Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition: The return of ‘normal’ politics in Nepal and Sri Lanka?

Highlights

• The end of war marks a reconstitution in what is seen as legitimate politics.

• The shift is a result of political work attempting to produce legitimacy.

• This constrains certain actors, tactics, and registers and amplifies others.

• Spaces for dissent are reduced, while the space for politicking expands.

• Underlying fallibilities and contradictions of democracy are thus exposed.

Abstract

Bringing together ethnographic evidence from mid-Western Nepal and eastern Sri Lanka, this article explores how political legitimacy is constructed and contested in post-war environments. We posit that in the post-war context there are important changes in the kinds of politics, agenda-setting, players and tactics that are considered acceptable and those that are rendered transgressive, threats to order and stability, or otherwise placed ‘out of bounds’. The art of crafting political legitimacy is defined in sharp contrast to the immediate history of armed conflict. The end of the war and the resumption of supposedly democratic politics thus mark a shift in what is seen as legitimate or normal politics. This shift constrains certain kinds of actors, tactics, and registers and it amplifies others, while being itself a result of political work. We argue that a reduction of the space for dissent, and an increase of the space for politicking are complementary aspects of the redefinition of what constitutes legitimate politics in the post-war context. These adverse political effects are not simply problems of context – post-war environments being non-conducive to democracy – but rather expose the more fundamental fallibilities and contradictions of demarcating a legitimate sphere of democratic politics in particularly visible and precarious ways.

Introduction

Bringing together ethnographic evidence from mid-Western Nepal and eastern Sri Lanka, this article explores how political legitimacy is constructed and contested in post-war environments. The two regions are marked respectively by the history of Maoist revolutionary and Tamil separatist insurgencies, both of which challenged the legitimacy of the prevailing political and social order. Both rebel movements produced parallel, overlapping and – to stick with the catchphrase of this special issue – ‘anomalous’ forms of rule, which they legitimated in registers both similar and different to those of the regimes whose rule they contested. We take a complementary approach by analysing not how such ‘anomalous rule’ produced its legitimacy, but rather how legitimacy is produced in the period that follows. We thus take what you might call a temporal mirror image by exploring the politics of dismantling anomalous rule and bringing about ‘normality’. We explore how the space of legitimate politics is defined and delimited in the post-war period, and in particular the role local politicians play in this definition and delimitation.

Geographical scholarship has not shied away from asking fundamental questions about politics. Over the past decade or so, there has been debate about the nature of democratic politics and the political, about the boundaries of the political and what lies beyond it, and about the contradictions between deliberative and antagonistic understandings of politics (Barnett, 2008, Barnett, 2012, Spencer, 2012, Staeheli, 2010, Swyngedouw, 2009). These contentions are steeped in a broader theoretical debate on the democratic ‘piety’, the ‘crisis’ of democracy and ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch, 2004, Deneen, 2005, Little, 2008, Mouffe, 2005, Rancière, 1999). The question of legitimacy is never far off in these debates, but often remains somewhat implicit. A recent special issue in this journal edited by Featherstone and Korf (2012) attempted to straddle the problematic divide between the rather abstract ontological notions that often characterise these debates and ‘actually existing politics’, as captured by more ethnographically oriented scholarship. In so doing, some of the big dichotomies in the theoretical debate start to dissolve: boundaries are blurred, contradictions become apparent (see also Barnett, 2012, Spencer, 2008).

Our article is written in a similar spirit of bringing together the politics of specific empirical sites with larger conceptual questions about ‘politics in general’. Rather than simply applying European theorists to South Asian contexts, we engage with the literature on South (and South East) Asian politics (e.g. Alagappa, 1995, Chatterjee, 2004, Hansen, 2001a, Ruud, 2001, Spencer, 2007) to explore our empirical findings, before returning to some of the bigger questions about politics and legitimacy.

This literature gives quite a good sense of what ‘normal’, ‘actually existing’ politics comprises in South Asia. As we understand it, normal is clearly not the equivalent of good. In fact, the literature on South Asian politics usefully directs us to the political work that goes into producing norms and boundaries that demarcate what stands as legitimate politics. These insights are helpful when grappling with countries emerging from long years of war and upheaval, because the political transitions in these countries are typically steeped in discursive registers of returning to purported normalcy, i.e. in the need to redress the preceding anomaly. While we understand political legitimation as a process that is always ‘contingent, dynamic and continuously defined’ (Alagappa, 1995: 29), post-war transitions represent particularly fluid and precarious moments where the new rules of the game are negotiated. This involves important shifts in the kinds of politics that are considered legitimate and those that are rendered out of bounds.

The post-war shift in what is seen as legitimate or normal politics constrains certain kinds of actors, tactics, and registers, and it amplifies others. On the basis of our findings in post-war Nepal and Sri Lanka, we argue that this shift in the sphere of legitimate politics involves at least two important adverse effects. Firstly, post-war democratic politics has a silencing effect; it reduces the space for dissent and sidelines oppositional views. Rather than resolving the structural political causes underlying the wars in both countries, contestation over these issues has effectively been put on hold (in Nepal) or is supressed (in Sri Lanka). Secondly, it increases the space for politicking; for political entrepreneurs to elbow their way into government and secure patronage for their constituencies. In short, we might say that the newly delimited sphere of legitimate politics in the post-war contexts represents a curtailment of ‘the political’ and a relative intensification of petty politics. Of course the dynamics of political transition are complex. We acknowledge that in-depth examination of other bases of political legitimation remains beyond the scope of this paper.¹

A shift in the sphere of legitimate politics does not simply obtain as a result of the end of the war, but is the outcome of the work of political actors engaged in processes of legitimation. We argue that, in the post-war context, the reification of national unity and the delivery of patronage are centrally important to the way some politicians claim legitimacy. However, doing so requires them to set aside some of the more contentious or antagonistic issues related to inequality or identity politics. Several of the key issues that were at stake in the wars are thus neutralised, or at least put on hold, while the space for political competition focuses on the distribution of state largess. These adverse effects that we observe are not simply problems of context (the trouble of crafting democracy in a post-war environment), but rather expose more fundamental fallibilities and contradictions of democratic politics. The flux of the post-war moment only makes them more precarious and more visible.

This paper proceeds with a brief note on methodology and context, followed by a conceptual section that places our argument in the literature on South Asian politics (and on political legitimacy in Asia more broadly). The empirical section is organised along the two main strands of our argument – the silencing effects of post-war politics, and the surge of politicking and patronage. Both sections include insights from Nepal and Sri Lanka. These two strands are drawn together again in the conclusion.