Colombo, Identity, Media and Communications, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War

Re-mediating Sri Lanka: Cyberspace, Groundviews and Political Engagement

The thoughts below are taken from a longer article published as ‘Sri Lanka inside/out: cyberspace and the mediated geographies of political engagement’, in Contemporary South Asia (2010) 18 (4), pps.443-449.

1.

Readers of Groundviews will know well that delineations of who gets to speak, how and which critical voices are allowed or not to intervene in political debate, and the effective bite of civil society organizations have long been tightly controlled in Sri Lanka. Such acts of intellectual and representational enclosure are, I want to suggest, key to the perpetuation of an island imagination characterized by the insularity and exceptionalism with which Sri Lanka is so associated by the international community. In other words, state regulation and censorship of key media outlets has played a large role in determining the common sense meanings of phrases as innocent as ‘in Sri Lanka’. For it is in this context that such an innocuous turn of phrase comes to imply not just a physical location within the territorial borders of the island-state, but also an ideological and ethnicized located-ness within the parameters designated by the Sinhala majoritarian regime. The President’s victory speech in May 2009 went so far as to suggest there are no longer any minorities in Sri Lanka, only those who love the country and those who don’t; a suggestion that flagged dissent and political critique as ‘unpatriotic’. Critical engagements of the contemporary Sri Lankan (Sinhala) national, it seems, has little place in the polity.

This kind of enclosure of the Sri Lankan political field has been replicated beyond just the media. As Neloufer de Mel has shown in her book Militarizing Sri Lanka (2007), censorship and the regulation of a broader field of cultural production – including film and literature – is part of a broader pattern that has seen the effective ‘militarization’ of society. Civil society activists, NGOs and Sri Lankan studies scholars alike have also been plagued by the particularly fraught challenge to get inside the skein of issues and political debate in Sri Lanka, particularly those activists, workers and academics based outside the nation-state itself. But this is nothing new; another kind of squeezing of the political sphere, and another instance where the challenge of political critique is made to fold into the simply geographical because postcolonial and critical intervention has so frequently been accused by Sinhala nationalists as a form of ‘neo-colonialism’. Thus, Sri Lankan studies scholars, NGO operatives and activists – no matter where they are based – have long had to engage the awkwardness, intense exclusion, and locational challenges of getting ‘inside’ the nation-state, politically and critically that is.

To make these observations is to tease out the troubling and challenging geographies of mediation through which Sri Lanka is debated. I should add that writing as an academic (that is, not as an NGO worker, activist or journalist), it is my strong sense that part of this challenge over the mediation and critical engagement of Sri Lanka should be embraced and worked through carefully. After all, it is all too easy for the non-Sri Lankan based Sri Lankan studies scholar (such as myself) to choose to leave the country when the stakes of an argument become too dangerous; a luxury not available to most based on the island itself. However, what I also signal with these observations is that a rather draconian and unbreachable geography of inside and outside is accentuated by the current regime’s rather insularizing regulation of the country’s media(tion). Whether through the curtailment of journalistic freedom of expression, regulation of NGO and civil society activity, or through the withholding and withdrawal of research and work visas to foreign academics, that guarding of a nationalist, ideological and Political inside from criticism, dissent and political intervention serves the regime’s intended hegemony well.

2.

What then of cyberspace? In this context, I think we can turn rather more hopefully to the emergence of new virtual spaces in the Sri Lankan context that are reconfiguring this rather too sticky geography of inside/outside that has long pervaded the country’s political field. In this time of information censorship ‘in Sri Lanka’, it is axiomatic that readers of this post will be well aware of the host of new Web 2.0 platforms and spaces that are effectively and usefully turning Sri Lanka’s insularity inside-out, in turn progressively reconfiguring the parameters of that very phrase ‘in Sri Lanka’ by producing virtual, dissident political space that is neither territorially or ideologically enclosed. Amidst a chattering field of gossip, fluff and social networking, the contemporary Sri Lankan blogosphere is today rich with news, information, and importantly, opinion and debate. And this includes websites and collectives that take as their mandate the provision of open and participatory online spaces for dissent, debate and the free-flow of information in the hope of fashioning a more robust Sri Lankan civil society that itself is under attack from nationalist political hegemony. Notable amongst these is, of course, Groundviews itself and its sister site Vikalpa. The political potential of new media platforms and technologies for radical politics in difficult and contested national contexts is well known and discussed of course; the recent mobilization of ‘twitter’ in Iran being a case in point (see debates on Social Text website, for example). What I want to stress here, however, is the topological effect of such new media platforms on political and critical engagement. By topological, I mean to imply the new geographical reach and spatialities that such web technologies enable; in essence, their potential reconfiguration of Sri Lanka’s all too marked geography of inside/out, and the potentialities these virtual spaces provide for dissident Sri Lankan politics. New media platforms produce new and dynamic political spaces in the Sri Lankan context that are not defined by a simple and rigid geometry of (ideological and geographical) inside and outside regulated by the state.

With the advent of new media and web platforms distances from political hegemony and control can be short-circuited, folded away, and replaced by a more open and participatory space conducive to dissident politics and debate and all its potentials. Groundviews provides the example par excellence of this geographical reconfiguration of political discourse. In particular, Groundviews provides a space for expression, but perhaps more importantly also for political dissensus. Disagreement can be tracked through the ebb and flow of comments, which are sometimes awkward, sometimes angry, sometimes marginal, but usually exemplify a mode of agonistic political debate that has been sorely lacking in the Sri Lankan political and public sphere, and that many have argued is an urgent requirement for a more democratic Sri Lankan governance.

Precisely because of the common and open nature of the arenas provided here, Groundviews has achieved a kind of leveling in the terms and cadence of the critical political debate it hosts and generates. Its wide constituency of contributors and readers necessitates that a key dimension of its spatial openness is communication through an idiom that avoids the theoretical and technical abstractions that would otherwise alienate non-specialist readers. In other words, as a form of media it is exemplary because it takes participation seriously, and taking participation seriously we should remember is central to the invocation of citizenship. The grounded socio-political relevance and generativeness of entries have become the guiding arbiters of content. In this sense, we can say that the site’s agenda around groundedness favours critical relevance, practical legibility and interventionary capacity over, first, any territorial distinctions between inside and outside that can be used to discriminate against diasporic and exilic voices, and second, the theoretical and technical overspecializations that so often prohibit meaningful political and intellectual interventions across constituencies. In this sense, new medias I want to suggest have the potential to bring different constituencies of people into conversation, and in doing so form political communities born of potential solidarity, but also of potentially progressive disagreements.

I use Groundviews here as one example of how new media technology and creativities can produce new kinds of spaces with the potential to effectively turn Sri Lanka inside out. Key to such progressive reconfigurations is the spatial reordering that such platforms achieve. The political potential here lies in precisely the ability to dismantle established social and spatial orders that have become the ‘naturally given’ basis for political debate. If, as I have suggested in the first part of this post, government regulation of the media and censorship of the free-flow of information have helped to perpetuate a kind of introverted Sri Lankan insularity, it has done so through a rather too authoritarian configuration of the field. That is the work of hegemony, and in the Sri Lankan context hegemony’s particular achievement is the negation of the political moment, where the political is conceived as a moment of disruption, where the unaccounted for can emerge, where new thought can be given expression. New Web 2.0 platforms offer spatial and topological potential for such political moments in the Sri Lankan context, which in turn provides for the possibility of the remediation of Sri Lanka itself. To this end, cyberspace provides some genuine hope for Sri Lankan politics.

3.

But Sri Lanka’s new virtual political spaces are, of course, also plagued by some of their own forms of rather undemocratic enclosure as well as serious challenges going forward. I outline three briefly here. First, and most obviously, a digital divide ensures that large swathes of the country’s rural population in particular are denied access to, and participation in, such new virtual political spaces. Ironically, however, here we can hope for and expect some help from government itself. Its considerable recent investment in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the establishment of a heavily funded government ICT agency, may in time offer pathways for bridging that digital divide. Second, more worryingly, online contributors and journalists are just as subject to the threat of expulsion, violence, and disappearance as are those that trade in the more traditional forms of print media. The disappearance of Prageeth Eknaligoda in January 2010 is proof of this. And third, is the prospect of government censorship and blocking of an increasing number of Sri Lankan news, information and discussion websites. Even over one and a half years on from the end of the war, the government continues to block access to a number of websites in Sri Lanka. Taking these last two points together, despite the progressive new topological openings and remediations of Sri Lanka’s political terrain that new cyberspaces offer, they are in a sense just as susceptible to the draconian sanctions, censorship and sovereign power that the government can exercise over Sri Lanka’s mediation.

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Tariq Jazeel, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield