Japan's peace building diplomacy in Sri Lanka

Abstract

While Tokyo has sought to play an active mediatory role in various domestic and regional disputes in Southeast Asia, its quest for a political role in Sri Lanka is probably the first attempt to seriously do so in South Asia, an area where India is the great regional power. Japan's peace building efforts in Sri Lanka and other parts of Asia also reveal that the image of Japan being a political pigmy despite being an economic superpower is simplistic if not obsolete. The article also highlights the importance of informal policy networks in the formulation of Japanese foreign policy. The role of informal policy networks is an under explored area in the study of Japan's foreign relations. This article seeks to elucidate how informal networks have facilitated Japan's political activism in Sri Lanka. This article examines Tokyo's role in Sri Lanka as a case study of Japan's peace building in Asia. In the Sri Lankan case, Tokyo ventures into an ethnic conflict which erupted in 1983 between the Sinhalese-dominated national government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This conflict has already cost around 65,000 deaths and displaced more than 800,000 internal refugees. Although Japan had expressed concern about the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict in October 2000, it did not seek to play an active role in addressing. the conflict until the advent of the Koizumi administration. This article will first ask : why has Japan adopted peace building diplomacy? Next, it explains why Japan has picked Sri Lanka as a litmus test for its peace building agenda. Following that is an examination of Japan's peace building process in Sri Lanka including the key actors involved. Finally, the article will examine the problems and prospects to the consolidation of peace in Sri Lanka and their larger ramifications for Japan's political role in Asia.