Description
An exploration of the connections between ethnicity and nation-building.
This ambitious work explores the vexed connections among nation-building, ethnic identity, and regional conflict by focusing on a specific event: Indian political and military intervention in the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Drawing on interviews with leading players in the Indian-Sri Lankan debacle, Sankaran Krishna offers a persuasive analysis of this episode. The intervention serves as a springboard to a broader inquiry into the interworkings of nation building, ethnicity, and "foreign" policy. Krishna argues that the modernist effort to construct nation-states on the basis of singular notions of sovereignty and identity has reached a violent dead end in the postcolonial world of South Asia. Showing how the nationalist agenda that seeks to align territory with identity has unleashed a spiral of regional, statist, and insurgent violence, he makes an eloquent case for reimagining South Asia along postnational lines-as a "confederal" space.Postcolonial Insecurities counters the perception of "ethnicity" as an inferior and subversive principle compared with the progressive ideal of the "nation." Krishna, in fact, shows ethnicity to be indispensable to the production and reproduction of the nation itself.About the Author
Sankaran Krishna is associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies.
Book Information
ISBN 9780816633302
Author Sankaran Krishna
Format Paperback
Page Count 356
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm
