This much would appear to be clear. On May 18, 2009, the civil war that had racked Sri Lanka since July 1983 was brought to a decisive close. Government troops obliterated what remained of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who, along with untold civilians, were trapped on the narrow beach at Mullivaikkal. But that seeming clarity is illusory; so neatly bookending bilateral violence is necessarily a cheat. Belief and pain that compel compatriots to wreak calamitous devastation upon one another cannot be neatly “straightened up.”

Szymborska wisely titled her poem, “The End and the Beginning.” With this volume, editors Amarnath Amarasingam and Daniel Bass deliver a “problems and prospects” (p. 1) stock-taking of the uncertain postwar beginning in Sri Lanka. In itself, it is a remarkable collection of eleven specialist essays, each as expert, informative, and engaging as the next. But it is also something more. When this book project began, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose government's ruthlessness brought about the war's end, looked to be continuing in office indefinitely. His divisive politics promised not only continuity with the war years but also an escalation of its corrosive Sinhala-first, majority-rule nationalism. There seemed little hope that post-war would ever become post-conflict. But then, unexpectedly, on January 9, 2015, Rajapaksa was defeated in a snap election. This contingency makes Sri Lanka: The Struggle for Peace in the Aftermath of War an important record of a difficult chapter of Sri Lanka's postwar history. We are lucky to have it.

Unsurprisingly, the tone is not entirely cheerful. Yet Nira Wickramasinghe's stimulating afterword summing-up is perhaps too single-minded in its pessimism:

She is right, of course, but the book is more than just a confirmation of our worst fears. We also learn from it. Each chapter illuminates a new context. We become more knowledgeable about post-conflict legalities, the unitary state, transitional justice mechanisms, priestly influence, Tamil heterogeneity, and much else besides. Clearly, even before January 2015, there was more to post-conflict Sri Lanka than the insidious hegemony of a heavy-handed government.

The collection's first section, “Social and Legal Complexities,” comprises an essential tutorial on the state, language, and law. First, Kumaravadivel Guruparan deconstructs reconciliation. He deploys detailed examples to make the case that in the “radically unequal, deeply divided, victor-imposed” Sri Lankan context, reconciliation discourse masks hegemonic practice (p. 31) and thwarts the needed discussion of justice, self-determination, and the nature of the state. Asanga Welikala, whose topic is the state, follows with a learned account of Sri Lanka's instantiation of the unitary state, which Sinhala nationalists legitimate as a “continuation of the ancient state” (p. 47). This suspect genealogy, which ignores the concept's British origins and Sri Lanka's multi-polity history, sets the stage for it to be “transubstantiated” (p. 52) through constitutional amendments from a guiding principle into totalizing structures that, contra British practice, obviate pluralist devolution. Law comes down to earth in Sujith Xavier's chapter. He champions an “access to justice” strategy for addressing human rights violations and critiques the usual foreign-expert-staffed truth commissions. He argues that improving local legal mechanisms and education empowers ordinary people to be their own advocates (p. 71), better serving their felt needs. The section concludes with Senthan Selvarajah's discussion of Sri Lanka's ethnically biased, linguistically divided, and, often, government-controlled journalism. He advocates “peace journalism” to spotlight underlying causes rather than surface politics.

The next section, “Ethnic and Religious Dynamics,” examines those underlying causes. Suren Rāghavan describes the Theravada Buddhist sańgha’s (community of monks) ability to mobilize rural people under a dharma yuddha (“just war”) banner, which, he argues, was a key reason for the LTTE's defeat (pp. 91–92). Farzana Haniffa extends this point with her perceptive account of how Bodu Bala Senā monks adapt traditional rhetorical forms to marginalize and, arguably, instigate attacks against Muslim Sri Lankans. And anthropologists Daniel Bass and Malathi de Alwis movingly convey different aspects of being Tamil citizens in post-conflict Sri Lanka. Bass describes how Up-Country Tamils, descendants of Indian tea plantation workers, creatively navigate increasingly constrained options by seeking local governance, changing identities, and migrating. De Alwis documents the impact of the government's denial of collective trauma and the right of all citizens to memorialize their experiences.

The book's final section, “Tamil Nationalism at Home and Abroad,” introduces us to the heterogeneity of Tamil voices. Ravi Vaitheespara's indispensable summary of the Tamil press covers both those writers who put nationalism first and leftish ones concerned also with issues of class. Mark Whitaker tellingly reports on recent political conversations with Tamil friends in Sri Lanka and in Canada to convey that there are significant commonalities between the two. Amarnath Amarasingam disaggregates the Canadian diaspora, documenting historically how the community and its goals have evolved and diverged, never monolithic and always dynamic.

As with any experience of excellence, one is left wanting more. Particularly felt, given the volume's historical significance, is the lack of ordinary Sinhala voices. Also, as Wickramasinghe points out in her concluding remarks, there is no consideration of the long-ignored problem of assuming cultural purity and “territorial exclusivity” (p. 223). But these complaints in no way gainsay the value of a work that can be easily recommended to all, student and professional alike, interested in South Asia, post-conflict societies, and contemporary transnational politics.