war-zone

Warzone Tourism in Sri Lanka

AUTHOR: Sasanka Perera
FORMAT: Paperback
First Published by SAGE Publications Pvt. Ltd in 2016
AVAILABILITY: Not yet published – available in 2026

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
Sasanka Perera is Professor of Sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi and Editor, Society and Culture in South Asia. 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).