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The thesis explores the role and impact of the internet on Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora political activism, focusing on both the experiences of political activists and on an analysis of web content related to diaspora activism. The central argument of the thesis is based around the relationship between political agents and cyberspace. The thesis argues that the political strategies and tactics adopted in the Tamil diasporan political sphere have changed with an increased dependence on the internet changing with it the politics and lives of individual activists. Cyberspace is presented as a site of power struggle with power as both an objective and source in micro-political struggles. The thesis also highlights the double sense of space attributed to cyberspace, both as a space facilitating political activism and as a qualitatively new space for politics. It traces the manifestation of violence in cyberspace based on its extensive reach and the collateral damage it can cause in political conflicts. Also the thesis argues that these intense web engagements for domination and resistance within the diaspora communities cause the emergence of new political priorities in Tamil diaspora politics. These do not parallel political developments in the conflict back in Sri Lanka. The thesis is based on research conducted from 2005 to 2008 during heightened rivalries between supporters of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and dissident Tamil diaspora political activists which involved the extensive use of cyberspace for political purposes. The empirical research consisted of an integrated framework of online and offline research. The offline research was based on eight months of fieldwork in London including interviews with Tamil diaspora political activists across the spectrum from pro-LTTE to anti-LTTE dissidents. The online research was based on the technique of Web Sphere Analysis, which enables a framing of web content into a coherent unit of analysis.

Energy saving in coal power plants is a popular topic in present days with the global energy crisis. Internal electricity demand or auxiliary power consumption is an energy portion related with equipment supportive to the main equipment, which is unavoidable but with a proper investigation, some amount of this energy can be saved either by introducing thermally efficient auxiliary equipment or improving efficiencies of available equipment. Out of the various auxiliary equipment, the driving motor of boiler feed pump is the largest power consumer of internal electricity demand in 3x300 MW sub-critical Lakvijaya Power Station in Sri Lanka. So it is obvious that prime movers of feed pumps could be contributed for a large percentage of the losses. So it was decided to find out how to minimize the losses related to Boiler Feed Pump (BFP) system using small steam turbine to drive the BFP. The widely used alternatives for the BFP drivers are condensing type and back pressure type steam turbines. Eleven (11) different configurations of Condensing type, back pressure type and also extraction back pressure type turbines were considered and software programs for each configuration were implemented using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. The considered configurations are different to each other by inlet steam thermodynamic parameters, steam flow rate, exhaust thermodynamic steam parameters and intermediate extraction parameters etc. Thermodynamic analysis ended up with interesting solutions while all the configurations are giving improved efficiencies than existing electrical motor driven mode. But some of them had not improved their net output and hence there were no gain in net generator power output although the efficiencies are higher. Out of other configurations with improved net output and efficiency, the case with back pressure turbine arranged parallel to the HP turbine had the highest net output gain with better improvement in efficiency without changing the input power to the boiler. Considering the CO2 , SOx and NOx emissions, it was cleared that power plant with suggested BFP modes will give more clean energy than existing power plant. Considering the partial loads behavior it was observed that power plant with Back pressure turbine, steam extracted from HP turbines inlet for prime movers of boiler feed pumps is more thermodynamically economical than existing power plant. Annual financial saving with BFP configurations with positive net output gain and zero boiler input gain were calculated and it will be in between 0.46 and 2.72 UDS million / Year.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Yang-Ming Chang / This report examines the role of the privatization in Sri Lanka and assesses its effectiveness. The focus was given for the evolution of privatization and how socio-political factors such as rent-seeking, inconsistency policy making, market competition, political uncertainty and role of supporting institutions have affected the privatization process. After the independence in 1948, several reforms have been taken place in Sri Lanka. In 1977, a market oriented policy package which brought huge amount of foreign aids into the country was introduced. Further the privatization in Sri Lanka can be addressed as: Sporadic attempt, Systematic approach and Structured approach. The appointment of short-term governments and changing of the leadership has always been a hurdle for a successful privatization in Sri Lanka. In order to establish a successful privatization, it requires having the changing of ownership from public sector to private sector, creating a competitive market environment and forming a proper institutional framework. Unfortunately, due to less emphasis was given to the latter two factors: the privatization has always given undesirable outcomes. In the whole history of privatization in Sri Lanka, the highest value for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) was recorded in 2008. It is clear that the reason for the FDI value escalation in 2008 is the improved confidence of foreign investors by addressing security concerns. In conclusion, it is time to investigate whether the current regulatory model is the most appropriate arrangement for the prevailing economic, social and cultural circumstances in Sri Lanka.

This study aims to analyze the impact of terrorism on the educational sector of Sri Lanka. We focus our attention on Eelam War IV, the final phase of the 26-yearlong Sri Lankan conflict and the period of peace (period under the Norwegian government mediated ceasefire agreement) prior to it. We use data from the 2012 National Population and Housing Census and war related fatality counts from the South Asia Terrorism Portal to divide the island’s 9 provinces into high and low war intensity provinces in order to analyze the impact of terrorism on the educational attainment of individuals residing in each of these provinces during the two periods; peace and war. We use an Ordinary Least Squares Model to estimate the average years of schooling and a Logit Model to estimate the levels of individual grade completion. Our results find that the conflict did not have a diminishing impact on education, in fact educational outcomes for individual grade completion increased during the conflict period in areas deemed highly intense.

Honor ideology and militarized masculinities have recently gained more attention within the research field of peace and conflict studies. It has been found that attitudes related to honor and gender equality are associated to the use of violence on both an individual level and on state level. This thesis is exploring honor ideology in a post-war context in order to investigate if honor ideology is connected to attitudes regarding coexistence. By using new survey data collected in north-eastern Sri Lanka, ordinal logit regressions are used to test the hypotheses that individuals with higher levels of masculine toughness, patriarchal values and honor ideology are less willing to coexist with people from former ‘rivalling’ groups. From the regression analyses, it was found that there seems to be a relationship between higher levels of masculine toughness, patriarchal values and honor ideology, and lower levels of willingness to coexist with people from former ‘rivalling’ groups – findings that were statistically significant on 95-99% confidence interval. However, the results are not very robust and further research is needed to investigate how honor ideologies affect other attitudes that are important for peace.

This doctoral research project conducts a political sociology of knowledge of non-governmental actors engaged in advocating and reporting on issues relating to conflict and human rights. It engages the following research question: what are the limits of knowledge produced by non-governmental advocates? This question is applied to empirical case studies looking at, firstly, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, and secondly, a network of global activists working on post-war Sri Lanka (2010-2014). Applying a Bourdieusian sociological framework, the thesis argues that professional advocates' epistemic practices are shaped by an array of socio-political dependencies. Contrasting with past applications of Bourdieu to International Relations, this thesis reveals contextually-specific dependencies through multiple levels and scales of analysis. At the organisational level, these dependencies manifest through advocacy NGOs' market-like relations with their targeted consumers, as well as their relations with rival knowledge producers. At the level of the human practitioner, it is shown how leading advocacy NGOs are reliant upon a relatively narrow labour market, consisting of practitioners who share a strong dispositional affinity with their consumers. Studying a smaller group of global advocates working on post-war Sri Lanka, the thesis also demonstrates how symbiotic relations between NGO practitioners and leading policy stakeholders had a structuring effect on advocates' network relations, as well as stimulating a deference to a dominant policy discourse of 'liberal peace'. Shifting the attention to advocates' extraction of knowledge from its proximal contexts, this thesis also examines the influence of advocates' localised dependencies. In the case of post-war Sri Lanka, it is shown how foreign advocates' knowledge is informed by a limited set of domestic actors, primarily encompassing the country's liberal elites. Overall, these dependencies are argued to place significant constraints on knowledge generated in advocacy contexts - limits that differ to other modes of knowledge production.

Changing notions of marriage and family across the globe—from kinship obligation, social reproduction, and complementary labour to an ideal of marriage based on affective bonds, emotional intimacy, and pleasure—is widely read as indicating the shift from tradition to modernity. The modern companionate marriage ideal is then linked to a larger cultural transformation: the development of the modern individual self. The emergence of modern conceptions of the self in North America and Western Europe that emphasizes personal autonomy over the authority of the patriarchal family is said to have resulted in the decline of power parents and kin had over the choice of marriage partner with marriage coming to be seen as a person’s individual choice. Moreover, because companionate marriage demands a high degree of emotional and personal commitment it is generally accepted that such marriages must be entered into voluntarily, thereby recasting marriage as a contractual agreement between two people rather than an alliance between two families. Narratives about choice in marriage are, therefore, part of a historical process that emphasizes an “inner self” as integral to modern subjectivity and gives credence to individual agency in intimate relations. My thesis explores how marriage norms, family structures, and kinship relations amongst the middle-class in Sri Lanka have been transformed by social change from the early part of the twentieth century to the present. It aims to understand the ways in which modernity is reconfiguring people’s expectations of intimate relations and shaping women’s experiences and presentations of the ‘self’. In doing so, it attempts to answer three main questions: How do changing expectations of marriage structure people’s narratives about individual agency? To what extent do kinship obligations, caste considerations, and class mobility structure people’s choices in marriage? And finally, what implications do these findings have for the feminist theorization of agency and personhood? Based on fifteen months of fieldwork amongst Sinhala Buddhist middle-class families living in the city of Colombo, I argue that the urban middle-class in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which a choosing person is consciously created as a mark of modernity and progress. However, people’s life histories show how, rather than indicating a radical shift in the way people negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on choice signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the self. Moreover, I argue that rather than signalling freedom, these narratives reveal how people are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency and grapple with making the “right” choices. By carefully deconstructing people’s anxieties that underline their narratives about choosing the right kind of partner, I reveal how choices are, in fact, structured by social norms and the expectations of family. I argue that marriage continues to be a principal strategy for social mobility and the assertion of status in contemporary Sri Lanka. Therefore, I demonstrate how caste and class considerations form the basis on which collective manoeuvring is undertaken to influence individual choices. I then argue that the trope of individual agency is not universal to all narratives about marriage and family. By examining alternative stories about marriage that defy the accepted convention I show how narratives of agency, which are deployed in certain contexts, are downplayed or denied in others; that the ‘self’, which is presented as making individual choices and actively shaping its own destiny in one context, is presented as the object of fate and circumstance in others. I conclude that because what it means to be middle-class is always a process of negotiation between competing and contradictory notions of tradition and modernity, people’s presentation of the self reveal the perpetual striving that seems to characterise modern subjectivity.

The present research investigates the interaction between Sri Lanka and its closest neighbouring region, South India, during the Early and Middle Historic periods. This connection has often been studied based on the textual evidence available on either side with little regard for the material evidence. Therefore, previous studies have fallen short of providing an objective understanding of the interactions. Furthermore, the focus of previous studies has been large-scale, state-mandated interaction. In contrast, this study has adopted a novel approach through the perspective of personal adornment and has been able to trace far closer contact between the two regions than official interaction suggests. To understand interpersonal interactions between the two regions, objects of personal adornment from seven different sites in Sri Lanka and South India were analysed. The patterns that emerge from assemblages of objects of adornment, including beads and other non-bead adornments were observed. The rationale behind this analysis was that body beautification expresses the individual and social identities of people across time and space. Consequently, it was anticipated that, by observing artefacts that are expressions of the identities and preferences of the general populace, this would shed light on interpersonal contact between the two regions. The patterns visible from the analysis of assemblages illustrate strong similarities between the two regions, during the Early and Middle Historic Periods. This is likely to have been the result of exchanging goods, ideas and technological knowledge. This study has also revealed that amidst shared cultural traits, each region developed preferences distinct from each other. The ethnographic study carried out provides further evidence of interactions between the two regions, which is missing in the texts and the archaeological record. These interactions probably reflect those which existed in the past. The integrated evidence used in this study clearly indicates longstanding, continuous personal-level interactions, between Sri Lanka and South India, which were hitherto unknown.

This thesis evaluates the policy intentions, practices and effects of two different types of School-Based Management (SBM) initiatives in Sri Lanka: the Programme for School Improvement (PSI) and the Child-Friendly Schools Initiative (CFSI). Moreover, it examines the similarities and differences between these two initiatives and, when they co-exist in the same school, the ways in which schools have integrated them. PSI is the national SBM initiative of Sri Lanka introduced to the schools during 2006-2011 following a prolonged process of designing and consensus building which started in the 1990s. Running parallel to PSI, the CFSI - a rights-based approach to education which also has SBM features - is being implemented in selected primary schools. The policy discourse of SBM/PSI focused on the proposition that schools should be empowered to meet the expectations of their communities and that the administrative decentralisation which had shifted power from national to provincial levels was not addressing adequately disparities between schools. At the same time, there was scepticism as to whether SBM would be able to address the issues of a heterogeneous school system. CFSI was introduced by UNICEF in response to the government's request to strengthen disadvantaged schools. The policy intentions of these two initiatives were investigated through interviews with key policy officials and with the representatives of development partner agencies who assisted PSI and CFSI. The influences of the policy-intents of PSI and CFSI on organisational practices, their effects, similarities, differences and complementarities were explored through six school case studies and experiences of the principals, teachers and parents. The thesis reveals that PSI is expected to empower schools with autonomy for making collaborative decisions, create a sense of ownership among the school community and permit improvement of schools. CFSI is intended to promote inclusiveness, child-centredness and democratic participation. They are both, in principle, guided by the concerns for ensuring equitable opportunities for all to learn, improving the quality of education which is judged by student learning outcomes and improving efficiency in resource allocation and use. At the school level, each case-study school has forged collaboration between school-parent-community and ensured democracy in decision-making. School-based decision-making is promoted by PSI through a set of Ministry guidelines and by CFSI through a participatory approach recommended by UNICEF and the Ministry, but having less official ‘force' than PSI. Both initiatives have influenced to increase parents' contribution in the school physical infrastructure development and in the educational projects. School-based planning has been promoted by both initiatives, and in some cases has resulted in the production of two separate plans. Some schools have combined these plans in accordance with the thematic structure of national Education Sector Development Framework. These initiatives have involved principals and teachers in decision-making, planning and implementation of programmes in collaboration with the community. The emphasis given to school-based teacher development is, however inadequate. Nonetheless, the increases in attendance and retention was influenced by CFSI rather than PSI, while both initiatives have had a positive influence by improving student learning and performance through various interventions at school and learning at home. The several ways in which these initiatives are integrated by schools, ensuring that each contributes towards filling the gaps left by the other are described. Considering their complementarities, the positive features of management in PSI and rights-based approach to education in CFSI in a rational manner, the author recommends an integrated ‘Learner-Friendly School-Based Management Model' which will effectively address learners' needs. It also recommends a methodology to pilot this model in Sri Lanka, thus putting the new knowledge produced by this research into practice.