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20 Global Governance 166 (2014)
Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka: Life after Terror

handle is hein.journals/glogo20 and id is 168 raw text is: 166    Book Reviews

Another set of chapters discusses the issue of financial regionalism (e.g.,
East Asian power) versus the power of the US financial market, along with
national strategies. Also examined are issues of capital controls, rating agen-
cies, and particular capitalist countries' perspectives and different methods of
state intervention.
This book highlights the main issues of the current global financial crises
and gives an important historical background of the previous financial and
economic crisis. Perhaps its mains shortcoming is the lack of critical analysis
of the Keynesian active policies of the post-World War II policies. An excel-
lent book, worth reading. @ Reviewed by Noemi Levy-Orlik
Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka: Life After Terror. By Dhana
Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
Most studies on conflict in Sri Lanka tend to focus on the violent Tamil sep-
aratist movement in the north and east. In doing so, these studies inevitably
frame the politically complex communities of the Tamils and Sinhalese as
monolithic wholes, with the interests of each genuinely represented by the
militants on the one hand and the state on the other. Not so in the case of this
book. In Violence, Torture and Memory in Sri Lanka, Dhana Hughes breaks
the mold by focusing on a largely overlooked conflict, the Bheeshanaya (the
Terror) within the majority Sinhala community in southern and central Sri
Lanka that lasted from 1987 to 1991.
Founded on original ethnographic fieldwork, Hughes engages in a pro-
tracted study of the memories and narratives of those engaged in violent
actions-both insurgents and state counterinsurgency officers-in order to
explore not only the meanings they assign retrospectively to their violent
activities, but also to understand how violence is both personally and socially
negotiated in its aftermath. Hughes stresses that accuracy and confession are
not the purpose of her work; instead, her unmitigated focus remains on the
memories of those touched by the violence as perpetrators, victims, or wit-
nesses. She acknowledges the blurred and continually shifting boundaries
between the categories of perpetrator and victim as those inflicting vio-
lence could be, and often were, tortured, killed, or forced to disappear by the
opposition.
Hughes also highlights how entire communities were tom apart by
opportunistic violence where personal rivalries among intimates were played
out under the cover of the Bheeshanaya. The stories recounted are especially
poignant given that those who inflicted the violence as insurgents continue to
live in the present, without justice or reconciliation, with those who were
their torturers, their victims and those within their closely knit communities
who denounced them to the authorities. Hughes explains how violence is
remembered, lived with, and assigned meaning in ethical terms. Thus, for

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