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Politics, Citizenship and Rights pp 345–362Cite as

Between Exclusion and Political Engagement: Conceptualizing Young People’s Everyday Politics in the Postwar Setting of Sri Lanka

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Part of the book series: Geographies of Children and Young People ((GCYP,volume 7))

Abstract

Drawing on findings from research on youths in postwar eastern Sri Lanka, the aim of this chapter is twofold: first to develop a framework for understanding young people’s everyday engagements with politics in the context of the transitions that a postwar setting involves and second to develop an understanding of young people’s political everyday engagement in a context where the state has clearly and quickly moved from a postwar stage to a development stage. The authors find that the different experiences of the violent past and a politicized postwar setting continue to play a role in young people’s lives and form a constrained context in which their political engagement is shaped. Unemployment and lack of involvement in ongoing development initiatives by the state exclude Tamil and Muslim youths from political spaces and from having a political voice at the national level. Instead they are enmeshed in societal and spatial power relations in a political environment that impacts negatively on their identity construction and subjectivities.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya – Deltota – Rikiligaskada Rd, 20400, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

    Fazeeha Azmi

  2. Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Høgskoleringen 1, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Cathrine Brun & Ragnhild Lund

Authors
  1. Fazeeha Azmi
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  2. Cathrine Brun
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  3. Ragnhild Lund
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fazeeha Azmi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), Centre of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization (RELATE), University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Kirsi Pauliina Kallio

  2. Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, United Kingdom

    Sarah Mills

  3. Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Tracey Skelton

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

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Azmi, F., Brun, C., Lund, R. (2016). Between Exclusion and Political Engagement: Conceptualizing Young People’s Everyday Politics in the Postwar Setting of Sri Lanka. In: Kallio, K., Mills, S., Skelton, T. (eds) Politics, Citizenship and Rights. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-57-6_31

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