Studying Sri Lanka
BY MIKE UNGER
Love can blindside the best of us. When SIS professor John Richardson was looking for a new challenge in the mid-1980s, he accepted a position as a visiting professor at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Richardson was studying development issues and figured the one semester appointment would provide a great chance to experience firsthand the difficulties faced by developing nations entangled in conflict. The small Indian Ocean island nation was engulfed in not one, but two civil wars.
John Richardson, right, with students
“I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to deepen my understanding of these kinds of conflicts by actually living in the midst of one while I was doing my teaching,” he says. “It definitely achieved that goal, and then something funny happened. I kind of fell in love with Sri Lanka. Falling in love with something is hard to describe. I have always felt good, felt comfortable, felt at home when I was in the country. There was something about my temperament and the culture there that fit together very well.”
Ever since then Sri Lanka has become Richardson’s home away from home. He returns two to three times a year, and has positioned himself as one of the world’s foremost experts on the country. In March he culminated many years of study and research by publishing Paradise Poisoned, a voluminous history of Sri Lanka that also examines how other developing nations can learn from its troubled past.
“From being somebody whose scholarly work had been at a very high level of aggregation and would make the theoretical argument, I really became somebody who was deeply immersed in the culture of quite a small country,” he says.
By 2001 Richardson had completed a manuscript, but he soon realized that the premise upon which he started the project had shifted.
“It struck me that this was not just the work of somebody who by now was pretty knowledgeable about Sri Lanka’s history and culture and politics and economy, but what I had to offer were lessons that could be drawn from that and be more broadly applicable. The book as it finally emerged has a core of the Sri Lankan experience but draws from that lessons for broader communities who are concerned with development and security.”
In examining Sri Lanka’s history, both its missteps and its successes, Richardson presents 10 policies that he believes will help prevent conflict and terrorism in developing nations.
“Three of these are particularly important because they are out of the mainstream,” he says. “The first is the importance of attending to the needs of youth, particularly young men. These are the foot soldiers and some of the leaders of militant movements. So if you have, as you have in Iraq, for example, 50, 60, 70 percent unemployment, you have young men who have hopes and dreams—they’re not that much different than the students who live in Anderson Hall with me in many ways—they have nothing to do, and they see very little hope in the established order. If you have a charismatic militant leader who says I’m going to put a gun in your hand and show you a path to create a new society or perhaps to live eternally in paradise, this is very attractive, if you can see nothing else.”
The vital importance of policing—how they are trained, how they are paid, how they are treated—and the role of the business community also are essential in developing countries, Richardson argues.
Today, a fragile peace has taken hold in Sri Lanka, a nation roughly the size of West Virginia with a population of 19 million people. On Nov. 18, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse was elected president by a narrow margin. According to the Associated Press, balloting went smoothly in western and southern parts of the nation, but in the north and east—territory of the Tamil Tiger rebels—grenade attacks, roadblocks, and fear kept many ethnic Tamils from voting.
It is remarkable that in a country so fractured, an outsider’s analysis has garnered so much respect across the political spectrum. The first printing of Paradise Poisoned sold out in Sri Lanka in six weeks.
“There aren’t too many who have studied Sri Lanka in recent times as closely as he has,” says Ravinatha Aryasinha, Sri Lanka’s deputy chief of mission at its American embassy and an SIS doctoral student who has known Richardson for 18 years. “He can say something that people don’t agree with because he’s viewed as a supporter of Sri Lanka. He genuinely loves the country and aims to be fair. It’s a very interesting vantage point.”
Richardson promised himself that unlike many academics, after the book came out he would not immediately embark on his next project. Instead, he is working diligently to get the book’s ideas into the public arena.
“I’ve been studying Sri Lanka as my major professional interest for 20 years now, and every year I learn something new,” says Richardson, who hopes to spend three months a year living there when he retires. “I’ve been at this for 18 years, so maybe in 10 years if I keep working in this little country where I have made a huge investment in building respect I may begin making some headway.”
Reprinted from American Weekly, Nov. 29, 2005.
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