Showing One's Colours
This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The …
Legalizing Oneself
This article contributes to the anthropological scholarship on citizenship and unrecognized states by analyzing how people grapple with the convoluted legal landscape of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). I present four life histories to describe the diverse citizenship constellations among the TRNC's (de facto) citizens and its (de facto) migrants and refugees-and the shades in between. The article integrates and develops three conc…
Unravelling the constitutional settlement
Like other conflict-torn societies, Sri Lankans have long sought to build peace through constitutional re-design with devolution of power and minority protections. However, the preoccupation with legal norms and institutions runs counter to the widely-held conviction that politicians routinely transgress norms and twist institutions. It is thus imperative to study the lived political realities of power-sharing arrangements, rather than their inte…
Contested citizenship in the liminal spaces of a divided Cyprus
Mental health issues, such as depression, are prevalent in Belgium, particularly among individuals with a migration background. General practitioners (GPs) may inadvertently contribute to these disparities through unconscious biases and stereotypes. This study investigates how Belgian GPs’ accounts reflect, perpetuate, or resist stigmatization toward patients with a migration background experiencing mental health issues and how these accounts are…
Sri Lanka in 2021
The Rajapaksa government consolidated its position with new laws, special task forces, and public-sector appointments. With the opposition wiped out, Sri Lanka now has a unipolar political landscape. Two successive waves of COVID-19 infections caused a rising death toll and necessitated severe lockdowns. The resulting economic problems exposed structural weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic constellation, with depleting foreign exchange and an…
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka: after the end." Contemporary South Asia, 26(3), pp. 363–364
The separatist conflict in Sri Lanka
Religion, Conflict and Boundary Politics in Sri Lanka
The gift of disaster
This paper analyses the commodification of post-tsunami aid in Sri Lanka, a process that 'contaminated' the 'purity' of good intentions with the politics of patronage and international aid. It argues that gifts are not just material transfers of 'aid', but also embodiments of cultural symbolism, social power, and political affiliations. The tsunami gift re-enforced and reconfigured exchange relationships among different patrons and clients in Sri…
Aid, Peacebuilding and the Resurgence of War
Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka
This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka's war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the e…
In the Eye of the Storm
This article narrates how bureaucrats in eastern Sri Lanka operated during and after the war. They managed to keep minimal state services running whilst being locked between the government and the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). When the government defeated the LTTE in 2009, civil servants were freed from rebel coercion, but they also lost their counterweight against unappreciated policies from the capital and interference by l…
Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque
Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition
The political geography of war's end
Showing One's Colours
This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The …
Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation
This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to th…
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka
War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka: after the end." Contemporary South Asia, 26(3), pp. 363–364
The problem of peace and the meaning of 'post-war
The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not …
Public Authority Under Sovereign Encroachment
In this article, we compare two kinds of public authority under conditions of civil war. We study two villages in eastern Sri Lanka, both of which came under LTTE rule during the 1990s and 2000s. The first case study describes a rural development society, which was co-opted by the LTTE to rule the village. The second describes the leaders of a Hindu temple, who defied LTTE attempts to settle temple-related conflicts. Conceptually, we draw on the …
The Politics of Order and Disturbance
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Sri Lanka in 2019
Sri Lanka was confronted with three interrelated crises in 2019: the unresolved gridlock of last year’s constitutional crisis; the Easter bombings and their turbulent aftermath; and the coming to a head of fiscal shortfalls and debt burdens. Growth is stalling, living costs are rising, deficits are widening, and the price of Sri Lanka’s debt is weighing heavily on the government budget. In the presidential elections, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, heir of t…
Marginal placeholders
This study explores the political significance of peasant identities, rice cultivation and land struggles in the context of civil war. It comprises two agrarian settlements in Sri Lanka's former war zone: a state-sponsored Sinhala settlement colony (Weli Oya) and a village formerly ruled by the Tamil insurgency (Sampur). We conceptualise both communities as 'marginal placeholders' positioned in Sri Lanka's embattled Dry Zone frontier. Their conte…
‘A Garuda in my Heart, a Tiger in my Stomach’
This article studies the life histories of two broker figures from the Borneo highlands to explore the changing borderland dynamics of Krayan, an Indonesian region bordering on Malaysia. Rather than a lagging or rebellious periphery, the region can best be understood as a site of experimentation. Krayan’s history is strongly shaped by shifting patterns of infrastructural connectivity and mobile networks. This, I posit, has resulted in an indigeno…
Victory’s Categories, Contingent Histories
Ahmed Hashim’s When Counterinsurgency Wins (2013) and Sharika Thiranagama’s In my Mother’s House (2011) may appear similar at first sight. Both books look back on Sri Lanka’s ethno-separatist war; both pay close attention to the rise and fall of Tamil militancy; and both are published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. However, in crucial ways, they are opposites. Hashim’s book is a military analysis focusing on the Sri Lankan government’s …
Sri Lanka in 2021
The Rajapaksa government consolidated its position with new laws, special task forces, and public-sector appointments. With the opposition wiped out, Sri Lanka now has a unipolar political landscape. Two successive waves of COVID-19 infections caused a rising death toll and necessitated severe lockdowns. The resulting economic problems exposed structural weaknesses in Sri Lanka’s macroeconomic constellation, with depleting foreign exchange and an…
Demos at war
This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different…
Legal identity in a looking-glass world
This introductory article, and the additional 11 contributions that comprise this special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals.It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or poli…
Unravelling the constitutional settlement
Like other conflict-torn societies, Sri Lankans have long sought to build peace through constitutional re-design with devolution of power and minority protections. However, the preoccupation with legal norms and institutions runs counter to the widely-held conviction that politicians routinely transgress norms and twist institutions. It is thus imperative to study the lived political realities of power-sharing arrangements, rather than their inte…
Contested citizenship in the liminal spaces of a divided Cyprus
Mental health issues, such as depression, are prevalent in Belgium, particularly among individuals with a migration background. General practitioners (GPs) may inadvertently contribute to these disparities through unconscious biases and stereotypes. This study investigates how Belgian GPs’ accounts reflect, perpetuate, or resist stigmatization toward patients with a migration background experiencing mental health issues and how these accounts are…
Legalizing Oneself
This article contributes to the anthropological scholarship on citizenship and unrecognized states by analyzing how people grapple with the convoluted legal landscape of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). I present four life histories to describe the diverse citizenship constellations among the TRNC's (de facto) citizens and its (de facto) migrants and refugees-and the shades in between. The article integrates and develops three conc…
Political science (22 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Sociology (18 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Political economy (15 obras) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (14 obras) · Economics (12 obras) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (10 obras) · Sri lanka (9 obras)