Description
This paper examines Tamil and Muslim women’s everyday reconciliation through inter-communal care networks in Northern Sri Lanka in a context of significant post-war population displacement and resettlement. I argue that women in Northern Sri Lanka gained social standing, companionship, and security from their care and reconciliation work and that women’s networks led to fragmented but meaningful communal reconciliation over time. I maintain that everyday peacebuilding literature tends to take a more instrumental understanding of agency, which focuses on conflict minimization and coexistence, over transformative and empathy-based practices, which encourage relationship-building and reconciliation. I engage with feminist work on care, relationality, and vulnerability and examine less visible agency and the smaller informal ways in which women contribute to everyday peacebuilding and reconciliation. The paper also examines care continuums and the gendered aspects of everyday reconciliation. Focusing on the lesser-known Muslim-Tamil minority conflict that occurred in the context of a three-decade war between the military and the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam, this research brings attention to the layered nature of local peacebuilding and reconciliation. The paper contributes to critical and feminist understandings of everyday peacebuilding through its analysis of less visible informal reconciliation.
