Professor Sahadevan lectured on Post-Civil War Sri Lanka during Nordic tour

23–24 May 2012, Professor P. Sahadevan, Professor of South Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India, visited SASNET and Lund University. In a seminar jointly organised by SASNET and the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University, he lectured about ”Challenges to Peace and Reconciliation in Post-Civil War Sri Lanka”. 
In his presentation, he discussed the dawn of a new political life and qualitatively different challenges facing both the state and nation, that connotes the end of the 26-year long ethnic war in Sri Lanka. The country has entered a 'post-war situation' marked by absence of manifest violence, armed resistance movements and open use of military coercion as a state policy. However, post-war Sri Lanka is yet to become a post-conflict society. This underlines the need for a permanent political solution aimed at redressing the legitimate grievances of the Sri Lankan Tamil community. Yet, a political solution is far from the reality. Where is Sri Lanka heading towards? What are the post-war realities? Does the international community have a role to play in the conflict? Prof. Sahadevan tried to identify the emerging trends and challenges to peace and reconciliation in the island. See the conference poster.

Prof. Sahadevan, who is also Editor-in-Chief of International Studies – a quarterly journal published by SAGE Publications, visited Lund University as part of a Scandinavian tour carried outy with a twofold aim – to see how centres for Peace and Development studies function in Norway and Sweden, as well as collect material for an article on the Sri Lankan diaspora that he works currently on. In this trip lasting one month he visited, among others, the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen, the Centre for Peace Studies in Tromsø, the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), and others. In Sweden he visited the four major universities in Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala, and delivered a number of lectures.