Notes on Possibilities after the UN Report: Including Nationalism and ‘The Geopolitics of Emotion’

Photo courtesy Deborah Philip It was my sense after May 18, 2009 when the LTTE was defeated that Sri Lanka was missing an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a kinder, gentler, global community. Instead it heightened nationalist discourse, extended emergency rule, surveillance and militarization, and devised new forms of censorship. Sri Lanka missed the opportunity to become one of South Asia’s more enlightened nations by not reaching out to one of its more battered and war-scarred communities after 18/09.  The UN report has returned us to that moment, and if intelligently and constructively used may help us explore roads not taken, toward a better, brighter and kinder future for all its citizens. Political philosopher Judith Butler wrote after 9/11 and the attacks on the twin towers in New York City in a book titled: Precarious Life: “that we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of the other,…