Neil DeVotta — Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology: Implications for Politics and Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka

79 published claims from this book.

• A foundational sufferance belief justifies enduring Sinhalese superordination over minorities.
• A leftist party adopted anti-Tamil nationalism opportunistically when politically expedient
• A majoritarian Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ethos is now broadly accepted across Sri Lankan society
• A monk’s rhetoric conflating missionaries with the LTTE redirected nationalist violence onto Christians.
• A natural death, reframed as conspiracy, triggered fifty-four church attacks within a month.
• A religious anniversary let nationalists recast a language dispute as a Buddhist issue
• Adopting nationalist ideology produced mass civilian killing and displacement without prosecution
• Anti-conversion violence targets Catholics who do not actively proselytize.
• Bandaranaike manufactured a Sinhala-only platform to outbid rivals despite earlier bilingual solidarity
• British colonizers broke treaty pledges and backed Christianity’s conversion drive
• Buddha statues serve as deliberate territorial markers against minorities
• Buddhist leaders claim missionaries desecrate Buddha images in conversion rites
• Colonial-era Tamil overrepresentation and Buddhist marginalization jointly produced the Sinhala-only demand
• Courts apply religious restrictions unequally to Christians versus Buddhists and Muslims.
• Defeating the LTTE may strengthen rather than soften Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist dominance
• Elite party entrepreneurs manufacture a victimhood narrative to mobilize ethnic solidarity
• Elite-engineered demographic mobilization fails against structural incentives
• Founding myths silently bury inconvenient facts of shared ancestry
• Illiberalism aimed at minorities eventually spreads to harm the majority too
• Institutionalized nationalist ideology forecloses federal settlement even after the war ends
• Jaffna’s population fell from 795 to 528 per square kilometer by 2001
• Language offered Sinhalese a unifying identity that overrode internal religious division
• Leading monks reinterpret Buddhist doctrine to justify war and Sinhalese majority rule
• Linguistic identity unified Sinhalese across religious lines while dividing them from Tamils
• LTTE attacks on Buddhist sacred sites hardened Sinhalese antipathy
• LTTE coercion of civilians rationalizes the military’s refusal to distinguish fighters from civilians
• Modern politicians actively map themselves onto mythic warrior-kings to claim legitimacy
• Modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism’s founding figure emerged from Buddhism’s colonial marginalization
• Monks frame Buddhism’s special status as necessary protection against a hostile world
• Monks’ political role was retroactively reconstructed by a 1946 book to legitimate later politicking.
• Nationalist demographic anxiety targets the ethnic minority despite lower population density there
• Nationalist monks weaponized a death anniversary to ban cultural events and incite grenade attacks.
• Nationalist refusal to question the state serves their crafted preferences
• Nationalist scholars framed Buddhism and Sinhalese identity as inseparable, dehumanizing non-Buddhists
• Nationalists frame demographic fertility as a weapon for territorial control
• Nationalists tolerate out-group elites only when they endorse majority domination
• Political parties strategically use monks for legitimacy while resisting their influence
• Political parties weaponize conversion bills to outmaneuver each other.
• Post-1956 Sri Lankan extremists sustained each other by feeding off reciprocal escalation
• Radical monks seek constitutional veto power they lack training to exercise
• Religious leaders stoked fears of mass conversion to justify anti-Christian violence
• Renaming Tamil towns with Sinhala names advances nationalist demographic goals
• Sinhala language conflates nation, race, and people so deeply that multiethnic polity seems incomprehensible
• Sinhalese Buddhist historiographical tradition itself supports ethnic political violence
• Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism manufactures substitute enemies when its primary one is absent
• Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism will persist and could expand to other minorities
• Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology casts minorities as tolerated guests in a Sinhalese island
• Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology itself blocks Sri Lankan conflict resolution
• Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology requires a manufactured enemy to mobilize and survive
• Sinhalese Buddhist state-church symbiosis historically trumped ethnic identity of rulers
• Sinhalese Buddhist violence stems from socio-psychological cravings rather than from Buddhism’s actual doctrines.
• Sinhalese elites openly threatened genocide against Tamils weeks after anti-Tamil riots
• Sinhalese governments manufactured Tamil separatism through base-securing ethnocentric competition.
• Sinhalese nationalist identity rests on a manufactured sacred history.
• Sinhalese nationalist ideology frames NGOs as foreign conspirators aiding the enemy
• Sinhalese nationalists wage war to displace Tamils and Sinhalize the northeast
• Sinhalese political Buddhism emerged as a protest against Christian and Western dominance.
• Sinhalese racism toward Muslims exceeds rhetoric used against Tamil rebels
• Sinhalese-Tamil enmity was retroactively projected onto a local dynastic war
• Sinhalese-Tamil ethnic divisions are recent social constructions, not primordial facts
• Sri Lanka’s 1956 election introduced ethnic outbidding as a political tactic
• Sri Lankan Buddhist chief priests can be bought off by politicians
• Sri Lankan ethnic myths served political purposes only since the nineteenth century
• State Buddhist ceremony functions as political legitimacy theater, not religious devotion
• State-linked extrajudicial violence against Tamils was systematic and wide-scale
• Superiority claims generate conspiracy theories to explain past defeats
• Supremacist ideology taints even educated, progressive Sinhalese elites
• The internet enables nationalist extremists to advocate genocide
• The island’s indigenous peoples are mythically framed as demons Buddha subdued.
• The JHU normalized Buddhist supremacist ideology while wrapping it in civilizational and righteous-state language.
• The monastic interpretation emphasizing Buddhist supremacy triumphed over the pragmatic one
• The same colonial influence that established secularism also provoked Buddhist communalism
• The sangha’s sanctity makes any monk an untouchable institution
• The separatist war hardened Sri Lanka’s Buddhist clergy toward militarism
• The state denied Christians victim-status, and nationalists blamed victims for their own persecution.
• Threat-hardened nationalist groups brand all peace advocates as traitorous enemies.
• War serves demographic goals even when militarily unwinnable
• War-hardened nationalist parties can infiltrate state armed forces
• Whoever controls the institutions and men of violence can impose social order