dev industry

Seamus Heaney has a new collection out: District and Circle which I must beg borrow or steal for I can't find it here in Sri Lanka. The itch to write again is overtaking me. I watched Sheltering Sky yesterday: I don't know why Bertolucci is so obsessed with that shifting space of sexual relationships. A friend is getting married and I am to be the bridesmaid (good god). Must define research interests soon enough. Oh yes, I remember now what I wanted to say: i discovered a true intellectual and how often can you say that. The only wonder is that it took me this long. The below are full excerpts from pieces of her work. She is a leading intellectual in Sri Lanka, focusing on the development-conflict-peace nexus.

"In this context, the question may be raised as to why the GoSL and the LTTE have chosen or been impelled to chose the World Bank to be the custodian of the post/conflict fund? And on what basis? Historically, the United Nations is the international organization charged with and experienced in dealing with post/conflict reconstruction (East Timor being a recent example). Moreover the UN agencies despite numerous critics have a relatively open attitude to human security, local voices, priorities and knowledge systems, than has the World Bank since it is not so closely allied to international finance and corporate interests, and in the grip of what Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist and ex-Vice President of the World Bank, terms ‘market fundamentalism’ in his book Globalization and its Discontents. Is the World Bank then a more or less neutral actor or will it ensure that the peace is structured to suit the agendas of international finance and corporate capital while making Sri Lanka vulnerable to fluctuating global financial markets as the world economy goes into recession (as occurred in Argentina)? As conflict, security and development are increasingly linked will it disburse funds to projects that have a less capital friendly and more social justice focus?"

"The information lacuna in turn perpetuated a number of myths that sustained the conflict, both at the level of policy as well as in popular discourse. As the conflict escalated in the nineties, the notion that ‘growth with war’ is possible appeared to be the operative fiction in policy circles. Meanwhile the conflict generated a war economy with military service becoming the leading income generation project for young men from rural areas even as it generated new forms of social and economic inequality and marginalization (eg. Muslim-Tamil conflicts in the east coast). That Sri Lanka, the South Asian leader in social indicators may be slipping in health and education, and mortgaging its future as the numbers of disabled increased, and the economy structured into a war economy, with the rural sector increasingly dependent on soldiers wages was not mentioned."

"Finally, the question remains: will humanitarian and post/conflict aid effectively subsidize SAPs and country's adjustment to Global Capital (ism)? As the various MPs tour Switzerland, Canada etc for constitutional models they may as well read Stiglitz and visit Third World Latin American countries in conflict and post/conflict situations that have a far closer profile and learn from economic debate and debacles in that region not to mention Africa. What informed critical debate in those countries may suggest is that After almost two decades of armed violence in Sri Lanka building a sustainable peace would entail political and economic reform aimed at achieving substantive rather than ritual or procedural democracy and the need for re-distributive justice. By substantive democracy is meant here, economic and social as well as civil and political aspects of democratic practice. "