Beyond winners and losers: Regional variations of peace in Sri Lanka’s war victory (REGIOPEACE)

REGIOPEACE proposes a new approach to study variations of peace at sub-national level. The weak track record of peacebuilding after civil wars make research on the post-war character of peace urgent.

While peace after negotiated settlements has received substantial attention in research, limited focus is devoted to peace in the context of military victories and authoritarian forms of governance. This is a critical issue due to the prevalence of illiberal forms of governance in today’s post-war states.

Emerging scholarship on victor’s peace and illiberal peacebuilding follow macro level analyses around state policies and practices, and seldom provide a comprehensive understanding of variation across localities. Without this, we cannot fully understand what is needed to build nation-wide peace.

REGIOPEACE addresses this gap and aims to develop an analytical framework to study peace at sub-national level by analysing peace across geographical localities in Sri Lanka’s war victory. The project focuses on selected regions with distinct socio-cultural features, histories, and war legacies.

We combine mapping historical and post-war developments with focus groups and interviews to compare bottom-up micro level understandings of peace across regions.

By advancing knowledge of the peace that is produced on the ground, the project provides research and policy relevant insights into transforming post-war situations, and challenges and possibilities for consolidating nation-wide peace.