3 - Performing an Insurgent Sovereign Experiment

Summary

This chapter discusses the rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) de facto state after the retreat of the Indian military in 1990, when the movement firmly asserted itself as the sole voice of Tamil nationalism, and its climax during the internationalised peace process of the 2000s. The subsequent LTTE defeat and its aftermath are discussed in Chapter 4. Like other insurgent movements and unrecognised forms of government (Arjona, Kasfir and Mampilly 2015; Caspersen 2012; Corcuff 2012; Kyris 2022; Mampilly and Stewart 2021; Staniland 2014; Alice Wilson 2016), the LTTE operated in the conviction that acting like a state may lead to being seen as a state, which may lead to implied forms of acceptance and a better prospect of becoming a state. The movement set out to normalise and stabilise control over people and territory with an array of governing institutions, thus probing its trajectory towards more established institutions and implied forms of recognition. Other authors have described the probationary character of such an unfinished aspirational trajectory as a ‘dress rehearsal’ (McConnell [2016] in relation to Tibet) or an ‘aporetic state’ (Bryant and Hatay [2020] in relation to north Cyprus). I will describe the evolution of the LTTE's institutional framework as a sovereign experiment, an exploratory pursuit that comprises sovereign mimicry and sovereign encroachment.

Sovereign mimicry is a form of citational practice (Weber 1998) whereby insurgencies replicate prior institutions, rules, buildings, uniforms, emblems and flags but make small adjustments. Like any other form of mimicry, this yields outcomes that seem like duplicates of the state but are in fact slightly different, and herein lies their unsettling potential (Bhabha 1994; see also Klem and Maunaguru 2017, 2018). Sovereign encroachment entails a practice of tacit restraint towards the purportedly hostile institutions of the Sri Lankan state and deliberate attempts at percolating and co-opting these institutions – a form of bricolage in support of insurgent assertions of rule. Crucially, the performative efforts of insurgent movements like the LTTE are undergirded by the capacity for violence, of both a disciplinary and a spectacular kind.