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An Ethno-political Accounting of the Sri Lankan Tsunami Impact and Recovery

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The Asian Tsunami and Post-Disaster Aid

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Abstract

New tools aimed at achieving accountability in the delivery of humanitarian assistance offer opportunities to understand the role foreign donors play in the domestic ethno-political landscapes of post-disaster nations. In Sri Lanka, hopes that the Indian Ocean Tsunami would facilitate further rapprochement between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were soon replaced by renewed conflict. Soon after, came widening gaps in the levels of foreign assistance reaching the disproportionately-affected Tamil and Muslim minority communities in the east and north of the island. This paper combines data from the UNDP Development Assistance Database with highly local damage and ethnic composition, to provide an in-depth accounting of the magnitude of post-Tsunami foreign assistance, the role of foreign donors in distributional inequities, and the tragic consequences of the disaster-conflict nexus. While the power bases of both the ruling United National Party and the LTTE received nearly twice the national average level of foreign assistance, the war- and tsunami-ravaged regions of the Eastern Province received as little as half the national average.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By the middle of 2009, however, the civil war in Sri Lanka was over with the defeat and surrender of the LTTE.

Abbreviations

LTTE:

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

CFA:

Cease Fire Agreement

DAD:

Development Assistance Database

DAP:

Dollars per Affected Population

GoSL:

Government of Sri Lanka

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and California Center for Population Research, Los Angeles, USA

    Randall Kuhn

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  1. Randall Kuhn
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Correspondence to Randall Kuhn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health and Adjunct Faculty at the Special Centre for Disaster Research, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Sunita Reddy

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Kuhn, R. (2018). An Ethno-political Accounting of the Sri Lankan Tsunami Impact and Recovery. In: Reddy, S. (eds) The Asian Tsunami and Post-Disaster Aid. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0182-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0182-7_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0181-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0182-7

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