Buddhist Monks and the Politics of Lanka's Civil War - Suren Raghavan
An Army in Yellow Robes: Saṅgha Political Resistance 1815–2010
Buddhist Monks and the Politics of Lanka's Civil War - Suren Raghavan
Suren Raghavan [+]
University of Oxford
Suren Rāghavan Ph.D. is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Buddhist Studies – Wolfson College University of Oxford and a visiting professor at St Paul University Ottawa- Canada.
He turned to academic research after extensive fieldwork in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka during its thirty years of civil war. His multilingual expertise, bi-ethnic background and lifelong studies of Sinhala Buddhist society have provided a rare position for an in-depth and unique analysis of the Sinhalas, the war and especially the historical role of the Mahā Saṅgha, – Buddhist Monks. Rāghavan won the first Asian award for Political Studies from James Madison Trust in 2005. He won the British Government Overseas Research Scholars Award in 2008 and the Swiss Federal Government Scholarship for Minority Studies in 2011. His current research includes the role of religions in post-conflicts democratization, critical religion analysis of Buddhism and textual deconstruction of the Mahāvaṃsa
Description
This chapter surveys the key moments in Saṅgha mobilization, and concludes that with each wave of resistance, the Saṅgha were able to claim societal, cultural and political space to promote their agenda, and this agenda acquired sharper contours as their ethnoreligious nationalist project took shape.