There is much research on how the aftermaths of contemporary crises are exploited to deepen neoliberal political-economic relations. The post-war ‘moment’ can be understood as such an arena: an opportunity, through reconstruction, to intensify processes of what Marxist geographer David Harvey, building on Marx and Luxemburg, calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. While the gendered dynamics of accumulation are relatively well-explored, there has been less analysis of the gendered modes of dispossession, especially in post-war transitions, where the population is living in the wake of wartime land dispossession. My book aims to do this, via a case study of post-war Sri Lanka. I explore how gendered modes of dispossession are experienced in the everyday working lives of women on the ‘defeated side’ of the civil war, in Sri Lanka’s formerly-contested Northern Province, where accumulation involves the simultaneous processes of violent state and capitalist expansion.
The book draws on multi-sited and multi-levelled qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Sri Lanka over eight months from 2014 – 15, with women in manufacturing, agricultural (fishing) and service/informal sectors. It is also informed by postdoctoral research in early 2020. Knowledge contribution: The book explores the concept of dispossession through an interdisciplinary gendered lens that brings together insights from feminist political economy and feminist conflict studies, and which builds on the original Marxist meaning of dispossession as separation from the means of production via wholesale agrarian transition. The book argues that in this long post-war moment, dispossession is occurring in the working lives of women in three interrelated ways, all linked to and enabled by wartime land dispossession.
The research develops an innovative and interdisciplinary feminist theoretical framework. The case study represents an empirically valuable opportunity to investigate a domestically driven post-war transition, managed by a strong (not fragile or collapsed) state.