war-zone

Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka

AUTHOR: Sasanka Perera
FORMAT: Hardcover
First Published by SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd in 2016
AVAILABILITY: AVAILABILITY: Tambapanni Academic Publishers, 2025 – Buy Now

An ethnographic study on internal travel analysed through the perspectives of Sinhala tourists going from the South to the war-ravaged North.

Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka explores travellers’ narratives that reflect the experiences and interactions of those going to northern Sri Lanka, and argues that the discourses that emerge are not simply based on leisure and innocence of travel. Rather, they have much to do with the thirty-year civil war in Sri Lanka and how it has impacted the inter-ethnic relations in the country, creating two mutually antagonistic forms of nationalism―Tamil and Sinhala.

This book is a significant contribution to academia in light of the disruption of civilian travel to northern Sri Lanka during the civil war, effectively barring face-to-face access between citizens, and the narratives which emerge from post-war travel, highlighting the resentment between the two main ethnic groups.

Author
Chairman of the Colombo Institute for Human Sciences. He taught sociology at University of Colombo from 1993 to 2011 and at South Asian University from 2011 to 2024. He was Head of Sociology at University of Colombo from 2009 to 2011. He is the author of Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from Darker Places in Paradise (2016), Violence and the Burden of Memory: Remembrance and Erasure in Sinhala Consciousness (2015), and Artists Remember and Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts (2012).