Publication

This paper develops a political liberal defense of federalism as a political solution to ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils. The author defends federalism as a stable political consensus between Tamil liberals and Sinhala liberals, not simply as an unstable political compromise between Sinhala nationalists who prefer a unitary state and Tamil nationalists who prefer to secede. The paper states that the strategy of such a political liberal defense is to reinterpret an ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese as a political conflict between liberals and nationalists.