Giacomo Mantovan and Lola Guyot co-authored an article entitled ‘“A God Cannot Die”: Divergent Accounts of the Defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’. The article was published in the journal Critique internationale.
Summary
After waging a long war against the Sri Lankan government (1983-2009), raising high hopes of victory among combatants and activists in the Tamil diaspora, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were totally annihilated in 2009. Although they share the same objective, diaspora activists and ex-combatants in exile have developed very different narratives about this event. The former, on the one hand, gloss over the destruction of the armed movement and the death of its leader and play down the defeat by declaring that victory is within reach. The latter, on the other hand, give a detailed account of the annihilation of their organisation, as well as the ensuing collapse of their culture, their imagination, and their way of being in the world. In seeking to understand the reasons for these differences, this article examines the links between memory production and the mobilisation trajectories (demobilisation and remobilisation) of activists. The efforts of defeated actors to make sense of years of struggle, the experience of defeat, and political impotence are studied in light of their various political trajectories, between capitulation and attempts to resurrect the struggle.
source: Mantovan G. & L. Guyot, in Critique internationale, 101, n°4, 2023-12-01, p. 77-98

