RESEARCH NOTE

Sri Lanka inside-out: cyberspace and the mediated geographies

of political engagement
Tariq Jazeel*
Department of Geography, University of Sheeld, Sheeld, UK
This research note begins by pointing to the forms of geographical and political
enclosure that have resulted from the current Sri Lankan governments eective
regulation of parts of the national media, as well as its mediation of knowledge
produced about Sri Lanka more generally. It argues that a rather draconian and
unbreachable geography of inside and outside is instantiated by the political
regimes insularizing regulation of the countrys media(tion). The research note
then points to new virtual spaces in the Sri Lankan context that are reconguring
this sticky geography of inside and outside. In particular, it argues that Sri
Lankas burgeoning blogosphere and online citizen journalism provide new,
participatory spaces for dissent, debate and the free ow of information that have
much potential to assist in the production of a more robust and critical civil
society. The emergence of these spaces points to the importance of geography
and spatiality in manufacturing an eective critical politics in contemporary
Sri Lanka.
Keywords: Sri Lanka; media; knowledge production; censorship; geography
Of late there has been little in the way of press freedom in Sri Lanka. During the
wars protracted endgame in particular, journalists who chose to speak out against
the governments military tactics in Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-occupied
territories, its wartime treatment of Tamil civilian populations and the subsequent
internment of approximately 270,000 internally displaced peoples were at risk of
imprisonment, enforced exile and, in extreme but not unheard of cases, either
assassination or disappearance. There is a grim necessity, therefore, for any critical
engagement with media in contemporary Sri Lanka to point out how control and
regulation of the media has been a pivotal spoke of the current governments war on
terror. Critical journalism has for a while been a hazardous occupation in Sri Lanka.
Regulation of the Sri Lankan news media can be thought of as a foreclosure of
sorts; perhaps, moreover, a representational enclosure that has served in the interests
of a political insularity long associated with the exceptional territoriality of the Sri
Lankan island/nation-state (see Jazeel 2009). Indeed, the rst point I want to make
in this brief research note is that such foreclosures of critical media engagement in Sri
Lanka connect to a longer history of the broader imaginative and physical
insularization of the Sri Lankan political sphere. Delineations of who gets to speak,
how and which critical voices are allowed or not to intervene, and the eective bite of
*Email: t.jazeel@shef.ac.uk
Contemporary South Asia
Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2010, 443449
ISSN 0958-4935 print/ISSN 1469-364X online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2010.526200
http://www.informaworld.com
civil society organizations have long been tightly controlled in the Sri Lankan
context. Such acts of intellectual and representational enclosure are key to the
perpetuation of an island imagination characterized by the insularity and
exceptionalism with which the nation-state is so associated by the international
community.
Since the 1983 riots, at least, the government regulation and coercion of key media
outlets has been a fact; and one that has played a large role in determining the
common-sense coordinates of phrases as innocent as in Sri Lanka. For it is in this
context that such an innocuous turn of phrase comes to imply not just a physical
location within the territorial borders of the island-state, but also an ideological and
ethnicized located-ness within the parameters designated by the Sinhala majoritarian
regime. President Mahinda Rajapakses victory speech in May 2009 went so far as to
suggest there are no longer any minorities in Sri Lanka, only those who love the
country and those who do not; a suggestion that agged dissent and political critique
as somehow unpatriotic (see Jazeel and Ruwanpura 2009, 385). Critical engagement
of the contemporary Sri Lankan (Sinhala) national, it seems, has no place in the polity.
Enclosure of the Sri Lankan political eld by an eective clamping down on
dissent has not just aected journalists and the media. Censorship and the regulation
of a broader eld of cultural production including lm, literature and the news
media is part of a wider pattern that has seen the militarization of Sri Lanka (de
Mel 2007, 194245). Civil society activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
and Sri Lankan studies scholars alike have also been plagued by the particularly
fraught challenge to get under the skin of issues and political debate in Sri Lanka,
particularly those activists, workers and academics based outside the nation-state
itself. But this is nothing new; it is another kind of squeezing of the political sphere,
and as such another instance where the challenge of political critique is made to fold
into the simply geographical because postcolonial and critical intervention has so
frequently been accused by Sinhala nationalists as a form of neo-colonialism (for a
very troubling example of such accusations, see Goonatileke 2006). Thus, Sri
Lankan studies scholars, NGO operatives and activists no matter where they are
based have long had to engage in the awkwardness (Jazeel 2007), intense exclusion
(Bell 2009), and locational challenges (Jeganathan 2009) of getting inside the
nation-state, politically and critically.
For sure, to make this observation is to depart from the issue of the media as such.
However, it is important to tease out the troubling and challenging geographies of
mediation through which Sri Lanka is debated and produced more generally. Writing
as an academic (i.e. not as an NGO worker, activist or journalist), it is my strong sense
that part of this challenge over the mediation of the nation-state should be
unequivocally embraced and worked through carefully. After all, it is easy for the
non-Sri Lankan-based Sri Lankan studies scholar to choose to exit the country when
the stakes of an argument become too dangerous; a luxury not available to most of
those based on the island itself. However, I also make these observations in order to
signal a rather draconian and unbreachable geography of inside and outside that is
instantiated and accentuated by the current political regimes rather insularizing
regulation of the countrys media(tion). Whether through the curtailment of
journalistic freedom of expression, regulation of NGO and civil society activity, or
through the withholding and withdrawal of research and work visas to foreign
academics, that guarding of a nationalist, ideological and political inside from
criticism, dissent andpolitical interventionserves the regimes intendedhegemony well.
444 T. Jazeel
What then of cyberspace? In this context, my second point in this research note is
to turn rather more hopefully to the emergence of new virtual spaces in the Sri
Lankan context that, I suggest, are reconguring this rather too sticky geography of
inside/outside that has long pervaded the countrys political eld. In this time of
undoubted information censorship in Sri Lanka, a host of new Web 2.0 platforms
and spaces are emerging that are eectively and usefully turning Sri Lankas
insularity inside-out, in turn progressively reconguring the parameters of that very
phrase in Sri Lanka by producing eective dissident political space. Amidst a
chattering eld of gossip, u and social networking, the contemporary Sri Lankan
blogosphere is today rich with news, information, and, importantly, opinion and
debate.
1
There are also increasingly active websites and collectives that take as their
mandate the provision of open and participatory online spaces for dissent, debate
and the free-ow of information, in the hope of fashioning a more robust Sri Lankan
civil society that itself is under attack from nationalist political hegemony. Notable
amongst these is the citizen journalism website Groundviews (n.d.), to which I return
below, and its related Sinhala and Tamil language site Vikalpa (n.d.). The
infrastructural potential of such new media platforms and technologies for radical
politics in dicult and contested national contexts is well-known and discussed of
course; the recent mobilization of twitter in Iran being a case in point (see Social
Text 2009, for example). What I want to stress here in the last half of this research
note, however, is the topological eect of such new media platforms on political and
critical engagement in the Sri Lankan context. By topological, I mean the new reach
and relationalities that such web technologies enable (see Allen 2009, 205206); in
essence, their reconguration of Sri Lankas all too marked geography of inside/out,
and the potentialities which these virtual spaces provide for dissident Sri Lankan
politics. New media platforms produce new and dynamic political spaces in the Sri
Lankan context that are not dened by a simple and rigid geometry of (ideological
and geographical) inside and outside regulated by the state.
Discussion of the shifting topologies facilitated by such new media in the Sri
Lankan context is not entirely new. Over 12 years ago now, Pradeep Jeganathans
richly textured discussion of the new locations, routes and spatialities produced by a
then emergent Sri Lankan cyberspace drew attention to webspaces pre-eminent
capability of mediating, as he put it back then, between an inside and an outside
(1998, 521). Although his own interventions were focused primarily on government
and Tamil nationalist websites, they oered an important vocabulary for under-
standing the potential of webspace to create geographies, or virtual locations, whose
strength is precisely that they are equidistant from everywhere and far away from
nowhere (Jeganathan 1998, 518).
In the 12 years or so since Jeganathans observations, Web 2.0 use has moved on
to the extent that the very coordinates of outside and inside are in the process of
being recongured. Distance, in the Sri Lankan context, thought through
contemporary World Wide Web technologies, has become a distinctly topological
relation. At the least, such technologies have the potential to recongure distance in
such a way that it is no longer measured either by ones located-ness within island
territoriality, or by proximity to an acceptable hegemonic political ideology. With
the advent of new media and web platforms, those kinds of distances can be short-
circuited, folded away, and replaced by a more open and participatory space
(Hattotuwa 2007) conducive to dissident politics and debate. In this conguration,
the relationship between exile and political intervention/representation takes on new
Contemporary South Asia 445
meanings, because, simply put, it is more dicult to be exiled from spaces that are, in
Jeganathans (1998) vocabulary, equidistant from everywhere and far from nowhere.
One example of these new, progressive, mediated geographies of political
engagement is the website Groundviews (n.d.), a trilingual (English, Sinhala and
Tamil) citizen journalism initiative created in 2006 by Sri Lankas Centre for Policy
Alternatives, under their AusAID (Australian Agency for International Develop-
ment) and Canadian International Development Agency-funded Voices for
Reconciliation project. It was inaugurated as a response to requests from local
civil society organizations, NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations, the media
community as well as members of the diaspora to have a better idea of conditions on
the ground in Sri Lanka. It publishes short articles and posts submitted by writers
located anywhere in the world who feel they have something to say about Sri
Lankas political present. Contributions have tackled such prescient issues as
constitutional reform, corruption, media and communications, religion and faith,
through genres as diverse as political commentary, opinion pieces, poetry and
creative writing. And contributors include academics, NGO workers, civil society
activists, journalists, bloggers, as well as a range and diversity of thinkers that the
word citizen does not quite capture. Indeed, there are no citizenship requirements
for contributors, but there is a moderating panel.
If Groundviews provides a discursive space for consensus, perhaps more
importantly it does so also for political dissensus. Disagreement can be tracked
through the ebb and ow of readers comments, which are sometimes awkward,
sometimes angry, and sometimes marginal, but usually exemplify a mode of
agonistic political debate that has been sorely lacking in the Sri Lankan political and
public sphere, and that many have argued is an urgent requirement for a more
democratic Sri Lankan governance (see Scott 2000; Jazeel and Ruwanpura 2009).
Groundviews has, in eect, produced a space for the thrust and parry of debate that
is sorely lacking in [Sri Lankan] mainstream media, and is crumbling in mainstream
polity and society (Hattotuwa 2007). Part of its political appeal and vibrancy is
precisely that its conversation lacks the grammar and diplomacy of socio-political
norms. Instead it is raw, visceral, impatient, irreverent, pithy, provocative
(Hattotuwa 2007) in perhaps the most productive of ways.
Topologically speaking, precisely because of the common and open nature of its
arena, Groundviews has achieved a kind of democratic levelling in the terms and
cadence of the critical political debate it hosts and generates. Its wide constituency of
contributors and readers has necessitated that a key dimension of its spatial openness
is communication through an idiom that avoids the theoretical and technical
abstractions that would otherwise alienate non-specialist readers. In other words, as
a form of media it takes participation seriously, and taking participation seriously is
central to its democratizing and politicizing operation. This is not to say that it
discriminates against theoretical intellectual work, but rather to stress that the
grounded socio-political relevance and generativeness of entries have become the
guiding arbiters of the sites content. In fact, the very name Groundviews indicates
how the sites agenda around groundedness favours critical relevance, practical
legibility and interventionary capacity over, rst, any territorial distinctions between
inside and outside that can be used to discriminate against diasporic and exilic
voices, and, second, the theoretical and technical overspecializations that so often
prohibit meaningful political and intellectual interventions across constituencies. In
this sense, part of Groundviews specically spatial and topological achievement as a
446 T. Jazeel
mode of new media is precisely the ways that it has brought dierent constituencies
of people into conversation, and in doing so formed a political community born of
potential solidarity, but also of a potentially progressive dissensus.
I use Groundviews here to provide but one example of how certain forms of new
media technology and creativity are producing new kinds of geographies with the
potential to turn Sri Lanka inside out. Key to such progressive recongurations is
the spatial reordering that such platforms achieve. Their potential is precisely their
ability to disassemble an established social and spatial order that has become the
naturally given basis for government (see Dikec 2005, 173). If, as I have suggested
in the rst part of this note, government regulation of the media and censorship of
the free-ow of information have helped to perpetuate a kind of introverted Sri
Lankan insularity, it has done so through an authoritarian conguration of the eld.
That is the work of hegemony, and in the Sri Lankan context hegemonys particular
achievement is the negation of the political moment, where the political is conceived
as a moment of disruption, where the unaccounted for can emerge, where newness
can come into representation (Dikec 2005, 176). New Web 2.0 platforms are
currently producing the spatial and topological potential for such political moments
in the Sri Lankan context, which in turn provides for the possibility of the
remediation of Sri Lanka itself. As Qadri Ismail (2005, xvi) has written, each time
knowledge is produced about Sri Lanka the place itself is reiterated, produced
slightly dierently. If the insularizing conditions of that knowledge production are
opened out then there is the potential at least that Sri Lanka may be produced in less
territorial, more open, participatory and imaginative ways going forward. To this
end, cyberspace provides some genuine hope.
Sri Lankas new virtual political spaces are, of course, also plagued by some of
their own forms of rather undemocratic enclosure as well as serious challenges to
come. In closing, I outline three briey here. First, and most obviously, a digital
divide ensures that large swathes of the countrys rural population in particular are
denied access to, and participation in, such new virtual political spaces. Ironically,
however, here we can hope for and expect some help from government itself. Its
considerable recent investment in information and communication technology (ICT)
has seen the establishment of a heavily funded government ICT agency, which in
time may oer pathways for bridging that digital divide.
2
Second, and more
worryingly, online contributors and journalists are just as subject to the threat of
expulsion, violence, and disappearance as are those that trade in the more traditional
forms of print media. The disappearance of Prageeth Eknaligoda, political
commentator and cartoonist for www.lankaenews.com, in January 2010 is proof
of this. The third issue is the prospect of government censorship and blocking of an
increasing number of Sri Lankan news, information and discussion websites. Even
over one year on from the end of the war, the government continues to block access
to a number of websites in Sri Lanka, including Tamilnet (n.d.), TamilCanadian
(n.d.), and Lanka News Web (n.d.) (see David 2010). Taking these last two points
together, despite the progressive new topological openings and remediations of
Sri Lankas political terrain that new cyberspaces oer, they are in a sense just as
susceptible to the draconian sanctions, censorship and sovereign power that the
government can exercise over Sri Lankas mediation.
The purpose of this research note has not been just to stress that new research
might usefully seek to explore just what eects the topological openings and
remediations of Sri Lanka the blogosphere and other virtual spaces are achieving.
Contemporary South Asia 447
Although such understandings are urgently required, this note is also written to
suggest that critical Sri Lankan Studies scholars readers of this journal perhaps
themselves might seize the opportunity now to use such spatialities and platforms to
contribute their own thoughts, interventions, even dissident remarks. In other words,
to contribute to the remediation of Sri Lanka going forward.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Marta Bolognani, and Kanchana Ruwanpura and Cathrine Brun for their
comments on a draft of this research note.
Notes
1. For a syndication of current Sri Lankan blogs, see www.kottu.org/blogroll.
2. The Sri Lankan ICT Agencys aim is to increase computer literacy gures from 29%
nationally in 2009 to 60% by 2012 (Dewapura, Deshapriya, and Fernando 2009).
However, such national targets do not take into account the signicant intersections of
class, caste, gender and ethnicity that continue to delimit access to Internet usage in
dierent parts of rural Sri Lanka. It is also worth adding here that there already exists a
well-developed network of political connectivity, information dispersal and mobilization
via cellular phone technology in many of Sri Lankas rural areas.
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Contemporary South Asia 449
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