Sri Lanka

On 1 December 2006, a bomb-laden trishaw travelling into oncoming traffic, rammed head-on into the convoy of Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’s secretary of defence and brother to the president, in the city of Colombo, the country’s commercial capital. The vehicle exploded causing several casualties, although Rajapakse remained unhurt. The physical inscription of the incident on the city would take two forms. First, the face of a screaming man was temporarily painted on the shrapnel ridden boundary wall of the house closest to the junction.1 By the end of January the residents of that house would repaint and repair their wall underlining Colombo’s determined erasure of evidence of the ongoing conflict. Second, a traffic system described as ‘uniflow’ was introduced in Colombo with major roadways devoted to six lanes of one-way traffic. The militarisation of urban life already evident in the form of army checkpoints at politically sensitive areas of the city became a pervasive everyday reality, structuring schoolbound traffic and reorganising everyday activities. As the fighting escalated in the north and east of the country and the threat of reprisals through further suicide bombings increased, Colombo’s residents followed circuitous paths around their city

Ancient history · Anxiety · Biography · Criminology · Political science · Psychiatry · South asia · Sri lanka · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Law · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Arterial blockages

  A Pieris•National Identities•2015

  Incluir item

• Illiberal peace? Authoritarian modes of conflict management

  Open Access•D G Lewis, John Heathershaw et al.•Cooperation and Conflict•2018

  Incluir item