Introduction
Moving from war to postwar recovery involves long and contested journeys. There are no blueprints for how a society can rise from the ashes that a war has created as the history, context, causes, and nature of war vary across countries.
As such, postwar recovery should be carefully implemented, as actions taken may revert people back to conflict. In Sri Lanka, postwar recovery commenced in 2009, after more than three decades of conflict. Focusing mainly on the physical infrastructure programs in war-affected areas, however, the Sri Lankan government’s rhetoric of recovery does not focus on young people in spite of the violent history of youth uprisings in the country.Sri Lanka’s 30-year-old civil war, fought between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government forces from 1983 to 2009, is well documented (Azmi 2012, 2014; Brun 2005; Hyndman and Amarasingam 2014; Hoglund and Orjuela 2011; Jayatilleka 2013; Rotberg 1999; Shanmugaratnam et al. 2003). It was not just a bipartisan conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils, but spread to include the minority group of Muslims (recognized as an ethnic group in Sri Lanka). As the authors have reported elsewhere (Azmi and Lund 2010; Azmi et al. 2013, 2016), youths’ involvement in politics in Sri Lanka dates back to the pre-independence period, but it was not until independence was gained in 1948 that the country saw the development of youth uprisings by rural youths, unemployed educated young people, and nationalist groups mobilizing around ethnicity (Amarasuriya 2009; Fernando 2002; Hettige 2008). As a result of this history of youth uprisings and conflict, youth politics in the country have been understood as violent and troublesome. Consequently, young people participating in politics are often regarded as suspicious; there is societal anxiety accompanying discourses on young people and politics in the country which tend to restrict many young people’s participation in politics.
Generally, young people do not figure prominently in the recovery process in Sri Lanka.
They are not visible in the general discourse on post-conflict recovery and its manifestations in the Sri Lankan context as mentioned above (Azmi et al. 2016). Some attention is given to young people in the reintegration of former combatants, which is often a main priority after war (Annan et al. 2011). Scholars have emphasized that there are risks involved in overlooking young people in postwar recovery and particularly regarding employment (Izzi 2013). They have cautioned that differences which created violent relationships during the war may be cemented in a postwar setting and may harbor the risk of renewed violence (McLean Hilker 2014). Neglecting the need for employment among young people may lead to new unrest (Azmi and Lund 2010). The intention of this chapter is to inform already existing scholarly narratives of recovery where a perspective of youth is found to be limited (Blaikie and Lund 2009; Hilhorst 2013). The chapter’s main concern is the young people who did not join the LTTE or young people who were involved with the LTTE for a short while but came out of the movement before the war ended. The chapter shows that youth could potentially play a crucial role in recovery. War and postwar are experienced by young people as radical uncertainty (Horst and Grabska 2015), and we show how young people navigate these volatile war and postwar settings in Eastern Sri Lanka by analyzing how social and spatial mobility is practiced and negotiated with a view to achieving social justice in an uncertain environment.2