Concepts and Methods

This article focuses on violent forms of conflict between ethnoreligious groups. “Conflict,” simply put, represents “perceived differences in interests, views, or goals” (Deutsch 1973). “Violence,” on the other hand, may be classified in terms of its nature: physical, nonphysical, or structural. These first two types of violence are included in conventional definitions, such as the definition offered by the World Health Organisation (2015, 2): “[T]he intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.” Johan Galtung (1969; Tanner 2007) observes that social structures or social institutions that prevent individuals from meeting their basic needs inflict “structural violence.” Thus, certain intensely discriminatory practices may amount to structural forms of violence, although they do not necessarily fall within the scope of physical or nonphysical violence. This article adopts a broad definition of violence that includes the physical, the nonphysical, and the structural. Such a broad definition is important to conceptualizing violent ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka.

Identity politics play a pivotal role in the persistence of violent conflict in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans identify themselves mainly along ethnic and religious lines, and official statistics on the population are presented separately on ethnic and religious bases. According to the most recent census carried out in Sri Lanka in 2012, in terms of ethnic identity, Sinhalese make up 74.9 percent of the population. Tamils constitute 15.2 percent (including Hill Country Tamils, who constitute 4 percent), and Moors constitute 9.2 percent. In terms of religious identity, over 70 percent of the population is Buddhist. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians respectively constitute 12.6 percent, 9.7 percent and 7.4 percent of the population (Department of Census and Statistics 2012).

Some scholars use the term “ethnoreligious” to describe certain identity groups to emphasize the intersectional nature of their identity (Yang and Ebaugh 2001). Others observe that the line between ethnicity and religion is often blurred because ethnicity and religion closely overlap in places such as Sri Lanka (Stewart 2009; Smock 2008). Given the existence of intersecting and overlapping identity strands, a notion of ethnoreligious identities has emerged in Sri Lanka. The identities “Sinhala-Buddhist,” “Muslim,” “Tamil-Hindu” can be understood as ethnoreligious identities. Such identities form a discrete category, i.e., “ethnoreligious” rather than merely a combination of the two identity categories “ethnic” and “religious.” Importantly, the majority community in Sri Lanka—Sinhala-Buddhists—must be understood as a discrete identity group rather than a group that has two separate identity markers. By contrast, Christians in Sri Lanka are not a single community, as they belong to separate ethnic groups (Sinhalese, Tamil, or Burgher) and identify as part of different Christian denominations (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, etc.). These demographic intricacies underscore the complexity of intercommunal violent conflict in Sri Lanka. While some scholars have contested using the term “ethnoreligious” as a legal category (Pérez-León-Acevedo and Pinto 2021), it remains useful to understand certain aspects of such conflict. The nature of such conflict may be better understood when it is conceptualized as “ethnoreligious” rather than merely “ethnic” or “religious.” Compromise in ethnoreligious conflict can be elusive, as the combined complexities of the ethnic and the religious make such conflict particularly difficult to resolve (Kaplan 2015, 422).

The methodological approach undertaken in this article includes two components: a review of secondary literature on ethnoreligious violence in Sri Lanka; and primary, qualitative research on how faith-based actors engage in ethnoreligious conflict resolution. The qualitative research included thirty key informant interviews and four focus group discussions with civil society actors, including religious leaders and members of faith-based organizations, lawyers, journalists, and academics.

Typically, a faith-based mechanism is a conflict resolution mechanism that uses faith as a frame of reference. A subset of these mechanisms would be interfaith initiatives, which bring actors of different faiths to the same forum to resolve conflicts. As a point of comparison, civil society actors, including women’s rights activists, who do not rely on faith as a frame of reference in their work, were also interviewed. Field visits were conducted in October and November 2022 in Colombo and several locations in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, including Batticaloa Town, Kallady, Kattankudy, Kalmunai, Sainthamaruthu, and Samanthurai. The overall sample of research participants reflected a mix of ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender, age, and disability.

The Eastern Province in Sri Lanka was selected as a case study to assess the effectiveness of faith-based mechanisms in preventing and mitigating violent conflict. The province was selected for two reasons. First, it features the major ethnoreligious groups in Sri Lanka and is one of the notable theatres of violent conflict in the country. The province is historically linked to the armed conflict between the state and Tamil militants and between Tamil militants and Muslims. It has also been the primary region from which radical Islamist groups have allegedly emerged. For instance, the National Thowheed Jamaat, a group alleged to have been responsible for the 2019 Easter Sunday Attacks (Bradsher and Garcia 2019), allegedly emerged out of the Batticaloa District. Second, the province has featured a significant number of faith-based conflict resolution mechanisms.

The Context of Ethnoreligious Conflict

Since the end of the armed conflict between the state and Tamil separatists in 2009, Sri Lanka has witnessed a rapid rise in violence of a distinctly ethnoreligious nature. Such violence coincides with the emergence of Sinhala-Buddhist militant groups such as Bodu Bala Sena, whose principal targets have been ethnoreligious minorities.

During this post-war period, violence against religious minorities—particularly Muslims and Christians—has increased. For example, widespread anti-Muslim mob violence took place in the Southern Province in 2014 and 2017, in the Central Province in 2018, in the Eastern Province in 2018, and in the Western Province and North-Western Province in 2019. In most of these episodes, common altercations such as traffic disputes or arguments at restaurants triggered widespread mob violence. The 2019 Easter Sunday Attacks meanwhile featured coordinated suicide bombings of three Christian places of worship and three hotels by an Islamist group. The attacks claimed the lives of over 250 people.

The emergence of post-war ethnoreligious conflict is particularly evident in the Eastern Province, as tensions there have heightened between Hindus and Muslims and between Hindus and Christians. Tamil-Hindu nationalist groups have emerged in this context and contributed to heightened tensions. For example, groups such as Siva Senai emerged in the post-war context and remain instigators of ethnoreligious conflict between Tamil-Hindus and other groups (Fuller 2018). Additionally, Ampara, a district in the Eastern Province, has become an area in which Sinhala-Buddhist militant groups have launched propaganda campaigns against Muslims. Such campaigns have underscored anti-Muslim violence in Ampara. For example, in February 2018, anti-Muslim mob violence broke out following an incident at a Muslim-owned restaurant where a Sinhalese customer accused the restaurant of mixing “sterilization pills” in his food (Wettimuny 2018). Militant groups thereafter posted propaganda on social media platforms claiming these “pills” were part of a Muslim conspiracy to reduce the population of Sinhala-Buddhists in the country.

The overarching context of ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka reflects the complex and cyclical nature of violence. The cyclical relationship between majoritarian violence on the one hand and violent radicalization within minority communities on the other is illustrated in the sequence leading up to the Easter Sunday Attacks and their aftermath. Years of anti-Muslim violence and discrimination are likely to have prompted disenchanted members of the Muslim community to gravitate towards radical forms of Islamism (Gunatilleke 2023, 126). In turn, Sinhala-Buddhist militant groups point to such radicalism to justify further hostility and violence towards Muslims. Thus, the sustainable resolution of violent ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka requires a deeper analysis of the underlying drivers of such conflict.

Certain long-term—and often entrenched—phenomena observable within communities can explain to some extent how and why such conflict has persisted in Sri Lanka. These phenomena may be described as drivers of ethnoreligious conflict. Any mechanism that sets out to engage in meaningful conflict resolution in Sri Lanka must invariably confront these underlying drivers. This section outlines two such drivers of conflict in Sri Lanka: entitlement complexes and existential fears.

The culmination of generations of political and ideological discourses, and socialization through school curricula, has produced a distinct entitlement complex among some segments of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority community. This complex is founded on the belief that Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country and “belongs” to the Sinhala-Buddhists, who are the original inhabitants of the island (DeVotta 2007, 5). This same complex held by some members of the Sinhala-Buddhist community may manifest similarly in the case of regional or local majorities. Hindus, Muslims, and mainline Christians have similar entitlement complexes when they enjoy majority status in specific regional or local contexts.

Existential fears often accompany entitlement complexes. Some Sinhala-Buddhists, for instance, feel deep existential fears that their dominant status at the national level may be eroded by the activities of Tamils, Muslims, and Christians. Similarly, certain members of the Hindu, Muslim, and mainline Christian communities possess existential fears connected to their regional entitlement complexes. Certain specific phenomena tend to trigger these national- and regional-level existential fears. First, there are fears that Muslim population growth and perceived Muslim dominance over trade threaten the numerical majority and economic prosperity of other communities. Moreover, competition between certain Islamic groups has led to overt assertions of Muslim identity and piety, thereby increasing the overall visibility of Muslim religious practices (Klem 2011). Typical examples of such external manifestations may include women wearing hijāb (various forms of head coverings) and niqāb (a cloth that covers the face of a woman wearing hijāb). Although the precise reasons for assertions of Muslim identity can be complex and multifaceted (Haniffa 2008), such assertions can underscore ethnoreligious conflict (McGilvray 2011; Faslan and Vanniasinkam 2015, 22). Second, Christian proselytization is perceived as a threat to the numerical and cultural dominance of other communities. This threat has historical roots, as the propagation of Christianity is associated with the colonial missionary projects through which many Buddhists and Hindus converted to Christianity (Schonthal 2016, 224). It also evokes historical memories of physical, nonphysical, and structural violence by colonial administrations against Buddhists and Hindus (De Silva 2005, 128).

Apart from the drivers of violent conflict, local dynamics between ethnoreligious groups often contain economic, political, and sociocultural tensions. These “fault lines” of ethnoreligious conflict may, either by themselves or in combination with more deeply rooted drivers of conflict, produce the conditions for violent ethnoreligious conflict.

Economic fault lines often underlie violent conflict. Scholars have argued that competition over scarce resources, such as land, capital, and business opportunities, creates the conditions for violent intercommunal conflict (Silva et al 2020, 49). Apart from general competition over trade and economic space, certain specific economic issues underlie ethnoreligious conflict in the Eastern Province. For example, disputes over land remain a constant source of tension. Several key informants based in Batticaloa Town and Kattankudy intimated that one of the primary fault lines between Tamils and Muslims in the area boils down to the scarcity of land and competition for resources.

Political fault lines, such as disputes over power-sharing arrangements, underlie political tensions between Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims. The Eastern Province in particular features some of these tensions. According to key informants, these tensions are evident in areas such as Kalmunai in Ampara. There is greater Muslim political representation in the Kalmunai Municipal Council than Tamil. This fact has engendered claims of Tamil marginalization and discrimination in terms of accessing state services. Muslims in Kattankudy similarly claim marginalization due to Tamil dominance in the Batticaloa district.

Certain sociocultural fault lines also underlie ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka. For instance, disputes over burial rites can form the backdrop for ethnoreligious conflict (NCEASL 2018). In many of these incidents, the minority community is compelled to either conduct burial rites according to the majority religion of the area or relocate to another cemetery. The question of Christian proselytization is often at the heart of such conflict. According to some key informants, resistance to Christian burials is motivated by antipathy towards proselytization. Therefore, taking custody of corpses and forcibly holding funeral rites according to the majority religion of an area symbolically serve to undo the conversion to Christianity.

Conflict Resolution Framework

There are several valuable theoretical frameworks on conflict resolution to draw from, the most significant of which is perhaps Johan Galtung’s (1969) theory of “positive” and “negative” peace. John Burton and Abraham Harold Maslow have meanwhile presented theories of conflict resolution based on addressing human needs, such as security and recognition (Burton 1990) and basic needs and self-actualization (Maslow 1987). For the purpose of this study, however, I have adopted a programmatic approach to conflict resolution that relies on a theory of specific objectives, activities, and approaches relating to ethnoreligious conflict resolution. While this framework is drawn from the Sri Lankan experience, it is hoped that it has relevance and applicability to any conflict resolution context.

This conflict resolution framework (Figure 1) contains three distinct activities. First, addressing the drivers and fault lines of conflict is crucial to conflict resolution. Addressing these fundamental drivers in many ways corresponds to achieving positive peace by meeting the fundamental human needs that underlie conflict. Second, the prevention of escalation (from tensions to violence) is required when complex drivers of conflict produce tensions that cannot be avoided easily. The third activity is the containment of violence, which is pragmatically necessary when initiatives that aim to prevent violent conflict are unsuccessful. The manner and extent of such containment become crucial to avoiding cycles of violence.

Figure 1: Conflict resolution framework.

As depicted in Figure 1, these three activities correspond to the two objectives embedded in the conflict resolution framework. The first two activities relate to the objective of conflict prevention, as they essentially seek to prevent ethnoreligious violence from occurring. The third activity relates to conflict mitigation, as it seeks to contain violence once it occurs. The conflict resolution framework also considers two distinct approaches to conflict resolution. First, a “proactive” approach is required to prevent violent conflict. Second, a “reactive” approach is required to prevent escalation and mitigate violent conflict when it occurs.

The effectiveness of faith-based conflict resolution mechanisms may be assessed in relation to the objectives, activities, and approaches contemplated in this theoretical framework.

Assessing Faith-Based Mechanisms

There is a rich literature on the role faith can play in intercommunal conflict resolution. As observed by Abdul Aziz Said and Nathan Funk, “[i]n promulgating the ideals and values held in the highest esteem by groups and individuals, religion profoundly influences goal-seeking behavior in conflict situations, by establishing the criteria or frames of reference for determining the rightness and wrongness of events” (Said and Funk 2001). Accordingly, faith actors have had a long history of intervening to resolve conflict. Their interventions are often grounded in their respective faith doctrines. For instance, Christians are taught that [b]lessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9 NIV). The Holy Qur’ān teaches Muslims to take the initiative for peace, reconciliation, and dialogue (Shippee 2003, 245). While Buddhism focuses on introspection in seeking answers to human suffering (Ghosananda, 1992), there are well-established Buddhist theories of conflict transformation that focus on relationships between conflicting parties (Galtung 1988; Arai 2015).

Prior to assessing the effectiveness of faith-based mechanisms, it is important to locate such mechanisms within the broader conflict resolution landscape. Conflict resolution mechanisms can be placed across a spectrum of informal to formal mechanisms. Negotiation, which involves a process of conversation between conflicting parties to arrive at a settlement, is perhaps at one end of the spectrum as the most informal mechanism. Mediation, which involves a third-party facilitator, may be described as informal or semiformal if carried out by some officially recognized entity. Negotiation and mediation are essentially cooperative and integrative forms of conflict resolution (Sanson and Bretherton 2001) and do not rely on legal rules as such. Arbitration and litigation may be placed at the other end of the spectrum and can be viewed as more formal adjudicative means of conflict resolution. These latter two mechanisms are essentially “rights-based” forms of conflict resolution, as they rely on legal rules (Sanson and Bretherton 2001). Faith-based mechanisms may ordinarily be located at the informal end of the spectrum and mostly involve negotiation and mediation. Such mechanisms may also occasionally take on a semiformal character, such as, for example, mediation by Muslim qadis.

Faith-based mechanisms in Sri Lanka function alongside several formal, semiformal, and informal mechanisms designed to resolve ethnoreligious conflict there. At the formal and the semiformal levels, several mechanisms warrant mention. Courts at various levels are available for parties to litigate their disputes and seek judicial remedies. Mediation boards have also been set up to resolve disputes, including those that take place at the community level. While ethnoreligious conflict is not necessarily the focus of such courts and boards, they do on occasion deal with conflicts that have an ethnoreligious dimension. For example, they may deal with land and commercial disputes between individuals from two different ethnoreligious groups. Next, community policing committees have been set up in several locations, including Trincomalee and Ampara in the Eastern Province. These committees comprise police, state officials, and community leaders, including members of the clergy, and provide a forum for community-level disputes to be resolved. These committees frequently deal with disputes of an ethnoreligious nature. Finally, District Reconciliation Committees, established by the former Ministry of National Integration and Reconciliation, have a mandate to inquire into community-level conflicts and mediate solutions. These committees, comprising community representatives, religious leaders, and law enforcement officials, are convened by the district secretary and have a mandate to serve as early warning mechanisms to detect tensions before they escalate to violence.

Apart from these formal and semiformal mechanisms, the nongovernmental sector offers a number of informal mechanisms designed to prevent and mitigate ethnoreligious conflict. These mechanisms are typically funded by international donors such as the European Union, the British government, and USAID. District Inter-Religious Committees (DIRCs) are the most prominent and widespread of such mechanisms. DIRCs are in fact the quintessential faith-based conflict resolution mechanism in Sri Lanka. Apart from DIRCs, more than thirty informal mechanisms exist in Sri Lanka and at least a dozen such mechanisms operate in the Eastern Province. In fact, many such mechanisms have overlapping mandates and often duplicate activities.

I begin the assessment of faith-based mechanisms by examining how they engage in the first activity within the conflict resolution framework: addressing drivers and fault lines of conflict.

Very few faith-based actors interviewed acknowledged communal entitlement complexes as drivers of ethnoreligious conflict. In fact, many appeared to subscribe to such complexes themselves. For example, a Buddhist monk, who was a reasonably active promoter of intercommunal coexistence in the Eastern Province, suggested that the dominant culture of the country should govern the practices of all communities. The dominant culture he referred to was unmistakably Buddhist culture. For many actors working on intercommunal coexistence, the fundamental parameters of coexistence were determined by which community was entitled to act as the “host” in the area and which was the “guest.” This “host–guest” relationship had a national dimension—where Sinhala-Buddhists were the “hosts” and all other communities were “guests.” It also had a subnational dimension—where a particular community could be the regional “host” and other communities the regional “guests.” The terms of coexistence were thus bound by preexisting entitlement complexes.

This tendency of faith-based mechanisms to legitimize faith actors with problematic views had a negative impact in other spheres. Some key informants, including women’s rights activists, added that faith-based mechanisms occasionally exacerbate the underlying sociocultural fault lines that drive conflict. For example, they observed that conservative faith actors, including Buddhist monks and Muslim clerics, resisted emancipatory initiatives that advanced women’s rights while still participating in interfaith conflict resolution mechanisms. They argued that such actors on the one hand enabled structural violence against women—such as, for example, forced marriage and impositions of conservative attire—while promoting intercommunal harmony on the other.

Faith-based mechanisms were thus generally disinclined to engage in strategies and interventions that confronted entitlement complexes. These mechanisms tended to focus on similarities between communities and had grown accustomed to a particular vocabulary of “sameness.” In many instances, a typical “workshop” or “meeting” between actors of different faiths avoided uncomfortable discussions on entitlement complexes and focused more on areas of consensus or manifest tensions. This careful avoidance reflects a general lack of appetite among faith-based mechanisms to confront deep-rooted drivers of conflict, such as majoritarian notions of identity.

While it is true that existing faith-based mechanisms lack the will to engage on such issues, their actual capacity to transform society, even if they had the will to do so, is somewhat limited. Drivers of conflict are deeply entrenched within the political, social, and cultural fabric of Sri Lankan society (Gunatilleke 2018). Strategies for transformation must necessarily be long term—even intergenerational. Faith-based mechanisms encounter two practical challenges in this regard. First, faith-based activities are often limited in their scope and reach only a handful of actors. For instance, school “exposure visits,” where children from one community visit children from other communities, can be carried out only in a limited number of schools in the district, and only on a limited number of occasions. Thus, even when activities to address conflict drivers are carried out, they can often fail to reach a critical mass of actors needed to be “transformative.” Second, the nature of the membership of faith-based organizations, i.e., their tendency to attract persons aged thirty years and older, and particularly over fifty years, results in faith-based mechanisms not reaching youth outside the school system. Faith-based mechanisms thus lack the programmatic bandwidth and membership profile to sustainably contribute towards transformative projects. By contrast, organizations that work on education reform, including history curricula reform, are often better placed to transform the aspects of socialization that perpetuate entitlement complexes.

Key informants working within faith-based mechanisms did, however, identify existential fears among communities as a possible driver of conflict. For example, a Buddhist monk who is a member of the Trincomalee DIRC expressed concern that Buddhist temples were losing their appeal among youth and that fewer people were attending sermons. He explained that these changes contributed towards resentment and anxiety among the Buddhist clergy that their influence in society was diminishing. Meanwhile, several Hindu members of the Trincomalee DIRC explained the context in which a dispute arose in a Hindu-majority school over Muslim teachers wearing the abhaya. It was intimated that Hindu parents feared that Muslim teachers were promoting “Islamic culture” in a predominantly Hindu school and that overtly Muslim attire diluted Hindu culture within the school. Meanwhile, Muslim DIRC members in Ampara pointed to a deterioration in the security of the Muslim community and described a general ethos of fear among the community. These members explained that such fears drove intercommunal suspicion, antagonism, and tensions.

In contrast to their reluctance to confront entitlement complexes, faith-based mechanisms do confront existential fears through interventions designed to increase intercommunal interaction. They also pay attention to the local contexts in which intercommunal conflicts, such as competition for resources and services, political disagreements, and sociocultural disputes, emerge. For instance, each DIRC maintains a “register of issues” in which intercommunal conflicts in the area (as reported by DIRC members) are logged. The issues are then discussed during DIRC meetings, and the members strategize about how to address them in order to prevent communal tensions and violence from emerging.

I now turn to the second activity in the conflict resolution framework: de-escalation. This activity is reactive—as opposed to proactive—because it essentially involves responding to conflict as and when it arises.

Community influencers are actors who are positioned to influence behavior and attitudes within a community. Such actors include religious leaders, civil society leaders, business leaders, and political actors. Local Buddhist monks are perhaps the most influential in this regard. The role of community influencers—particularly religious leaders—in preventing violence is well documented. In fact, some studies, such as a study by Pradeep Peiris (2018), argue that strong relationships between religious leaders within a particular community can often be more important to advancing ethnoreligious coexistence than the effective functioning of law enforcement authorities. When a tense situation arises, these actors are often invaluable to arresting such a situation and preventing escalation. A Buddhist monk who is a member of the Trincomalee DIRC recalled an incident in which a Bo tree—a sacred and protected Buddhist symbol—had begun to grow on the property of a Hindu kovil (temple). The initiative to cut the tree down gave rise to major tensions in the area. However, this monk, together with several other religious and community leaders, was able to mediate the situation and prevent escalation.

Actors operating within faith-based mechanisms seem to understand the crucial role community influencers can play in de-escalation. They prioritize the participation of influencers, including clergy, community leaders, business leaders, mediation board members, government servants, and politicians in their dialogues. However, the dialogues themselves are not always effective in terms of achieving tangible and sustainable outcomes. For example, discussions on the drivers of conflict at times lack depth. Yet, these activities serve an important purpose in terms of ensuring community influencers build mutual trust, respect, and familiarity, which enable them to coordinate better and work together when ethnoreligious conflict arises within the community. But this relative strength of faith-based mechanisms is limited to de-escalating offline tensions and does not extend to countering online hate speech and incitement that can eventually lead to offline violence. The inability of faith-based mechanisms to attract young persons to join and participate within their membership contributes to this weakness.

Next, faith-based mechanisms may be assessed in terms of the third activity in the conflict resolution framework: containment. Where measures to prevent the escalation of intercommunal tensions are unsuccessful, actual physical violence can break out. In such contexts, the capacity of actors working within faith-based mechanisms to mitigate the spread of violence and bring violence to an end is limited. Containing violence essentially requires the intervention of law enforcement authorities. The question then arises as to what faith-based actors in informal mechanisms such as DIRCs can do to motivate the intervention of such authorities.

Two types of activities are relevant in this regard. First, faith-based mechanisms could directly engage law enforcement authorities by appealing for interventions when violence takes place. This type of engagement is possible particularly where sound relationships and networks have been built with law enforcement authorities. At times, simultaneously serving on semiformal conflict resolution mechanisms, such as mediation boards or DRCs, may help particular faith actors access law enforcement authorities who also participate in such semiformal mechanisms. Meanwhile, the inclusion of influential religious leaders among the membership of faith-based mechanisms can be advantageous in this regard, as law enforcement authorities are particularly responsive to appeals by religious leaders (Spencer et al. 2015). For example, some key informants observed that many within their membership, including Buddhist monks, Muslim clerics, and Catholic priests, engage and animate local police when localized violence erupts. They share information with the police and encourage interventions to mitigate the violence and bring the situation under control.

Second, members of faith-based mechanisms have the potential to animate law enforcement authorities to intervene by raising public awareness of violence and prompting political authorities to issue necessary instructions. Where there is state inaction, faith-based actors can indirectly animate the intervention of law enforcement authorities by appealing to forces that incentivize such intervention. The alternative media is crucial in this regard, particularly in a context where the mainstream media is reticent about reporting on intercommunal violence. For example, the mainstream media severely downplayed anti-Muslim mob violence in the Southern Province in 2014 and in the Central Province in 2018 (Haniffa et al 2018). In this context, many civil society actors used their own channels via social media platforms to disseminate information about the violence and call for the intervention of law enforcement authorities. It is public outrage—generated through alternative channels—that often animates law enforcement authorities to act. However, many faith-based mechanisms lack the capacity to use alternative media, including social media platforms, effectively. Once again, a major impediment to gaining such capacity is the relatively low participation of youth in faith-based mechanisms. Therefore, while the potential exists for faith-based mechanisms to make positive contributions towards the mitigation of violent conflict through animating the intervention of law enforcement authorities, this potential is not always fulfilled.

Conclusion

This article set out to assess the effectiveness of faith-based mechanisms in preventing and mitigating violent ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka. What emerges from the study of these mechanisms is that they do have relative strengths. Yet, they also suffer from serious weaknesses. This concluding section summarizes the main strengths and weaknesses of faith-based mechanisms. While these insights are specific to Sri Lanka, they also tell us about the kinds of challenges faith-based mechanisms encounter more generally. Therefore, it is hoped that this concluding discussion aids scholarly work with respect to faith-based mechanisms operating in comparable contexts elsewhere.

First, in terms of addressing entitlement complexes that drive conflict, faith-based mechanisms are weak in their knowledge and understanding of such complexes. They are generally reluctant to generate meaningful conversations about such complexes both at the national and regional levels. Such mechanisms also, to some extent, legitimize ethnoreligious entitlement by reinforcing the prominence and exceptionalism of faith actors who themselves subscribe to narratives of entitlement.

Second, faith-based mechanisms are generally sound in their knowledge and understanding of existential fears and their willingness to discuss such fears at the national and regional levels. These mechanisms are also effective in terms of their willingness to understand and discuss economic, political, and sociocultural fault lines within communities. Faith-based mechanisms thus provide useful fora for discussing real and imagined intercommunal grievances and finding sensible solutions to avoid conflict.

Third, in terms of de-escalating tensions, the special societal credibility of faith actors enables faith-based mechanisms to effectively engage conflicting parties to de-escalate tensions. However, this strength tends to be limited to offline discourse. By contrast, faith-based mechanisms are weak in terms of their ability to de-escalate tensions that emerge online, primarily due to low levels of youth participation in such mechanisms.

Finally, in terms of containing violence, the special legitimacy faith actors have among state institutions enables faith-based mechanisms to effectively animate state law enforcement authorities to intervene to contain violent episodes. However, these mechanisms are not always effective in generating public awareness and outrage with respect to violent episodes, as they are unable to effectively utilize alternative media channels. Low levels of youth participation in faith-based mechanisms account for this lack of capacity.

Sri Lanka’s conflict resolution landscape comprising formal, semiformal, and informal mechanisms, including faith-based mechanisms, may be viewed as an ecosystem. On the one hand, such an ecosystem can contain a fair amount of competition—both healthy and unhealthy—as many of the mechanisms within the system compete for operational space. There is certainly duplication and overlap, where various mechanisms have identical mandates, and the same actors participate in several mechanisms. On the other hand, the mechanisms within the ecosystem can cumulatively offer effective means of preventing and mitigating violent ethnoreligious conflict. This potential is, however, contingent on the relative strengths of conflict resolution mechanisms, including faith-based mechanisms, being effectively leveraged. For instance, the relatively high levels of authority among formal mechanisms such as community policing ought to be leveraged alongside the relatively high levels of community engagement capacity seen among informal mechanisms.

Faith-based mechanisms have an important role to play within this ecosystem. The unique credibility faith actors possess can be leveraged to resolve localized disputes, de-escalate tensions, and animate law enforcement authorities to contain violence. Yet, faith-based organizations have serious limitations, and chief among them is their tendency to legitimize the very actors—faith leaders—who often propagate notions of entitlement, which can then perpetuate ethnoreligious conflict. Hence, it is crucial that faith-based mechanisms are viewed through a critical lens and acknowledged as being valuable in some respects but harmful in others. Ultimately, the effective prevention and mitigation of violent ethnoreligious conflict in Sri Lanka depends on avoiding overreliance on faith-based mechanisms and utilizing faith actors only for the specific strengths they offer within a conflict resolution ecosystem.