‘Playing the System’: Agency and Everyday Negotiations during LTTE Rule

Abstract

This article focuses on the ways in which civilians and members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka negotiated their demands with the rebel leadership and exercised agency. While much of the rebel governance scholarship emphasizes the top-down, rationalistic and instrumental approach of rebel regimes, we argue that the everyday negotiations we investigated were never simply one-directional, top-down or oppositional. Despite LTTE governance being coercive, our empirical evidence based on fieldwork reveals a more complex and relational form of agency. Here, the everyday roles, identities and practices of those involved were intermingled and co-constitutive, sometimes even cooperative and supportive. We contend that the conduct and outcomes of negotiations depended on several factors: the sympathy for the movement among the civilians, the need of the LTTE to garner local support, the position and (family) networks of the persons involved, the risk and sensitivity of the issue, and the timing. In conclusion, we present a depiction of agency that was co-constitutive and relational, often hidden, indirect, or secretive, but clearly beyond a simple oppositional or one-sided relationship.