Refusal and Resistance: the Sri Lankan State’s Failure in Sivanagar, Kilinochchi

The Sri Lankan state’s attempt to construct a Buddhist vihara on the grounds of a historic temple in Sivanagar reflect broader strategies of militarisation, Buddhisisation, and demographic engineering in the Tamil North-East. It foregrounds forms of collective refusal by local residents, whose everyday acts of resistance have prevented the project from materialising despite persistent state pressure and surveillance.