Description
Diaspora have long been regarded as important stakeholders and participants in homeland conflict and peace building processes, and there is an emerging literature on how diaspora participate in Transitional Justice processes that goes beyond essentialist and binary analyses of diaspora as either peace wreckers or peacemakers. Building on this literature, this article explores the politics of diaspora claims-making in processes of Transitional Justice. Specifically, it examines the role and power of the Tamil diaspora in the fraught Transitional Justice process in Sri Lanka through an exploration of (discursive) practices and struggles unfolding in and around the UN Human Rights Council.
The paper rests on a multi-method study of Tamil diaspora involvement in global and homeland governance, including multi-sited ethnographic research with the Tamil diaspora (e.g. at the UNHRC in Geneva in March 2017, and in Toronto and London between 2016-2018), open ended interviews with activists and professionals involved in the Sri Lankan TJ process, as well as desk research of policy documents and online archives.
In examining the discursive, bureaucratic and spatial political struggles that structure the UNHRC sessions and events relating to Sri Lanka, it becomes clear that they are not just about the shape that a TJ process should take, but over who is allowed to speak on the issue (and for whom), how and where. Consequently, rather than see struggles over legitimacy and representation as purely endogenous to the Tamil diaspora and broader Sri Lankan state and civil society, this article shows how they are situated within overlapping and often contradictory (global and local) fields of practice, which cast diaspora ambiguously, sometimes as victims or perpetrators of human rights abuses, sometimes as legal experts, and sometimes as members of a global civil society.
