Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on field work from a two year research project tells the story of Hambanthota, and in so doing complicates the idea that post-war peacebuilding involves the diffusion of power and resources outwards from centre to periphery.

Paper long abstract:

Central to the processes of securitized post-war development and statebuilding was the construction of a parallel centre in Hambanthota. The area became a major "theatre" of large-scale infrastructural investment, and of new and different constellations of power, as it was central to the reterritorialization agenda of the Rajapakse government.

This paper, based on field work from a two year research project entitled 'Borderlands, brokers and pecebuilding', tells the story of Hambanthota, and in so doing complicates the idea that post-war peacebuilding involves the diffusion of power and resources outwards from centre to periphery. Hambanthota, a new hub, with great political and economic salience, representing however, a vastly different constituency to the cosmopolitan elite of Colombo, emerged from a peripheral region. The making of a centre in Hambanthota helps explore the dynamic and uneven nature of post-war territorialisation, and the emergence of 'central peripheries' that simultaneously constitute and de-legitimise power at the centre.

Though the 'entity' that is Hambanthota became a hub of post-war statebuilding vis-à-vis development, there are inherent tensions between processes of state territorialisation and infusions of capital and investment, especially as the financial support for the transformation of Hambanthota from an impoverished agricultural area into an economic and political powerhouse came from China. The construction of Hambanthota as a parallel centre leads us to explore how the 'centre' in Colombo and the extra-territorial centre works to make Hambanthota ('the other') legible and knowable, and how the 'centre' is re-made in the process.