Jani de Silva

Contact: Janidesilva4(at)gmail.com

Senior Research Fellow, Social Scientists Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka

After a BA (Hons) in Political Science, Jani de Silva went on to do an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She subsequently completed her PhD in Anthropology at the London School of Economics & Political Science, London. She has published widely on issues of masculinity, the body and violence, with a special focus on how tropes of hegemonic masculinity are deployed by regimes-in-power to emasculate, devalue and repress a range of dissident social groups who are castigated as violent but cowardly. She is presently working on how cultures of impunity emerge in politically unstable, war-torn and post-conflict societies, eroding democratic guardrails and creating the conditions for creeping autocratization.

Her latest publication (2023) Inhabiting an embattled body: the making of warrior masculinities in Sri Lanka (Routledge: London & New York) focusses on the battlefield as a space where lesser masculinities struggle – desperately – to act out hegemonic practices.

Interrogating Cultures of Impunity across South Asia

Cultures of impunity problematize the very boundary between the state and regime. They unfold when a state accedes to the regime‘s efforts to roll back this boundary. Here the state refuses to hold a range of its own actors – i.e. officials, policemen, military and intelligence personnel – as well as members of the regime and shadowy private security contractors of all kinds, accountable for violating the rights of vulnerable groups.

The state then, acquiesces to the regime’s claim that civic dissent by such groups threaten national security, no less. This allows the regime to co-opt certain state actors who  then – effectvely – go rogue. With no push back from the state, the regime can  suspend the Rule of Law by declaring Emergency Rule, vilify protesters and political rivals as ‘terrorists’, ‘drug mafiosi’ etc., incarcerate or even assassinate them.

Such rogue actors hide behind their uniforms. They operate under a veil of anonymity. The onus of lifting this veil now falls upon civic activists. They must locate at which points in the criminal justice chain political detainees are held, by whom and under what conditions, through painstaking research and investigations, bringing together their diverse specialities. This could reveal the identities of these shadowy figures and their links to political assassinations and other high crimes.

As the spotlight falls on them, the regime may abandon them one by one. Regime-change itself turns on fresh electoral mandates. But disempowering rogue state actors by exposing their identities and making their positions untenable is key to pushing back against the regime’s intrusions into the state and rolling back impunity.