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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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