Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights: Experiences from Sri Lanka 2020022022, 2020022023, 9781138085244, 9781315111414

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Interdisciplinary Disability Studies

WOMEN WITH DISABILITIES AS AGENTS OF PEACE, CHANGE AND RIGHTS EXPERIENCES FROM SRI LANKA Edited by Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne

This book upends common portrayals of disabled women – from passive recipients or victims to agents of change in post-conflict settings. Using the stories of diverse Sri Lankan women and foregrounding gendered and disability injustices, the compelling narratives demonstrate how disabled women’s activism has changed the peace-building context in Sri Lanka. In building networks and coalitions to address their needs and aspirations, Sri Lankan disabled women remind us of the importance of “nothing without us”. Deborah Stienstra, Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work, Director, Live Work Well Research Centre, Professor of Political Science, University of Guelph, Canada. A critical and timely intervention in the literature on both peacebuilding and disability studies, this book builds a comprehensive argument against locating women peacebuilders as a generic category by examining the specific role of disabled women in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. In doing so it offers evidence and provocative insights from across scholarship, activism, life narratives and ethnic boundaries into the relationship of disability justice and postwar peace, collective mobilization and women’s agency. A compelling case study thereby emerges not only of the specific Sri Lankan context in relation to its war, the law, disability rights and challenges of post-war recovery, but also what peacebuilding means from a non-ableist perspective. Neloufer de Mel, Chair Professor of English, Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Using intersectional and agency perspectives in Post war Sri Lankan context, this book contributes significantly to the growing gender and disability literature in the global south. Empirically underlining the challenges of individual and collective activism of women with disabilities in peace making, it provides useful recommendations for public policy. A must read. Nilika Mehrotra, Professor, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights

Drawing on rich empirical work emerging from core conflict regions within the island nation of Sri Lanka, this book illustrates the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. This pathbreaking book shows the critical role that women with disabilities play in post-armed conflict rebuilding and development. Through offering a rare yet important insight into the processes of gendered-disability advocacy activation within the post-conflict environment, it provides a unique counter narrative to the powerful images, symbols and discourses that too frequently perpetuate disabled women’s so-called need for paternalistic forms of care. Rather than being the mere recipients of aid and help, the narratives of women with disabilities reveal the generative praxis of social solidarity and cohesion, progressed via their nascent collective practices of gendered-disability advocacy. It will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of disability studies, gender studies, post-conflict studies, peace studies and social work. Karen Soldatic is an Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Institute Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, at Western Sydney University. She was awarded a Fogarty Foundation Excellence in Education Fellowship for 2006–09, a British Academy International Fellowship in 2012, a fellowship at The Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University (2011–12), where she remains an Adjunct Fellow, and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (2016– 19). Her research on global welfare regimes builds on her 20 years of experience as an international, national and state-based senior policy analyst, researcher and practitioner. She obtained her PhD (Distinction) in 2010 from the University of Western Australia. Dinesha Samararatne is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the ARC Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law (2019–20), a Co-Convenor of Constitution Transformation Network (CTN) of the Melbourne Law School and co-editor of the Blog of the International Association for Constitutional Law (IACL). Her recent research has been in relation to constitution-making, methodology of comparative constitutional law, women’s rights and rights of persons with disabilities.

Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series editor: Mark Sherry, The University of Toledo, USA

Disability studies has made great strides in exploring power and the body. This series extends the interdisciplinary dialogue between disability studies and other fields by asking how disability studies can influence a particular field. It will show how a deep engagement with disability studies changes our understanding of the following fields: sociology, literary studies, gender studies, bioethics, social work, law, education, or history. This ground-breaking series identifies both the practical and theoretical implications of such an interdisciplinary dialogue and challenges people in disability studies as well as other disciplinary fields to critically reflect on their professional praxis in terms of theory, practice, and methods. Sexual Citizenship and Disability Understanding Sexual Support in Policy, Practice and Theory Julia Bahner Critical Disability Studies and the Disabled Child Unsettling Distinctions Harriet Cooper Disability, Globalization and Human Rights Edited by Hisayo Katsui and Shuaib Chalklen Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection Ryan Thorneycroft Identity Construction and Illness Narratives in Persons with Disabilities Chalotte Glintborg and Manuel de la Mata Disability and Citizenship Studies Marie Sépulchre Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights Experiences from Sri Lanka Edited by Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/ ASHSER1401

Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights Experiences from Sri Lanka

Edited by Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Soldatic, Karen, editor. | Samararatne, Dinesha, editor. Title: Women with disabilities as agents of peace, change and rights: experiences from Sri Lanka / edited by Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Interdisciplinary disability studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022022 (print) | LCCN 2020022023 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138085244 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315111414 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women with disabilities–Sri Lanka–Political activity. | Women with disabilities–Sri Lanka–Social conditions. | Women's rights–Sri Lanka. Classification: LCC HV1569.3.W65 W6656 2020 (print) | LCC HV1569.3.W65 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/08082095493–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022022 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022023 ISBN: 978-1-138-08524-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-11141-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Azahlea, Ahilan, Rithika, Michaela and Daniella

Cover artwork: M.H. Rafika Ms. M.H. Rafika is a woman with disability, from Nuwara Eliya district, Sri Lanka, who is advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. This artwork is an expression of Ms. Rafika’s thoughts on reading A Study of War-affected Women with Disabilities in Sri Lanka: Pre-consultation Report. She ponders on how all the recommendations mentioned therein might not become a reality and the situation of women with disabilities in such a context. This is her first artwork.

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements 1

Introduction: Out of the shadows: Women with disabilities as agents of peace, justice and reparations in Sri Lanka

x xiv

1

KAREN SOLDATIC AND DINESHA SAMARARATNE

2

Going beyond disability identity and creating communities of belonging: Perception management and gendered disability advocacy

16

NIRO KANDASAMY AND KAREN SOLDATIC

3

Music, resistance and change: The gendered-disability performativity of a Tamil woman with multiple disabilities

32

NIRO KANDASAMY AND SINDHU RATNARAJAN

4

Raging (e)motions

46

NIRO KANDASAMY AND BINENDRI PERERA

5

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law

60

DINESHA SAMARARATNE

6

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity: The role of reparations and gendered-disability justice

80

BINENDRI PERERA

7

Conclusion and recommendations: Enabling women with disabilities’ advocacy and activism in the peace-building landscape

100

KAREN SOLDATIC AND DINESHA SAMARARATNE

Index

105

Contributors

Niro Kandasamy is an interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia studies. She received her doctorate from the University of Melbourne in 2019. Her dissertation examined the role of memory in the oral histories of young Tamil people resettled in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. She has been undertaking research on the gendered disability advocacy work of women with disabilities in post-armed conflict Sri Lanka since 2014. She was a student visiting fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, in 2018. Niro is a postdoctoral development fellow at the University of Melbourne and is a sessional lecturer in history at the Australian Catholic University. Binendri Perera is a Temporary Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at Sri Lanka Law College. She completed her L.L.B. at the Faculty of Law of the University of Colombo. She read for her Masters at the Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts where she was a Cogan Scholar (2018/19). Her main research interests are constitutional law, international law and third world approaches, economic, social, and cultural rights and rights of marginalized groups. She has co-authored several works on the rights of persons with disabilities and women with disabilities in Sri Lanka. Sindhu Ratnarajan is an Attorney-at-Law and a graduate of the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo. She has co-authored and contributed articles for several journals on topics such as the implications of Sri Lanka’s city planning and beautification for human rights, development projects and administrative justice and the Marrakesh Treaty from a Sri Lankan perspective. Her interests include constitutional law, human rights and sociology, with a special focus on South Asia regional perspectives. M.H. Rafika is a woman with disabilities who is advocating for the rights of people with disabilities. The cover artwork is an expression of her thoughts on reading A Study of War-affected Women with Disabilities in Sri Lanka: Preconsultation Report. She ponders on how all the recommendations mentioned therein might not become a reality and the situation of women with disabilities in such a context. This is her first artwork.

Contributors

xi

Dinesha Samararatne is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the ARC Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law (2019–20), a Co-Convenor of Constitution Transformation Network (CTN) of the Melbourne Law School and co-editor of the Blog of the International Association for Constitutional Law (IACL). Her recent research has been in relation to constitution-making, methodology of comparative constitutional law, women’s rights and rights of persons with disabilities. Karen Soldatic is an Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, and Institute Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, at Western Sydney University. She was awarded a Fogarty Foundation Excellence in Education Fellowship for 2006–09, a British Academy International Fellowship in 2012, a fellowship at The Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University (2011–12), where she remains an Adjunct Fellow, and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (2016–19). Her research on global welfare regimes builds on her 20 years of experience as an international, national and state-based senior policy analyst, researcher and practitioner. She obtained her PhD (Distinction) in 2010 from the University of Western Australia.

Stages 1 & 2: Workshop and training (12–16 December 2016) Workshop organizations Law & Society Trust Ms Dinushika Dissanayake Mr Vijay Nagaraj Social Scientists’ Association Dr Pradeep Peiris Project coordinator Ms Binendri Perera Workshop Trainers Dr Karen Soldatic Dr Dinesha Samararatne Mr Andi Schubert Mr Shashik Silva Mr Mark Schubert Facilitators of mock interviews at workshop Mr Subramaniam Mr Cyril Siriwardene Coordination of mock interviews Mr Cyril Siriwardane

xii

Contributors

Volunteers at mock interview sessions Mr W.M.D. Ratnasekera Ms Nelka Ramani Ms Subhani Udeshika Mr Prasanna Lal Workshop participants Ms Kamalawathi Narayanagedara – AKASA, Association of Women with Disabilities (Thalawa) Ms D.M. Neetha Kumari – AKASA, Association of Women with Disabilities (Thalawa) Ms W.A. Krishanthi – Navajeevana (Tangalle) Mr K. Sunil – Navajeevana (Tangalle) Mr Ushan Indika Samararathna – Navajeevana (Tangalle) Mr Mohamed Arshad – Viluthu (Jaffna) Mr Sivakumar Sivavasanthan – Viluthu (Jaffna) Ms Chamari Imali – Women’s Development Center (Kandy) Ms Sheroon Shouketh – Women’s Development Center (Kandy) Ms Vindya Madumali – Women’s Development Center (Kandy) Ms Lanka Adikari – Women’s Development Center (Kandy) Mr M.A.M. Cader – CHANGE Humanitarian Organization (Puttalam) Mr Nandana Kumarasiri – Association of Women with Disabilities (Matale) Ms Nisha Shariff – Suwa Shakthi Organization (Kandy) Mr Kasunjith Satanarachchi Ms Azra Jiffry Ms Binendri Perera Interns Ms Sajini Fernando Administrative assistance Ms Janaki Dharmasena Mr Prasanna Gajaweera Ms Harshani Connel Ms Hasara Fernando

Stage 3: Semi-structured interviews (March–October 2017) Interview facilitation Law & Society Trust Ms Dinushika Dissanayake Mr Vijay Nagaraj AKASA, Association of Women with Disabilities (Thalawa) Ms Kamalawathi Narayanagedara

Contributors

xiii

Viluthu (Jaffna) Ms Inthumathy Hariharathamotharan Mr Jeyatharshan Yogeshwaran Navajeevana (Tangalle) Ms K.C. Wickramasuriya Mr K. Sunil Interviewers Ms Kamalawathi Narayanagedara – AKASA, Association of Women with Disabilities (Thalawa) Ms W.A. Krishanthi – Navajeevana (Tangalle) Ms R. Komathy – Viluthu (Jaffna) Ms S.P. Dhinusha – Viluthu (Puttalam) Ms Nisha Shariff (assisted by Ms Ashra Kamal) Ms Binendri Perera Translators of interviews Ms J. Jeyakala Ms I.M. Dharmadasa Administrative assistance Ms Janaki Dharmasena Mr Prasanna Gajaweera Ms Harshani Connel Ms Hasara Fernando

Acknowledgements

What began as a casual conversation of ideas and possibilities in early 2013 materialised over the next seven years as a successful research collaboration between many of us and the institutions that we are affiliated with. Two of our colleagues, Vijaya Nagraj of Law & Society Trust and Cyril Siriwardene of the Disability Organizations Joint Front, are no longer with us; they passed away under unexpected circumstances. We feel their absence very much. We continue to be inspired by the life they led. We are grateful to the women who participated in our research collaboration and thereby made it possible for us to deepen understandings about the life experiences of war-affected women with disability in Sri Lanka. We commend the enthusiastic engagement of the researchers who participated in the training workshop on research. We are particularly thankful for the team of interviewers who partnered with us in this project and for the professionalism and commitment they demonstrated in their work. AKASA (Association of Women with Disabilities, Thalawa), Navajeevana (Tangalle), Women’s Development Centre (WDC) and Viluthu (Jaffna) partnered with us in identifying suitable participants for this study and in carrying out the interviews. This project would not have been possible without their partnership. This research collaboration was made possible primarily due to the leadership and vision of Ms Dinushika Dissanayake, Executive Director of Law & Society Trust, until December 2017. She worked hard to secure the funding for this project and ensured its smooth implementation. We also acknowledge the contribution of Mr Sadun Thudugala, Executive Director (Acting) of Law & Society Trust, for his continued support for the project. We thank the Social Scientists’ Association, particularly Mr Shashik Silva, Mr Mark Schubert, Mr Andi Schubert and Dr Pradeep Peiris, for accepting our invitation, for being co-trainers at the research workshop and for facilitating the debrief of the interviews. We further acknowledge the contribution of Ms Sajini Fernando (intern) and Mrs Anuradhi Jayasinghe (Research Consultant) at Law & Society Trust.

1

Introduction Out of the shadows: Women with disabilities as agents of peace, justice and reparations in Sri Lanka Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne When we asked for help from organizations individually there weren’t any results but when we formed a team and started asking for help, we got a lot of attention. Dinushika, mother living with a disability, Sri Lanka I was a normal person who became disabled, so if not all, some people still talk about me. I am the treasurer of an organization called DPO. So people are friendlier towards me and I socialize with them too. Our organization is for people disabled by war and other disabilities. Deepani, mother living with a disability, Sri Lanka

Peace-building has come under considerable criticism in the last 20 years or so. As Richmond and Mac Ginty (2015) have shown in their work, this has largely occurred on two fronts. First, historically, there has been a heavy reliance on international systems of state power as a strategy to secure peace. Global institutions, such as the United Nations, or third-party countries, often former colonial powers, have been central to peace negotiations and have asserted their international positions of power to set the terms and conditions for the transition to peace. There are numerous examples. The two most illustrative of these processes are Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia. The Comprehensive Cambodian Peace Agreements signed in Paris in October 1991 to end the war between Vietnam and Cambodia was followed by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) to facilitate elections (March 1992–October 1993) and, more recently, the International Criminal Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed under the Khmer Rouge in 1975–79. In the former Yugoslavia, it began with the National Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military intervention, the unsuccessful installation of UN peacekeepers across Bosnia, the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (negotiated in the USA, November 1995 and formally signed in Paris, December 1995) and, again, an International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes on all sides of the conflict. Southern scholars suggest that these so-called exemplary international relations of peace securitization are often no more than a reassertion of colonial relations of state power (Weerawardhana 2018) wherein smaller, less powerful,

2

Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne

previously colonized states are coerced into peace negotiations and ratification by the former colonizer. As Weerawardhana (2018) articulates, these former colonial powers not only determine the content of peace negotiations and treaties, but also the path to peace. More significant, in relation to our own work on which this book is based, is the second set of criticisms, especially those identified by local peace movement advocates and activists. Localized civil society movements of peace and justice increasingly argue that international relations of peace can either consolidate or undermine local experiments, interventions and practices of peace-building (Kew and Wanis-St. John 2008). Internationally ratified processes to secure peace may disrupt everyday peace-building practices that have been occurring on the ground (Berghs and Kabbara 2016), in that they are largely exclusive and state focused, with demilitarization as the principal priority (Wanis-St. John 2008). The concerns of local actors and their everyday reality of armed conflict are not considered and can emerge in conflict with those formalized international peace agreements that are rolled out on the ground (Wanis-St. John 2008). Berents and McEvoy-Levy (2015) amplify these points, arguing that longstanding international peace interventions can no longer ignore the multiplicity of civil society practices, processes and actions implemented by those directly affected by protracted armed conflict. As this rich qualitative work has begun to map out, international relations of peace are only the final component, the tying together of diverse and divergent commitments, of bringing an end to violent hostilities and conflict (Gordillo 2020). Initially, these strong critiques emerged from locally embedded feminists and members of the women’s peace movement, yet over time, these criticisms have been taken up by other movements, including, but not limited to, young people’s movements, Indigenous movements, and refugees and the diaspora (Berents and McEvoy-Levy 2015, Cochrane et al. 2009, Karam 2000, Milner 2011). Despite these burgeoning and important criticisms of historical international peace-building initiatives, processes and practices, there has been a dearth of research that has explicitly identified the peace-building work of women with disabilities during armed conflict or its aftermath. This is curious, given the embodied dynamics of militarized violence and conflict (Berghs and Kabbara 2016). The body-and-mind is the primary site of destruction, debilitation and disability (Puar 2017). Long before the first rounds of the Geneva Convention (1864), it was well recognized that military strategy not only involves the death and destruction of enemy combatants, but also the use of maiming, harm and injury as a tactical instrument (Carnahan 1998). This so-called military necessity is aimed at impeding further advancement of an enemy military offensive and at asserting ongoing control over civilian populations (Utas and Jorgel 2008). Given this history, it should not be surprising that any focus on disability has been on demobilization and rehabilitation; the demobilization of disabled ex-military (male) combatants back into civilian life (see de Mel 2016); and the rehabilitation of civilians with a war-acquired disability (Mukashema and Mullet 2013). There has been almost no consideration of disabled people, particularly disabled women, as active agents within the peace-building process (Berghs and Kabbara 2016).

Introduction 3 As the opening two quotes from Dinushika and Deepani demonstrate, the work of disabled women during times of armed conflict and its immediate aftermath are central to the peace-building process. Through collectively organizing on issues of disability justice, as illustrated in the chapters to follow, disabled women are engaged in a multiplicity of peace-building actions and activities. Frequently, they are leading strategists for disability justice, through everyday forms of negotiation, organizing and advocacy. Therefore, this book is framed through the second set of criticisms emerging within the broader church of international relations and peace and security studies. The narratives of the activists and advocates in this book strongly suggest that, for peace and peace-building to be sustained beyond the transitional process, international formalized peace processes need to identify, recognize and actively support the everyday embodied processes of peace-making that occur in the discourses, actions and collective organizing for peace by local civil society subjects and actors (Elayah and Verkoren 2019).

Positioning disability within the feminist transnational peace movement Even though the transnational feminist peace movement has demanded justice after militarized violence because of protracted civil conflicts (Bouta and Frerks 2002), it has overlooked the important work of disabled women in organizing for peace. We suggest that disabled women are the forgotten sisters in international relations of peace and peace-building (see Gartrell and Soldatic 2016). This book seeks to counter the ableist assumptions within the transnational feminist peace movement and the international relations of peace-building that position disabled women as passive recipients of these groups’ peace-building efforts. As each of the chapters illustrate, disabled women are active agents of peace. Disabled women’s peace-building advocacy and activism work is multidimensional. Dinushika’s and Deepani’s quotes at the start of this introduction illustrate their collective organizing and active agency in disability organizations as women living with disabilities within conflict zones. Thus, these opening quotes signify the critical work of disabled women in mobilizing disabled people to garner broad-scale support for their claims within the polity. The work that they do is both gendered and gendering (Soldatic 2020). Gendered practices of peace-building within the disability movement are often contradictory; they reaffirm the historical gendered dimensions of everyday relations of power, yet contest these very gendered relations as women with disabilities take up leadership positions to collectively organize for rights, recognition and reparatory justice. I have never ever felt worried that I don’t have a hand. I will do all the work. But I can’t comb my hair. My husband didn’t get angry for the reason that I don’t have a hand. But the relatives of my husband’s side didn’t like me due to this reason. I am a member in social organizations. I know what rights are available to disabled persons in Sri Lankan law. But still I didn’t ask anybody to help me. Leela, woman from the Northern Province

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Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne

Importantly, as the women with disabilities in this book articulate, as disabled women, they are able to move through and beyond past ethnic, racial and religious tensions, and play an important role in processes of reconciliation through focusing on the injustices that emerge through ableist peace-building processes. Their advocacy and activism as disabled women strategically combine a repertoire of actions, practices and tactics that is creatively generative on the grounds for disability justice claims. They seek to demystify strategies of ableist memorializing and reconciliation by foregrounding their disabilities over ethnicity, race and religion. As the following quote from Lakshmi demonstrates, such processes are, thus, more than a struggle for fair and just reparations for the impact of longstanding militarized violence on their bodies. I can’t forget two unpleasant incidents in my life. One is when my father was arrested and the other is when I was imprisoned. I was mentally affected a lot by these two incidents. I attempted suicide many times. I slit my wrist, too. My mother and an organization helped me overcome this part of my life. At that time I was very antisocial. I wouldn’t go out of the house or get out of my bed. I did not want to talk to anybody. I couldn’t walk or use my hands because of my disabilities (Lakshmi can walk now) so my mother had to help me even in the bathroom. I couldn’t even comb my own hair. I was very embarrassed and I suffered both mentally and physically. I am a disabled woman. Because of this reason the society looks at me in a different way. My family was disappointed at me and also angry as I couldn’t do my own work like combing my hair or going to the bathroom. I don’t attend weddings or birthday parties. If I must attend an occasion I just pop in at the last minute. At the very beginning disabled people were excluded from meetings. Buses won’t stop if they see a pair of crutches. There was no place for disabled people in the society. But now things have changed because of awareness programmes. I get a letter for every meeting and people actually consider us as individuals, too. We can live in peace. We can go out without fear of getting shot or being killed. The sound of gun fire is finally over. Families are happy and there are only trivial problems. In the past, war was the major problem. Now that there is no war, little conflicts inside the family, trivial issues and such are the only problems. There is also loads of freedom. So much freedom that people don’t really know how to use it. I have been interviewed many times. I know the people who interview me take the information for a good purpose. A lot of people are not aware of people like us. I think this is a good way of making them aware. I believe that when stories like mine are published the probability of a war occurring again is less as people become more aware. Lakshmi, woman from the Eastern Province As the deep narratives of this volume suggest, disabled women peace activists and advocates work to centre the possibility of disability during times of armed

Introduction 5 conflict and then foreground gendered-disability injustices within the post-conflict transitional landscape. Their activism and advocacy as disabled women is a ‘double move’, ‘an affirmative politics of disability … and … a transformative politics of impairment actively seeking just reparations’ (Soldatic 2013, p. 752).

Focusing on Sri Lanka: political positionings and transnational gendered-disability methodological reflections The conflict It can be suggested that the way the protracted civil war in Sri Lanka ended sits outside the norms of the last 50 years. Unlike Rwanda, former Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone, the end of active armed conflict occurred through state militarized violence. A UN report documents ‘credible allegations’ of international humanitarian law and human rights violations against both the government (e.g. the killing of civilians through widespread shelling) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the LTTE (e.g. using civilians as a human buffer) (United Nations 2011, p. 49). The conflict in Sri Lanka stems from the failure of the government to guarantee equal treatment of the country’s largest minority, the Tamils (Wickremesinghe 2006, p. 163). Discriminatory practices, legislation and constitutional provisions in post-independence Sri Lanka contributed to an armed Tamil separatist movement in the 1980s (Wickremesinghe p. 265). Although the armed conflict was brought to an end in 2009, the issues faced by the victims of war remain, and a political solution to the conflict itself has been elusive (Hoglund and Orjuela 2012). Today, war-affected women with disability in Sri Lanka are compelled to contend with this legacy alongside the challenges they face due to patriarchy, poverty and rurality (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). In the absence of a political solution to the conflict, tensions within and between communities on the basis of ethnicity remain unresolved. This leaves women with disabilities, like Rani, quoted below, with several questions. What has the government done for women like me after the war ended? I feel that currently there is no war only, but now we are experiencing more difficulties than previously. My wish is to educate my children, send them to good jobs and to live my life happily by them. Rani, woman from the Northern Province Women and law Women in Sri Lanka are in a curious position in terms of law and policy. Sri Lanka is known as the oldest democracy in Asia and introduced universal suffrage in 1931. Universal access to education and health care was made available in the 1940s. Today, women enjoy formal equality and their health and education are on par with those of men in Sri Lanka, with women having higher life expectancy. However, alongside these remarkable achievements, Sri Lanka has continued to

6 Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne apply certain legislation that is discriminatory of women. Moreover, since the establishment of electoral democracy, the number of women political representatives in Sri Lanka has been low. Quotas were recently introduced to local government bodies in response to this issue (Local Authorities Elections (Amendment) Act No. 16 of 2017). The Sri Lankan legal system includes ‘personal laws’, laws that are applicable to certain groups based on a territorial criterion or a personal attribute. These are Kandyan law, Muslim law and the Tesawalamai law. Kandyan law applies to descendants of those who lived in the Kandyan provinces in 1815 (Kandyan Marriage and Divorce Act No. 44 of 1952). The Muslim law applies to those who profess Islam (Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act No. 13 of 1951). Tesawalamai is the law that applies to Malabar Tamils (Tamils from the Northern Province) (Matrimonial Rights and Inheritance (Jaffna) Ordinance of 1911). The Muslim law and the Tesawalamai law include provisions that are discriminatory of women. Because the Constitution protects laws that are inconsistent with fundamental rights guarantees, these laws remain valid today, despite the constitutional guarantee of the right to equality and a prohibition on non-discrimination on several grounds, including sex (Article 12 of the Constitution of 1978). In Tesawalamai, married women are required to obtain the written consent of their husband in any transaction of their immovable property (Section 6, Matrimonial Rights and Inheritance (Jaffna) Ordinance of 1911). Under the Muslim law, men and women have no minimum age of marriage, women do not sign their marriage register (Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act No. 13 of 1951) and only Muslim men can be appointed as judges of Quazi courts (Section 12, Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, No. 13 of 1951). The most recent call for reform of these laws has come from a movement comprising a broad coalition of Muslim women – Muslim Personal Law Reforms Action Group (MPLRAG n.d.). This movement has been effective in raising awareness of the impact of discriminatory laws and in remobilizing women’s movements in Sri Lanka on this issue. These reforms have thus far been met with resistance. The call to reform the discriminatory provisions of the Tesawalamai law has not been resisted, yet the law remains valid. Women in the political context In Sri Lanka, social and political perceptions of women are often gendered and stereotypical. Underage marriage in certain rural areas (Goonesekere and Amarasuriya 2013) and sexual harassment on public transport (UNFPA 2017) have been identified as issues faced by girls and women in Sri Lanka across different ethnic/religious groups, class, geography and so on. Needless to say, the war has had a unique impact on women in Sri Lanka. Some of the critical issues that women face post-war are the transitional justice issue of conflict-related sexual violence, the rise of women-headed households and women’s access to land (Gomez 2016). It is interesting to note here that under the LTTE, Tamil women had a unique experience in comparison to other Sri Lankan women during that time. The

Introduction 7 suicide bombers of the LTTE included women, and the LTTE maintained a women’s wing (Rajasingham-Senanayake 2004). Former LTTE women combatants have returned to their communities and are compelled to navigate new, post-war realities, including stigma from their own community for the role they played during the war (Satkunanathan 2019). The accounts given in our interviews point to some of these challenges. I am 37 years old. I rear hens and goats for a living. Mainly I sell eggs and goats (not milk). My income is moderate. I have a son; he is in grade three now. My husband went missing eight years ago, when my son was only one month old. I was in the LTTE for seven years. I was posted at Kilinochchi. That’s where I got injured in 2009. I lost my hand from the elbow down. I was given an artificial hand from an organization in Jaffna but I don’t use it as my son is scared of it. (The artificial hand is locked up in a box.) At present I live with my son in a house built by the Indian government on my piece of land. I am the eldest in my family. I have five sisters and two brothers. One brother went missing during the war; the other one lives with my mother and he is 18 years old now. All my sisters are married. My father was a farmer and a fisherman. I joined the LTTE when I was 16 years old when they encouraged us to join by holding meetings, singing songs et cetera. One day I left home as if I was going to school (in uniform) and joined the LTTE with some other students. They returned home after some time but I didn’t. My parents detested the fact that I joined the LTTE. My father did not visit me out of anger. My mother did. I saw my parents for the first time after joining when I was 21 years old. I resigned from the LTTE after getting married. I was good at sports. Even now I win competitions held for disabled people in sports meets. Jayani, woman from the Eastern Province When I was married, everyone including my husband’s family and relatives asked my husband ‘was there no other woman to marry?’ and they scolded him. They asked him why he has married a woman who can’t give birth to a child. But by God’s grace I became pregnant. I cannot forget my experience in the war. I faced disrespect from my villagers because of my injury in the war. But also I am happy that my husband married me and cares for me without caring about the views of those in my village. Seetha, woman from the Northern Province Then my parents started looking for marriage proposal for me. But all did not like that I had lost my one leg. Then there was a marriage proposal which came to me in 2014. He was affected by the war and had experienced severe hardships and suffering in the detention camp for two years. He married me and it is now three years. He cares very well for me. I am eight months pregnant now.

8

Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne All the rights which are available to a human were not available to me. My goal is to live happily with my husband’s earnings and with my child. There are so many people who live like me. Who will realize their pain? Shanthi, woman from the Northern Province Both our families did not consent to our marriage as I was disabled and my husband was at risk of dying at any time. So I did not get any support from them. I was afraid of the future. If my husband dies I wouldn’t have a life. Nobody really likes to take care of a disabled person for long. When he is away I’m scared for him almost the entire time. We get news of bombing and other disastrous fates met by other soldiers and it makes my fear grow. I spend my time running around camps and centres looking for all kinds of information about my husband and the place he is camped at. I didn’t have any relatives to go with so the sister next door would accompany me in the three-wheeler of a village boy. The police would stop us and ask us to go back home as we were young girls. I go back home disappointed. The people at the camp would reassure us that the soldiers are fine but we were still scared. Communication was very hard. After the war I got my husband back and I’m very grateful for that. I was always afraid that he won’t return home. I bought a land and built a house. We get an income from my husband’s salary and also from my handwork. Now we live a relaxed life and there is no anxiety. We plan our daughter’s future and that’s our main priority now. Our lives are normal again. I have hopes and I actually want to live. There are no big risks of death every minute of the day and I’m very happy about the ending of war. Ramya, woman from the Central Province who lived in the North Central Province during the war When I returned home my parents brought me a proposal. I had a boyfriend in the army but my parents didn’t let me marry him. The husband they chose for me was a drunkard and I suffered endlessly because of him. He hit me a lot and I went to the extent of drinking poison. Aarusha, woman from the Central Province who lived in the North Central Province during the war It was not safe anywhere. We never slept in our homes; instead we slept in wells and paddy fields. Once mom was making rotti for our dinner when my brother came and told us the LTTE were coming. We were terrified and left home, forgetting the rotti. Mother dragged me as I couldn’t walk properly. We went to the safety of another village. Kanthi, woman from the Central Province who lived in the North Central Province during the war

In the post-2009 period, Muslim women have been impacted significantly by political developments. In general, anti-Muslim sentiments have been promoted

Introduction 9 by certain groups in Sri Lanka, including by the Bodu Bala Sena and the Sinhala Ravaya, and have been accompanied by a call to boycott Muslim businesses and other discriminatory actions (Imtiyaz and Mohamed-Saleem 2015). Incidents of damage to property owned by Muslims and riots against Muslims in certain localities have further complicated Sri Lanka’s post-war political landscape. The Easter Sunday attacks, carried out by an extremist Islamic group and resulting in over 250 deaths, further aggravated these tensions. The banning of face-coverings during the period of emergency introduced in the aftermath of the attacks predictably had a grave impact on Muslim women. Although the ban ceased with the lifting of the state of emergency, the stigma associated with face-covering by Muslim women continues to affect their interactions in the public sphere. During the armed conflict, too, Muslim communities experienced unique hardships. They were marginalized in the political contestations related to the conflict. In 1990, the LTTE forcibly expelled Muslims from the Northern Province (Haniffa 2015). To date, Muslim communities that were forcibly displaced remain as long-term internally displaced persons seeking resettlement and compensation. Unforgettable incident in my life is being shot … and I suffered a lot. In 1990, when it was four months since I married, we were told to move out from our home town Jaffna because of the war. Then I was shot by them on our way during the displacement. And my younger sister who came along with me also had been fired. At the same time my elder brother who had been killed at the same place by the bomb attack. Then we both were taken to the camp and treatment was given to us. Yet there are bullets in my hip side and in the hand of my sister. Because of this I am unable to work. Then we have been sent from the camp towards Puttalam. Hence there is no measurement for the pain we suffered in each and every place during the displacement. Fathima, woman from the North Western Province Disability, law and policy During this time, Sri Lanka continued to implement the welfare policies it developed from the 1930s to the 1940s. For women with disabilities, this meant that the state continued to practise a welfare approach towards them in the form of financial support and related services (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). Fundamental rights guarantees in the Constitution made reference to disability only as a ground for affirmative action (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). Disability has remained the exclusive subject of the Ministry for Social Services. Disability-specific legislation, the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, No. 28 of 1996, is extremely limited in its reach. It only introduces a legislative right to access public buildings. Even this access has not been fully realized, as was noted and upheld in a recent fundamental rights petition (Perera v Minister of Social Services, SC FR Application No. 273/2018, SC Minutes, 18 April 2019). The National Policy on Disability of 2003 and the National Action Plan for Disability of 2013, while commendable in their substance, remain weak in terms

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of implementation. Sri Lanka’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2016 has not yet had a significant impact on their enjoyment of rights for women with disabilities. Consequently, women with disabilities have found it difficult to make rightsbased claims in general in Sri Lanka. In addition, in the context of the armed conflict, disability has remained a marginal concern in the transitional justice measures that have been initiated, particularly since 2015 (Samararatne and Soldatic 2019). In March 2020, the Sri Lankan government officially withdrew from its undertakings to implement transitional justice measures before the UN Human Rights Council. This withdrawal signals unwillingness on the part of the government to be held accountable for its actions on the basis of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. As a result, the implementation of the recently enacted Office of Missing Persons Act (2016) and the Office of Reparations Act (2018) is in doubt. In this context, the space for disability advocacy is likely to shrink as well. Transnational gendered-disability methodological reflections It should not be surprising, then, that the foundations of the work captured in this book are deeply personal. They coincide with our (editors, researchers, authors, activists and advocates) lived experiences as people intimately connected to the ravages and destruction of armed conflict. There is no doubt that the Sri Lankan war has affected us in a multiplicity of ways, our families and our socio-political understandings of where we belong, what we understand as being ‘right’ and ‘just’ and how we decide to engage with others. All the contributors to the book have been directly impacted by the 30-year civil conflict, either as embedded citizens of Sri Lankan society, as part of the Sri Lankan diaspora community living in the global North through forced migration, or as a development worker in Sri Lanka during the late 1990s and have maintained intimate bonds since this time. Combined, we represent a set of divergent actors engaged in transnational relations of peace, working personally and professionally across local, national and international boundaries and borders. Our political orientations and invested emotional energies are aimed at not only working towards a just peace, but also shoring up just, inclusive transitional landscapes that are representative of disabled people’s lifeworlds and that recognize the real everyday work of disabled women who are active agents of peace and peace-building. The collaboration began in late 2011 and has been a sustained partnership of friendship, trust, mutuality and collegiality. Working across scholarly and activist boundaries, the research project itself drew upon what Rioux and colleagues (2016) suggest is a ‘new methodology for old problems’, that is, the importance of a politicized methodological approach that centres the expertise, experiences and knowledges of women with disabilities as expert knowers of their own lives. The project incorporated and expanded on all facets of the Rioux and colleagues (2016) model to historicize the ethnic, racial and religious politics of the

Introduction 11 Sri Lankan political context. As research partners, our critical reflexive engagement was not only an internal dialogue in relation to our own positionality, but also focused on how this positionality enabled or constrained the building of a gendered-disability solidarity beyond the ever-present ethnic, racial and religious tensions. This involved extensive, ongoing dialogue with women with disabilities and the facilitation of opportunities for research training, ensuring appropriate, fair and just remuneration for their work and that they were identified as the leaders of the project. This also involved extensive collaboration with non-disabled peace-building civil society groups. Dinesha Samararatne and Karen Soldatic had longstanding relationships with these groups; therefore, trust, capability and competence had been well established prior to introducing them to the disabled women’s organizations involved in the project. Extensive discussions were held with the disabled women’s organizations before engaging with peace-building organizations within civil society, and the women’s DPOs (disabled people’s organizations) were able to articulate the support role that local peace-building would play. It was agreed that the work to prepare for and conduct the interviews was to be led, where possible, by women with disabilities. In addition, the women with disabilities and their organizations asked the lead researchers of the project, Dinesha and Karen, to provide extensive training on disability rights, not only within international law, such as the UN CRPD, but also on how disability rights is translated into national policy and social provisioning and programming. The project involved reaching out to women with disabilities and interviewing them for the purpose of gathering qualitative research material. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in partnership with organizations and people engaged in promoting the rights of women with disabilities at the regional level. AKASA (Association of Women with Disabilities), Viluthu, Navajeevana (Tangalle) and Women’s Development Centre (Kandy) collaborated with the Law & Society Trust in the North Central, North, East, North West, South and Central provinces, respectively, in this endeavour. Interviews were conducted with women with disabilities from the following districts: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Matara, Kandy, Batticaloa, Nuwara Eliya, Jaffna, Puttalam, Mannar and Mullaitivu. The in-depth life narratives presented in this book are drawn from this initial work, which involved the three women in the chapters that follow who led the research locally within their own communities and then worked together to analyze the interviews, interpret the findings, and provide feedback to the women they interviewed at each stage of the research: the project’s findings and the public dissemination of the report through public presentations; advocacy to politicians from a breadth of political orientations; and presentations to parliamentarians and the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus, as outlined in later chapters. The research project’s initial outcomes were published in all three primary languages of the island – Sinhalese, Tamil and English – and provided in braille within each of the languages. This was the first time that research in the area of disability had been made accessible for women with disabilities.

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Structure of the book The book comprises five chapters. The first three chapters are the life histories and narratives of two of the core disabled women activists involved with the initial research project, as outlined above, and another disabled woman activist. Coincidentally, each of the women is from a different ethno-religious group and different part of the island, thereby representing the different lived experiences of disabled women across Sri Lanka over the 30-year conflict. The first of the three life narratives is that of Kamalawathie (Kamala hereafter), a long-term disability activist and advocate who has worked across Sri Lanka. Kamala has engaged in gendered-disability activism from a young age and has, over time, moved to different positions within the Sri Lankan disability movement. Significantly, her activism and advocacy reveal the central role of disability in forging cross-ethnic relations, both during the civil war and within localized peace-building efforts. Further, as identified by Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic, Kamala’s lifelong activism provides a platform to develop critical relationships with women with disabilities who are emerging as advocates and activists, to both share past learnings and to foster new networks of disabilitygendered landscapes of belonging across ethno-religious historical tensions. The next chapter presents the life narrative of Vinothini, a young Tamil woman with multiple disabilities, both congenital and acquired in the civil war. Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan explore the central role of music throughout Vinothini’s life and how she engages with musical public performances to contest communal and ethno-religious nationalist norms that stigmatize and demonize disabled Tamil women. Crucially, Vinothini is fully aware of her performing self and the ways in which her social positionality in both rural and urban contexts can resist and challenge communal and ethno-religious majority norms to spur on political curiosity about ‘who she is’. Kandasamy and Ratnarajan explore, with Vinothini, how she simultaneously embodies and resists the possibility of the ethnic ‘warring’ other, the often-assumed positionality by her audiences. Even though Vinothini is not a former Tamil Tiger who was made ‘disabled’ through her participation as an armed combatant, she directly confronts these public imaginings of who she is by drawing on music, dance and physical movement in her gendered-disabled performativity. Through performance of the gendereddisabled Tamil self, Vinothini first draws attention to the micro-aggressions she experiences in everyday life as a Tamil disabled woman and then responds to the communal and ethno-religious violence that has continued with the rise of Buddhist nationalism at the end of the war. The final of the three life histories, presented by Niro Kandasamy and Binendri Perera, is that of Nisha, a Muslim woman living with disability in a regional area of Sri Lanka. This chapter engages with Nisha’s embedded position of marginality within Sri Lanka and tracks how her intersectional identity has meant that she has had to negotiate increased forms of state and communal violence, pre- and postcivil war. Importantly, as Kandasamy and Perera illustrate, Nisha’s positionality is critical to understanding the affective injustices that are experienced by women

Introduction 13 with disabilities in their everyday lives and how this propels a highly productive gendered-disability advocacy that is built upon the deep interpersonal feelings of rage and anger. Moreover, Nisha’s life journey, across the axis of gender, disability and religious minority status within the transitional landscape, demonstrates the significant role of agency and self-representation in local-level peace-building initiatives for disabled women from ethno-religious minority groups who continue to be deeply stigmatized and experience high levels of violence. As Dinesha Samararatne illustrates in her chapter on the advocacy of women with disabilities in Sri Lanka, effective strategic advocacy is multidimensional. It encompasses social solidarity among diverse women with disabilities who work together collectively with allies to move disability rights and justice claims across and through the hierarchy of political power. Moreover, as Samararatne illustrates, this collective gendered-disability advocacy needs to emerge from the ground up, through the work of advocates, activists and allies with clear, tangible recommendations for change. The final chapter of the book, by Binendri Perera, examines the role of reparations for women with disabilities in the transitional landscape, not only for the harms and injustices caused by the armed conflict that created impairment, but also for the harms and injustices experienced directly by women with disabilities generally. Perera’s chapter gives an overview of the international framework commonly drawn upon to explore reparations in the transitional landscape and to promote peace-building and social cohesion and its application at the local scale, within the Sri Lankan context. Finally, Perera’s critical analysis of the reparations framework in post-war Sri Lanka distils its limitations, once gendered-disability ethno-religious minority status is contemplated within it, and the chapter ends with a range of recommendations for future developments in Sri Lanka and for potential global deliberation within existing human rights institutional frameworks.

References Berents, H. & McEvoy-Levy, S. 2015, ‘Theorising youth and everyday peace (building)’, Peacebuilding, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 111–25. Berghs, M. & Kabbara, N. 2016, ‘Disabled people in conflicts and wars’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability and the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, pp. 269–85. Bouta, T. & Frerks, G. 2002, Women’s roles in conflict prevention, conflict resolution and conflict reconstruction, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, The Hague. Carnahan, B. 1998, ‘Lincoln, Lieber and the laws of war: the origins and the limits of the principles of military necessity’, American Journal of International Law, vol. 92, no. 2, pp. 213–31. Cochrane, F., Baser, B. & Swain, A. 2009, ‘Home thoughts from abroad: diasporas peacebuilding in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, vol. 32, no. 8, pp. 681–704. de Mel, N. 2016, ‘Playing disability, performing gender: militarised masculinity and disability theatre in the Sri Lankan war and its aftermath’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic

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(eds.), Disability and the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, pp. 99–117. Elayah, M. & Verkoren, W. 2019, ‘Civil society during war: the case of Yemen’, Peacebuilding. doi:10.1080/21647259.2019.1686797. Gartell, A. & Soldatic, K. 2016, ‘Rural women with disabilities in post conflict zones: the forgotten sisters of disability-inclusive development’, Third World Thematics, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 370–81. Gomez, S. 2016, ‘Women in post-war Sri Lanka: linking policy to reality’, in A. Barrow & J.L. Chia (eds.), Gender, violence and the state in Asia, Routledge, London, Chapter 3. Gordillo, C. 2020, ‘Peacebuilding in Colombia: teachers’ and students’ perspectives on lectures on peace’, Peacebuilding. doi:10.1080/21647259.2020.1731124. Haniffa, F. 2015, ‘Competing for victim status: northern Muslims and the ironies of Sri Lanka’s post-war transition’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, vol. 4, no. 1, p. Art. 21. Hoglund, K. & Orjuela, C. 2012, ‘Hybrid peace governance and illiberal peacebuilding in Sri Lanka’, Global Governance, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 89–104. Imtiyaz, A.R.M. & Mohamed-Saleem, A., 2015, ‘Muslims in post-war Sri Lanka: understanding Sinhala-Buddhist mobilization against them’, Asian Ethnicity, vol. 16, pp. 186–202. Karam, A. 2000, ‘Women in war and peace-building: the roads-traversed, the challenges ahead’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 1, pp. 2–25. Kew, D. & Wanis-St. John, A. 2008, ‘Civil society and peace negotiations: confronting exclusion’, International Negotiation, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 11–36. Milner, J. 2011, Refugees, peacebuilding and the regional dynamics of conflict, Oxford University Press, Oxford. MPLRAG, n.d., ‘Muslim personal law reforms action group’, viewed 6 April 2020, . Mukashema, I. & Mullet, E. 2013, ‘Unconditional forgiveness, reconciliation sentiment and mental health among victims of genocide in Rwanda’, Social Indicators Research, vol. 113, pp. 121–32. Puar, J.K. 2017, The right to main: debility, capacity, disability, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Rajasingham-Senanayake, D. 2004, ‘Between reality and representation: women’s agency in war and post-conflict Sri Lanka’, Cultural Dynamics, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 141–68. Richmond, O. & Mac Ginty, R. 2015, ‘Where now for the critique of the liberal peace?’ Cooperation and Conflict, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 171–89. Rioux, M., Pinto, P.C., Viera, J., & Keravica, R. 2016, ‘Disability research in the global south: working from a local approach’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 531–44. Samararatne, D. & Soldatic, K. 2015, ‘Inclusions and exclusion in law: experiences of women with disability in rural and war-affected areas in Sri Lanka’, Disability & Society, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 759–72. doi:10.1080/09687599.2015.1021760. Samararatne, D. & Soldatic, K., 2019, ‘Transitioning with disability: justice for women with disabilities in post-war Sri Lanka’, in R. Shackel & L. Fiske (eds.), Rethinking transitional gender justice: transformative approaches in post-conflict settings, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, pp. 315–37. Satkunanathan, A. 2019, ‘The treatment of former combatants in post-war Sri Lanka: a form of arbitrary detention or rehabilitation?’ in F. de Varennes & C.M. Gardiner (eds.),

Introduction 15 Routledge handbook of human rights in Asia, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, chapter 13. Soldatic, K. 2013, ‘The transnational sphere of justice: disability praxis and the politics of impairment’, Disability and Society, vol. 28, no. 6, pp. 744–55. doi:10.1080/0968759 9.2013.802218. Soldatic, K. 2020, ‘Disability–Indigeneity gendered relations in settler-colonial Australia: continuities, trajectories and enmeshments’, in C. Spivakovsky, L. Steele & P. Weller (eds.), The legacies of institutionalisation: disability, law and policy in the ‘deinstitutionalised’ community, Hart Publishing, Oxford, Chapter 8. UNFPA. 2017, ‘Sexual harassment on public buses and trains in Sri Lanka’, Population Matters, Policy Issue 4, United Nations Population Fund Sri Lanka, Colombo. United Nations. 2011, Report of the secretary-general’s panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka. viewed 6 April 2020. . Utas, M. & Jorgel, M. 2008, ‘The West Side Boys: military navigation in Sierra Leone civil war’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 487–511. Wanis-St. John, A. 2008, ‘Peace processes, secret negotiations and civil society: the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion’, International Negotiation, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–9. Weerawardhana, C. 2018, Decolonising peacebuilding: managing conflict from Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and beyond, Cambridge Scholars, Cambridge. Wickremasinghe, N. 2006, Sri Lanka in the modern age: a history, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Going beyond disability identity and creating communities of belonging Perception management and gendered disability advocacy Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic

Disability advocates in the global South operate within highly racialized, ethnoreligious and gendered social, political and cultural postcolonial landscapes (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2019). The Southern postcolonial context is further compounded by the national imagining of the postcolonial nation with new frontiers, boundaries and borders. Questions of who belongs, how one should belong and what kind of behavioural practices publicly demonstrate one’s commitment to the postcolonial nation are always guarded, monitored and under constant surveillance. Questions of nationhood and belonging are clearly not new to the research on peace-building and the central role of social activism to its expression, yet to date, there has been a dearth of research that has explored these questions in partnership with local disabled women peace activists and advocates. Southern postcolonial expressions of the nation and belonging have often been explicit in an affective disregard for disabled women, and disabled women are absolutely invisible within postcolonial national imagining (Ghai 2002). As Ghai (2002) suggests, the formulae of Southern postcolonial nationalism and belonging is not only gendered (motherland, mother of the nation, she bears the marks of national reproduction and so forth), but also ableist in its representation of the national subject that is strong, productive and, indeed, in good national health. Women with disability have responded to these nationalist imaginaries within the Southern postcolonial landscape by collectively mobilizing, forming their own political organizations and networks. Such gendered-disabled practices have been to both affectively express their place of belonging through collective identification as gendered-disabled political subjects and to drive structural, institutional, political and socio-cultural change to open up the national imaginary of who belongs (see Gurung 2019). Sands (2005) argues that such agential strategies of collective mobilization by women with disability is to counter the invisibility of women with disability within the public national narrative. Through diverse representations of gendered-disability subjectivity and embodiment, particularly in relation to disabled women’s differentiated impairment types, women with disability perpetually work at the axis of gendered-disability diversity, in concert with their embodied subjectivities of ethno-religious backgrounds, socioeconomic class, Indigeneity and sexuality (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2019). These collective

Belonging beyond disability identity 17 expressions and agential processes of making ‘visible’ the ‘invisible’ in gendereddisability advocacy aims to address the socio-structural ableism that materializes through national policy regimes which continue to prevent disabled women from being active civil society members with political belonging (Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). The Southern postcolonial context of disabled women’s project of visibility provides new possibilities for exploring complex questions of gendered-disability subjectivity and their embodiment as agents of peace. Rather than ‘assume’ that disabled women’s agential peace-making engages in explicit actions, tactics and strategies of gendered-disability visibility, the complexity of the Southern postcolonial, post–armed conflict landscape pushes past simplistic representations often alluded to in Western scholarship. Southern postcolonial, post–armed conflict, engaged, collaborative research aims to explore and identify the ways in which disabled women move through and manoeuvre their ethno-religious-gendereddisability identity as agents of peace. Thus, within the Southern postcolonial, post–armed conflict landscape, questions of passing and perception management are central to women with disability, not only in the work that they do as advocates of disabled women, but also to their own positionality within this work. Given the tenets of anti-colonial struggle, in the emergence of longstanding armed conflict within the postcolonial landscape, the political positioning of disability is central. This is because the identification of ‘who did what and what role the person played’ (ex-military or militia, rebel fighter, political organizer) is marked on the body by disability. Thus, disabled people, and often disabled women from ethno-religious minority groups, made strategic decisions about when to practise disability identification and when one should enact practices of disability disidentification. The management of one’s disability identity is marked by these complex histories. As Kamalawathie (herein Kamala) illustrates, practices of disability identification and disidentification are also deeply intertwined with other concerns surrounding local spatial and temporal politics within the Southern postcolonial, post–armed conflict landscape. As Kamala narrates, questions such as how disability identity management emerges in rural Southern postcolonial, post-war contexts, and how do disabled women negotiate the complexity of their gendered disability over time, are all situated within their locally grounded struggles for political belonging. Kamala, a leading gendered-disability advocate in Sri Lanka, gives an indication of how these questions are embodied in everyday disabled women’s practices of grounded advocacy: On another day, a graama sanvardhana (council initiative) building was made. They asked me to come on the day of its opening. I went. When I went, it was on its top floor. There was only a staircase. I couldn’t go. When I went there, other people had already come. I told them I won’t be able to come for the meeting because I couldn’t climb the stairs. I said I was leaving. Then they told me ‘Wait, wait’. Then they said that I could hold someone’s hand and go up. I said, ‘It is OK. I can’t go now. I have to either hold sir’s

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Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic hand or the security’s hand if I want to go up. If there was a way for me to go up, I wouldn’t have to hold anyone’s hand’. After that every single meeting was held downstairs. I say that if we don’t do something like that which they will remember, we will never get anything.

Kamala Kamala was born in 1958 in Sri Lanka to a working-class family comprising her mother, father, three brothers and one sister. When Kamala was four years old, she had a fever and awoke one night feeling immense pain in her legs. Shortly after she was admitted to hospital, she learned that poliomyelitis had left her with extensive paralysis in her legs. Kamala has spent much of her adult life negotiating her polio identity in different contexts to achieve social change, as she has said, ‘I must live the way you live’. The ways in which Kamala manages her gendered-disability identity as an active agent in the Southern postcolonial post–armed conflict landscape offer insights into how women with disabilities manoeuvre and contour their gendered-disability identity with a plethora of different conceptions of disability, dependent upon the situated context in which they are located at any one time (Michalko and Titchkosky 2001). They are not passive actors who merely move through physical space. The intersections of gendered-disability experiences in Sri Lanka become central to Kamala’s disability politics, how she understands disability politics through her gendered rural subjectivity and how she attempts to transform the structural, institutional and everyday gendered-disability social and policy landscape through the work that she does to make socially-just change (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2019). While disability perception management is not a new area of scholarship in the global North (Olney and Brockelman 2003, Titchkosky 2003, Brune and Wilson 2013), there are few studies that engage deeply with disability identity management within multi-ethnic societies in the Southern postcolonial, post–armed conflict landscape, such as Sri Lanka. Kamala’s presentation of the self and how this is positioned differently across time and space in her actions, tactics and repertoires of gendered-disability advocacy expands global understandings of disability symbolically, discursively and materially (Priestley 2001). Kamala’s agential strategies of identity perception management move continually across the spectrums of resistance and challenges to normative mappings of disability. Kamala actively negotiates taken for granted connections of what is considered ‘normal’ with strategic intent, in relation to each of the contexts in which she finds herself (Olney and Brockelman 2003). Rather than define herself as a woman with polio, Kamala uses her physical impairment as a ‘functional’ quality to achieve her desired effect – one that has enabled her to manoeuvre herself to advance the disability movement in Sri Lanka. In this chapter, we explore, in collaboration with Kamala, the gendered-disability identity perception management strategies that Kamala activates in her gendered-disability advocacy work. Through this process, an additional set of questions emerge that distil the complexity of her identity as a disabled woman belonging to the Sinhala majority community from a rural area:

Belonging beyond disability identity 19 how she reconciles her status as a Sinhala woman with disability advocating for Tamil and Muslim women with disabilities; how she reflects upon and about her disability identity over time; and how and when she either conceals or reveals her disability identity and under what conditions.

Conceptualizing the multiplicity of disability identity According to Parekh (2008, p. 173), disability identity formations occur in intersecting spaces that are ‘conflicting, competing and co-opting’ and involve crossing boundaries of identity categories and cultural locations. Disability identity formations in the global South must be viewed as intersectional, as they operate within the oppositional frameworks of the colonial and postcolonial (Parekh 2008, p. 173). In other words, in exploring the identity perception strategies of Kamala, as this chapter seeks to do, the gendered discourses, ‘disabled’ identities and the new rhetoric of women’s disability rights are located within postcolonial formations of women with disability in Sri Lanka, beyond uniform experiences of gender, race, class and disability. The value of using postcolonial Black feminist disability theory, as Parekh (2008) does, is that it destabilizes the normalized and homogenized imperial discourses of disability studies. On the one hand, the postcolonial praxis considers positionalities as emerging from gendered and disability constructions, and on the other, it allows for the postcolonial nexus to challenge the patriarchy and Western worldviews and forms of exploitation (Parekh 2008). Following key proponents of intersectional perspectives of hegemonic systems of oppression, such as Collins (2000 [1991]), Mohanty (1995) and Ghai (2019), postcolonial Black feminist disability theory argues that change is only possible when recognizing the interconnected systems of inequality. At the interstices of different socially embedded relations of power, disability identity construction becomes visible in the structural, political and social, and in those processes of cultural reproduction that are held together, often in tension, by the nation state (Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). As Moya Bailey and Izetta Autumn Mobley (2019, p. 20) explain, postcolonial Black feminist disability theory ‘gives us the scaffolding to think in generative ways about the intersectional nature of oppression’ and better understand those ‘multiply marginalized within society’. This thesis centres the material body to reach new imagining and forms of organizing, asking, ‘are we prepared to reach toward a radical liberatory corporeal politics?’ (Bailey and Mobley 2019, p. 26). In response, as Meekosha and Soldatic (2011) argue, the interrelated politics of impairment and disability is but one formation of the dynamic intersections that shape the lives of disabled individuals within the global South and postcolonial context, for example, the axis of socio-cultural, political and national relations of power that govern gender, race, class, type of impairment, caste, marital status and age, among other factors. Gendered-disability studies’ inquiry in the global South within the postcolonial context needs to continue to respond to this challenge by centring the knowledges produced by women with disabilities themselves. This knowledge ‘of’, ‘on’ and ‘about’ disability emerges from their everyday embodied practices within the

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Southern postcolonial context. This is not only a project of destabilizing Western epistemologies that have dominated, and continue to dominate, socio-cultural imagining of Southern postcolonial contexts, but also an ontological one that seeks to critically distil gendered-disability praxis of the personal, the affective and collective practices of being and the kinds of inequalities that are generated within, by and between the categories of ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’. Southern gendered-disability ontological expressions, practices and engagement within the postcolonial post–armed conflict context thus recognize the distinct ways different persons, peoples and communities navigate the self, where this self situates its place of belonging to and how this place of belonging can be released. This includes belonging to one’s disability community across micro everyday lifeworlds, meso communal structures of power and representations and macro structures of socio-cultural imagining (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2019). Knowledge of ways of being, for Southern postcolonial disabled subjectivity, is henceforth a socio-cultural production (Cutajar and Adjoe 2016). In exploring Kamala’s experiences, journeys and navigations of disadvantage, oppression, resistance and organizing, her situated practices invite the readers of her life to reconsider Western accepted sociological understandings of the Southern postcolonial, post– armed conflict gendered-disability identity. For Kamala, as her rich life narrative illustrates, her gendered-disability identity is a contextual relationship of being in her situated lifeworld and her actions and agency. Kamala’s imagining of belonging is central to these. That is, her own personal affective journey is connected to the embedded landscape in which she exists and upon which she acts. Combined, these compel her forward to drive policy change, form collective networks to bring women with disabilities together from diverse ethno-religious backgrounds that have experienced more than 30 years of armed war and mobilize these very women to build a politics of gendered-disability solidarity to address the longstanding injustices that they have experienced, living at the nexus of being a woman, being disabled and being rural. Kamala’s desire to control the perceptions of others who are not from her gendered-disability lifeworld is to achieve socially just change for disabled women’s lifeworlds within a highly fragmented post–armed conflict Sri Lankan society and to gain legitimacy and relevance to the broad political project of peace negotiation and sustainability (Seoighe 2017). While Kamala has selectively employed differentiated practices of identity management as a strategy of gendered-disability representation, it is clear that she has clear goals and purpose in her actions. As Maddison and Scalmer (2006) suggest, these everyday embodied practices of activist wisdom are driven by the subjective desire to open up new spaces, not only for those moments that require a manoeuvring across the spectrum of identification and disidentification in gendered-disability advocacy work, but also when her gendered-disability identity needs to be collectively claimed as a political identity: Women can’t do things. She can’t be on her own. So then because of that, in 1989 I thought to start an organization for disabled women. I started the

Belonging beyond disability identity 21 organization with six disabled women, and it was started in Colombo. After winning the wheelchair competition, I wanted to train more … So I first established the organization in that house. I couldn’t carry it on for very long because disabled women wouldn’t come. Either they didn’t have a bus or a guardian or their parents wouldn’t send them. Still for all myself and the secretary carried it forward with great difficulty. Within the gendered-disability advocacy space, however, Kamala strategically adopts different positionalities of her gendered-disability identity to achieve distinct outcomes. Among women with disabilities, Kamala embraces her disability to demonstrate the possibilities of challenging gendered, ableist norms in society and to achieve greater independence and social change. By contrast, Kamala strategically orients this same disability identification in key decision-making spaces to stress the ableist attitudes, structures and institutions and the inequitable outcomes in society for disabled women. In this strategic repertoire of disability identification, the process engages not only in perception management strategies that are tied to disability, but with an orientation that illuminates the intersections of the multiple forms of oppression she experiences as a Sinhala Buddhist disabled working-class rural woman. Kamala draws upon these intersectional dynamics in her life stories, that at times foreground her gendered and class position as a disabled woman to build solidarity with working-class disabled women and their unique experiences. For Kamala, the importance of these strategic orientations to her own performance of gendered-disability perception management becomes not only a form of resistance to gendered able-bodied normative ideals, but also a strategy to mobilize and organize effectively, particularly within the reality that women with disabilities in Sri Lanka face the harsh conditions of social and political exclusion, indignity and disgust (Samararatne et al. 2018).

Perception management at the margins The cultural context in which Kamala self-articulates her disability identity has played a key role in how she self-presents across her life journey. Throughout the narrative interviews over the two-year period, Kamala acknowledges the specific contexts in which she has manoeuvred her disability identity and has politically emphasized that her disability is a product of her marginalizing environment, institutions and structures. Kamala states that this realization became more evident as she grew older and, notably, during wheelchair competitions that saw her travel overseas and participate alongside other international athletes with disability. Kamala has been awarded numerous prizes and accolades for her participation in wheelchair competitions, which have become a defining feature in her life stories. During the early years of competing, Kamala’s experiences highlighted her enthusiasm for wheelchair racing despite the exclusionary attitudes from her community in Sri Lanka.

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Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic If the competition was tomorrow, a matron called and spoke to me today saying, ‘There isn’t a way to give you a wheelchair for the competition. Now you have practised as well isn’t it? What can we do?’ The competition was the following day. I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, you take me there in the bus’. Now I didn’t have a wheelchair. They told me also that they only took me in to be trained and that there was no way to give me a wheelchair. I had practised and all and now they told me there weren’t wheelchairs. I could see a room filled with new wheelchairs.

Kamala’s family could not afford to pay for her wheelchair, let alone a welldesigned sports wheelchair specifically for national and international competitions. Regardless of these setbacks, she insisted that her teachers take her to the wheelchair competition the next day. She managed to borrow a sports wheelchair from a boy who was competing in the boys’ events and came first in all four races she competed in. Despite not having a personal wheelchair, Kamala continued to win wheelchair competitions in Hong Kong and Japan as a representative of Sri Lanka, as she outlines below: Even when I went there, I didn’t have a wheelchair. I just had a normal wheelchair. Those wheelchairs were really good. When we went to Japan there was a marathon also. It was 21 kilometres. I hadn’t practised for that. When I went, I was very happy, I couldn’t believe the kind of wheelchairs that were being used in the competition there. Some had one wheel in front and others had weird things like that. The moment you do this it goes very far. I was very upset. I asked the doctor, ‘Doctor what can we do now?’ he said ‘What to do so? We don’t have those kinds of facilities. You do what you want to do. You came for Sri Lanka. You must go even if it is just to lose. You had to fight in back home to come here’. There were 400 competitors from 56 countries. Girls and boys competed together. They would then choose the first from among the girls. I was placed 69th. To come 69th out of 400 is a big thing. While Kamala was constantly confronted by the possibility that she may not be given the opportunity to compete, as her family was never able to afford the appropriate wheelchair and equipment, she continued to engage to passionately assert her identity as a talented wheelchair champion. She worked hard to reject the uneven playing field that her working-class positionality imposed upon her competitive desires, reconceptualizing her disability not in relation to her polio, but as a product of structural inequalities of local and global magnitudes. The international competitions also provided her with insights about the inequalities between Sri Lanka and countries such as Hong Kong and Japan, where the other disabled athletes’ equipment and sports wheelchairs made this starkly evident. In each international competition, Kamala was confronted by her enduring class disadvantage, asking her doctor, ‘What can we do now?’ Together, the doctor and Kamala were forced to accept the class distinctions and inequalities she continued

Belonging beyond disability identity 23 to witness, and yet she continued to compete internationally. In another competition in Hong Kong, Kamala won using an unfamiliar wheelchair that was given to her by a doctor from another international team: When we were just about to start the race, the doctor shouted from far away. The doctor went and apologized to the organizers. I had never used that kind of a wheelchair before. I came in first as well. The doctor carried me and put me into that chair. He said don’t be afraid during the race nothing is going to happen. I wasn’t used to that chair, it wasn’t balanced, it didn’t have brakes. I just went. Only when I heard people shouting ‘come on Sri Lanka’ did I realize that I had won. I didn’t even look around or anything because I was scared that I would fall. I was scared because I wanted to win and if I fell that wouldn’t happen. In describing the wheelchair competitions, Kamala draws our attention to the ways in which class positionality and inequality undermine Southern postcolonial women’s experiences of personal competence and their personal desires to publicly demonstrate their competency. Nevertheless, and despite these class distinctions to potentially cause shame, these international disability sporting competitions and events continually emerge in Kamala’s life stories as agential moments of resistance to the stigma that situates poor and working-class women with disabilities at the margins of society. Instead, Kamala’s confrontational desires to resist the stigmatizing effects of her class positionality transcended geographical boundaries. In fact, as illustrated in the following quote, Kamala draws upon her positionality of class inequality as a form of gendered-disability mobilization to confront and transform structural inequalities that intensify the disadvantages experienced by women with disabilities in Sri Lanka’s rural, working-class and armed-conflict zones. I have gone to many countries for sports. When I went like that, one thing I saw was that they do their own thing. They have a good social background. I went to Japan for three months for a leadership training programme. There were people from different countries there. When speaking to them I learnt of the state of disabled people in their countries. After that when I came to Sri Lanka, I joined various organizations. I told them of the importance of working together to attain our rights. I saw this at Sarvodaya as well. Now no matter how many disabled people were there at Sarvodaya I wasn’t able to get a wheelchair. Now there has to be a programme by the government to provide disabled persons with wheelchairs. So, then I thought in order for us to participate in sports, for us to go to the temple, and do other things also I said we need to all come together. When I joined various organizations, I realized that women were not given the chance to come forward. Kamala’s political orientation towards disability is grounded within socio-political understandings of disability, where being disabled and the experiences of

24 Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic disablement are because of external, environmental structures and institutions rather than to a personal deficit. This is similar to Western sociological models of disability, where structures, institutions and normative values of ableism are central to the ways in which disability becomes medicalized, devalued and stigmatized. These experiences as a competitive international athlete subsequently spurred on a range of agential transitions and transformations. Kamala’s political orientations towards her gendered-disability identification take a marked turn after participating in international workshops and training in disability advocacy. Through these opportunities overseas, Kamala began to understand her gendereddisability identity for its potential to build collective solidarity with women with disabilities in her own context of Sri Lanka. Through the shared experience of being with other disabled women and learning collectively about the rights of women with disability, Kamala explores the possibilities of alternative social and political orientations that enable the possibility of challenging the ongoing stigma and marginalization attached to and experienced by Sri Lankan women with disabilities. Returning to Sri Lanka, Kamala states that she recognized that the women’s arm of the Sri Lankan disability movement needed to directly confront and campaign against the ongoing socio-cultural stereotypes that positioned women with disabilities as incompetent and undignified. As she herself had done, through her own personal sporting achievements and international training, Kamala desired to actively demonstrate the possibilities for women with disabilities and their capacities to participate in competitive activities, such as sports and everyday ritual practices of religious observance. She also recognized the significance of collective action in challenging the social, political and cultural devaluation of women with disabilities. This type of reconfiguration of disability perception at the margins is indicative of the complex processes of disability identification and disidentification management that Kamala engaged in as she ascended further into gendered-disability advocacy work in Sri Lanka.

Passing as ‘normal’: Kamala’s reflections from the field Daniel Wilson (2013) collapses the distinction between ‘passing’ and ‘normalization’ that was made by Fred Davis and argues that the normalization experiences of polio survivors are a form of passing. Passing is not only about eradicating or disguising the physical signs of impairment; indeed, this would be near impossible for people with polio. Passing, as Wilson (2013) suggests, includes those strategies that women with disability develop to reduce the stigma that renders their disability ‘invisible’ even when it is in plain sight. Polio survivors such as Kamala find ways to live relatively ordinary lives, even with a significant physical impairment. Over her life course, Kamala has developed ways to negotiate her own perceptions of her polio with publicly stigmatized representations of women with disabilities, demonstrating her capacities to achieve her goals of an ordinary life: getting an education, getting a job and a career, maintaining positive family relationships despite her not being married and having her own family. As

Belonging beyond disability identity 25 Kamala narrates, her desire to pass as ordinary through highly visible markers of ‘normal’, such as education, work and a career, the desire to have children and her own family, is retrospective now that she is older. While Kamala’s physical impairment and wheelchair are publicly and privately visible, she has found ways to render them ‘invisible’ and ‘pass’ as ‘normal’ as a deliberate strategy to be more or less accepted in, and belong to, her community as a ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ person (Wilson 2013). Passing has meant different things to Kamala at different periods of her life as a polio survivor and gendered-disability advocate. As documented in the work of Wilson (2013), often, polio survivors such as Kamala have found ways to deflect attention from their physical impairment through positive relationships of familial belonging as well as assistive devices, such as crutches and wheelchairs, that enable them to participate in familial relationships on par with their able-bodied family members. Reflecting on her childhood, Kamala identified the significance of ‘passing’ for her own sense of self and the affective bonds and ties she experienced with her immediate family members: I wasn’t excluded in any way. And they (my family) didn’t think that I was disabled and neither did I. Even my older brother would scold me if I didn’t do any work at home. So, because I was accepted as a normal person at home, I didn’t notice a difference and neither did they. I think that is what a disabled person needs to have. Kamala’s personal experiences of growing up with polio highlight the significance of being accepted as ‘normal’ within the family home, where one’s sense of familial belonging is not experienced as, nor is seen to be, different from siblings and other family members: My parents loved me like I was another child. They didn’t see me as disabled. They treated me like they treated the other children. They would not have thought of me as a disabled child. Now in most places they think that this is a disabled child and treat them differently. I think that it is only when parents treat disabled children in a special way that this difference appears. By contrast, in her disability advocacy work, Kamala has widely observed how families treat their children with disabilities differently from how they treat other siblings and family members. Kamala suggests that often, this distinctly visible differentiation makes it difficult for the child with a disability to become accepted, as such family rhetoric of differentiation is stigmatizing. As she noted through her disability advocacy work, many families frequently ask her, ‘Where do we leave him? We have to take him somewhere’. For many poor and working-class rural families with children with disabilities in Sri Lanka, Kamala suggests that being able to pass in plain sight, with or without assistive devices such as crutches or human assistance, is the natural order of things. Kamala states that this is particularly challenging in her work as a

26 Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic disability advocate, as she seeks to deliberately disrupt this natural order of things and remind families that their child is disabled, as an act of disability politicization and to create disability visibility: I feel when we go to a village, we have to be very careful when getting in touch with disabled persons because we go to houses and remind parents that their child is disabled. I have come across situations like that. It is then that people in that house also start to think differently. If not, the child normally goes to school, he has adapted to his home environment, he helps his parents in the paddy field. They help their mother to cook. It is only when we or some other organization goes to the house and ask if there is a person with a disability that the parents realize it. In certain contexts where women with disability have a long history of passing as ‘normal’ without consciously negotiating their disability, the role of disability advocacy remains unclear and in some cases problematic; as illustrated above, it can be damaging to the family dynamic. While in Western societies where there are extensive social protection regimes and disability rights based social provisioning, within the Southern postcolonial, post-war context, disrupting the only networks of support available to women with disability can have devastating outcomes. Citing another example, Kamala identified the role of women’s disability organizations that fail to understand the complexities of gendered-disability experiences and the day-to-day tensions that disabled women need to negotiate within the familial household and relations: It is the same in women’s organizations. Sometimes women live very well at home with her husband, her children. She will do her work. He will do his work. They will very socially carry on with their work. But what do our women’s organizations go and do? They will speak about rights and women’s rights and tell them not to do their husbands’ work. A key challenge of advocating for women with disabilities in Sri Lanka is recognizing that they may have already convinced themselves that they are ‘normal’ and do not require enabling disability supports that can facilitate an ordinary independent life. Within the context of Sri Lanka, particularly after almost 30 years of protracted armed conflict, continual family unification has been a core strategy of long-term, intergenerational survival. Thus, disability advocacy efforts that discuss ‘rights’ purely from a Western normative frame can appear to undermine the household normalization processes that the women have already established. While these familial relationships may undermine disabled women’s capacities and capabilities, disabled women in these positions do challenge gendered family norms of the ‘good daughter’. On one level, disabled women know that their gendered labour within the household is not only uneven, but at times central to maintaining household wellbeing. At the same time, global North discursive

Belonging beyond disability identity 27 framings of disability rights creates conflict and tension, often making it impossible for them to continue to be perceived as ‘normal women’. Further, given that there is a dearth of social provisioning for disabled women within the Southern postcolonial, post-war context, there are few opportunities to live a safe and secure life outside their family households. Thus, to intervene in the lives of women with disabilities and discuss disability rights has layered implications, in that it undermines their material wellbeing and simultaneously weakens the women’s normalization processes that have sustained their survival within gendered family constructions. It henceforth carries the very real possibility of placing their personal security at risk, as Kamala alludes to in her interviews. These women would be unable to deflect from their impairment and assistive devices that allow them to perform gendered household duties. In such instances, they, too, would become disabled instead of passing as ‘normal’ (Wilson 2013).

Reverse-passing for gendered-disability advocacy An interesting variant of passing is the way Kamala performs her disability in overt ways as a key disability advocacy strategy, thus reversing the passing work that she undertakes elsewhere. As a polio survivor, she reverse-passes her disability in key meetings with senior government ministers and administration officers to demonstrate the necessity of increasing critical supports for women with disability. That is, she clearly displays the disability as a product of her social world, where the world does not comprehend its systemic disablement that marginalizes its disabled citizens. In contrast to passing in family and among the local community, Kamala ensures the visibility of her disability and assistive devices in advocacy meetings. In these social settings that matter to the disability movement, Kamala purposefully and dramatically constructs the visibly disabled woman who requires assistance: Every single minister, every person in charge of departments in the district had to come and present their monthly progress reports at this meeting. The Disapathy and all would come. Sanasa also has that chance. When I was president, I got a letter asking if I was coming. I went. The first row is kept for politicians. The second row is for let’s say the Agriculture Ministry … the Secretary of the Agriculture Ministry. They hadn’t kept seats for Sanasa. Now the president of Sanasa should be given isn’t it? After that I went out and called the previous president and asked him, ‘There isn’t a seat for the president of Sanasa. Do you know why that is?’ He said, ‘No, those seats are only for government officers. Earlier we would go and sit on any chair’. That really upset me. The governor also came. I was outside. He smiled at me and went inside because I was on the phone. I was waiting to see what would happen. The meeting was about to start and there were no seats. I hadn’t gone on a wheelchair I had gone on crutches. I didn’t stay for the meeting. When I was leaving the governor phoned me. He asked me where I was. I said that I

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Niro Kandasamy and Karen Soldatic was going. He said, ‘No wait. I asked for the president of the Sanasa and you weren’t there’. I said, ‘Sir, I am the new president of Sanasa. There wasn’t a chair there. I can’t ask for a chair either and because I can’t sit on someone else’s chair I left’. From that day until today there is always a seat for the president of Sanasa. Sometimes we act in certain ways and get things done.

What Kamala does not allow to pass, in this context of a high-level meeting, is being used as an advocacy strategy. She uses her departure from the meeting to call for action to improve access to public spaces for women with disabilities, in this case, to attend meetings and advocate for their needs. These are calculated tactics: waiting outside to see if a chair would be provided, not staying for the meeting, not stating to the governor earlier that she is the president of the Sanasa and, instead, explaining her dissatisfaction to the governor as she leaves the meeting. Indeed, the meeting provided the context for reverse-passing that can be viewed as advancing disability advocacy work. Kamala defies the expectations of the meeting and constructs active forms of rebelling, playing the ‘misfit’, rather than trying to pass as able-bodied, leaving assumptions about her disability unchallenged. Part of the reason Kamala adopts reverse-passing to demonstrate the consequences of building disabled spaces is that it enables her to display intersectional gendered-disability experiences to achieve social change. In the example above, Kamala rejects the help that is available from the ‘sir’ and ‘security’, thus reminding the meeting attendees of the unique experiences of women with disability as they sustain gendered-ableist spaces of society. Kamala reminded the attendees of the meeting of her gendered disability so that they could feel contempt at their suggestions. She specifically constructs a situation in which the attendees would endure a sense of pity towards women with disability. Her externalization of an ‘abnormal’, dependent woman with restricted mobility exposes profoundly the intersectional markers of her disability to achieve social change, as she elaborates: One day he asked me, ‘Why can’t you hold someone’s hand and come?’ I said, ‘Sir, why should I have to hold anyone’s hand and come up? If I have to hold someone’s hand it will have to be a man’s hand. I’m not saying that it is bad to hold a man’s hand, but that is unnecessary. That facility must be there’. So, in that situation that is really a sin by being a woman … now a man can go on someone else’s back even up the stairs. It doesn’t happen only to me. The disabled woman will definitely be subject to more unfairnesses. It is because there aren’t facilities. The other thing is when you go to the toilet. It is so difficult. Now if you go to your office and you need to go to the toilet, you know where the toilet is, you go and come. If I am going, I need to ask the security or ask someone else. It is very uncomfortable. Reverse-passing, then, for Kamala, did not generally mean that her disability was always detectable. Such visibility was usually constructed in spaces and interactions that served as opportunities to highlight the intersectional disability

Belonging beyond disability identity 29 experience. Writing from the context of students with disabilities, Olney and Brockelman (2003) locate these polarizing forms of ‘passing’ within ‘perception management’ – as the more complex process that demonstrates a deficit in order to get appropriate supports and accommodations. While several interviewees in their study tried to keep their disabled identity a secret – to be perceived as competent first, avoid being stereotyped and to increase their social and academic opportunities – others identified positive outcomes that were gained after increasing recognition for their abilities, such as being approached by professors to work on projects with them. Kamala’s selective reverse-passing demonstrates how perception management is a critical part of her gendered-disability advocacy work. She simultaneously rejects, embraces and displays her disability to specific situations for reasons other than shame and fear.

Conclusion The nature of Kamala’s perception management strategies is an ongoing process, as she endeavours to control the timing and setting of concealing or dramatizing her disability to achieve certain outcomes. Among women with disability in rural and armed conflict settings, Kamala expresses her disability identity in ways that emphasize her resistance to physical and cultural structures of exclusion. Regardless of context, Kamala’s impairment and resistance were equally visible and used to demonstrate the possibilities for change. By contrast, in key advocacy meetings with senior government and community representatives, Kamala emphasizes her disability identity to highlight the plight of women with disability and to gain attention. This style of perception management, in which she controls her disability, has enabled her to navigate advocacy work at the intersections of grassroots mobilization with policymakers and service providers. The chapter reveals that disability perception management is a complex process that transcends static constructions of disability identity. It captures the role that Kamala, as a gendered-disability advocate, plays in defining her own life and the lives of other women with disabilities in Sri Lanka. Acts of ‘passing’ become complicated and give way to the concept of perception management that shows the processes of self-determination of an individual with a disability and how and when they decide to share information about their disability (Olney and Brockelman 2003). In the context of Sri Lanka, Kamala’s self-presentation regularly confronts the intersectional experiences of women with disabilities and the types of community and government supports that are required for them to live as ‘normal’ citizens. Across different settings, Kamala mobilizes her disability identity to different degrees that confront the ignorance, stereotypes, judgements, hopelessness, loss and grief that circulate her gendered-disability advocacy work. Disability perception management, in the case of Kamala, is not so much a choice, but rather a key strategy for her gendered-disability advocacy work. By drawing on historical and conceptual examples of disability perception management, we show that the Black feminist disability framework is emergent and intersectional (Bailey and Mobley 2019). It is also temporal, as Kamala’s

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experiences show; disability perception management is crafted over time and in response to lived experiences of exclusion, empowerment and awareness about the consequences and possibilities of disability identification and disidentification. This is especially important for Kamala, whose gendered-disability advocacy leadership critically engages the intersections of oppression facing women with disabilities in post–armed conflict Sri Lanka. As the works in Soldatic and Johnson (2020) suggest, disability advocates operate within increasingly complex landscapes of historical, cultural and political demands, which require creative approaches to sustain the disability movement. The disability perception management strategies carried out by Kamala provide a framework to understand the intricacies of gendered-disability advocates and to create greater awareness of the simultaneous experiences of enablement and social disadvantages afforded by having a disability in the global South. I have achieved many things, but it hasn’t come easily. I have been mocked and shamed. Similarly, I have been praised. I have come to this place with a lot of things. Now when I think about it, I think that it was for the best. If I just came up, there would have been no value in it. Now no matter what anyone says I know the value of what I have done. I am the person who can assess it. I can do that now because I came up in that way. I can face any challenge that life might throw at me.

References Bailey, M. & Mobley, I.A. 2019, ‘Work in the intersections: a black feminist disability framework’, Gender and Society, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 19–40. Brune, J.A. & Wilson, D.J. 2013, Disability and passing: blurring the lines of identity, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Collins, P.H. 2000, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, 2nd edn, Routledge, London. Cutajar, J. & Adjoe, C. 2016, ‘Whose knowledge, whose voice? Power, agency and resistance in disability studies for the global South’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, pp. 503–16. Ghai, A. 2002, ‘Disabled women: an excluded agenda of Indian feminism’, Hypatia, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 49–66. Ghai, A. 2019, Rethinking disability in India, Routledge, New Delhi. Gurung, P. 2019, ‘Our lives, our story: the journey of the voiceless towards advocacy in Nepal’, in K. Soldatic & K. Johnson (eds.), Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Oxon, pp. 145–60. Kandasamy, N. & Soldatic, K. 2019, ‘Kamalawathie: gender, disability and leadership in Sri Lanka’, in K. Soldatic & K. Johnson (eds.), Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Oxon, pp. 97–113. Maddison, S. & Scalmer, S., 2006, Activist wisdom: practical knowledge and creative tension in social movements, UNSW Press, Sydney. Meekosha, H. & Soldatic, K., 2011, ‘Human rights and the global south: the case of disability’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 8, pp. 1383–97.

Belonging beyond disability identity 31 Michalko, R. & Titchkosky, T., 2001, ‘Putting disability in its place: it’s not a joking matter’, in J.C. Wilson & C. Lewiecki-Wilson (eds.), Embodied rhetorics: disability in language and culture, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, pp. 200–28. Mohanty, C.T. 1995, ‘Feminist encounters: locating the politics of experience’, in L. Nicholson & S. Seidman (eds.), Social postmodernism: beyond identity politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 68–86. Olney, M.F. & Brockelman, K.F., 2003, ‘Out of the disability closet: strategic use of perception management by select university students with disabilities’, Disability & Society, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 35–50. Parekh, P.N. 2008, ‘Gender, disability and the postcolonial nexus’, in P.N. Parekh (ed.), Wagadu, volume 4: intersecting gender and disability perspectives in rethinking postcolonial identities, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 173–95. Priestley, M. (ed.) 2001, Disability and the life course: global perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Samararatne, D., Soldatic, K. & Perera, B., 2018, ‘Out of the shadows’: war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka. Final report, Western Sydney University, Sydney. Sands, T. 2005, A voice of our own: advocacy by women with disability in Australia and the Pacific. Gender and Development, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 51–62. Seoighe, R. 2017, War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka: after the end, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Soldatic, K. & Johnson, K. (eds.) 2019, Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Oxon. Titchkosky, T. 2003, Disability, self, and society, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Wilson, D. 2013, ‘Passing in the shadow of FDR: polio survivors, passing, and the negotiation of disability’, in J.A. Brune & D.J. Wilson (eds.) Disability and passing: blurring the lines of identity, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 13–35.

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Music, resistance and change The gendered-disability performativity of a Tamil woman with multiple disabilities Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan

Vinothini is well known among her community for her vocal talents and regularly performs at cultural events. The audience can identify her physical impairment by the crutches that rest against her at each performance. She holds the microphone with one hand as the crutches rest against her saree pleats. The viewer is drawn to the intersecting spaces of social and musical performance. In the intersectional representation, the music, the gender and the physical impairment compose an unfamiliar melody of the Tamil female body in Sri Lanka. The individual and collective are drawn into unity, harmonizing boundaries of bodily and performative spaces. Vinothini, dressed in Tamil cultural attire (saree and shalwar), projects an air of confidence. Vinothini was born blind and her leg was injured, leading to an impairment, during the armed conflict between Sri Lankan government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the Kilinochchi District. Her multiple disabilities have created a confluence of disability experiences that are heightened in her musical performances, to which the community’s responses have not always been positive. Reflecting on her early music performances, Vinothini explained that ‘[the audience] were not happy with the fact that a blind girl was on stage’. However, these social constructions of Vinothini’s disabilities only strengthened her music aspirations: ‘after that, I decided that I wanted to enter this field as a career’. Her resistance to the community’s criticism represents the dichotomy of performer/audience that can simultaneously appreciate and diminish the female musician with multiple disabilities. It also points towards the larger theoretical linking of the role of music and disability resistance within the historical context of Vinothini’s socio-political identity as a Tamil woman with multiple disabilities living in post–armed conflict Sri Lanka. As Straus (2011) has noted, there exists a long history of association between blindness and music. People marked out as blind are historically and widely considered more strongly attuned to hearing skills that enhance their musical talents (see Rowden 2009). As Straus (2011) demonstrates, long before the proliferation of the social model of disability, blindness was viewed not as a deficit in music creation, but rather as a different form of ability essential to the socio-cultural interpretation of the musician’s craft. Straus (2011) brings together music and disability in ways that conceptualize disability as socially and culturally constructed

Music, resistance and change 33 and historically contingent, thus deeply varied with time, place and context. The impact of disability and concepts of disability on music – through composers, performers and listeners with disabilities – has the potential to reveal the narrative forms of disability that remain underexplored. For example, Witek (1988) challenges negative Western cultural tropes of blues singers in 1960s USA as either the ‘blind genius’ or the ‘suffering blues singer begging with a tin cup’. Witek (1988) examines the autobiographies of blues singers to show that the intimate connection between their blindness and their music is a source of power and represents their struggle against exclusion. This chapter explores the connections between gender, rurality, ethnicity, disability (multiple) and music, by focusing on the myriad ways in which Vinothini’s talent and passion for music has shaped and been shaped by her identity as a Tamil woman, blind since birth and, subsequently, by her impairment to her leg during the armed conflict. She was shot in the leg and was subjected to multiple operations that have left her with metal parts inside her body. The pain is heightened when she sits down on plastic chairs or is required to stand up for long periods of time. It is noteworthy that Vinothini’s confidence reduced after her leg injury, as she became more dependent on others. At the same time, Vinothini’s cheerful nature captures her resilience and tenacity to become a positive figure in society and pursue her aspirations. The chapter explores the gendered-disability experiences and demonstrates music as the mechanism for negotiating and traversing peace and resistance in Vinothini’s life trajectory as a young Tamil university student living in the business capital, Colombo. As Vinothini articulates, she uses her blindness in unfamiliar ways to navigate challenging political and social circumstances, for instance, those of armed conflict and of the rural/urban. In this chapter, we focus on how music is experienced and viewed as a social and cultural representation of disability. At the same time, Vinothini embodies her disability as enhancing her performing-self within the present and future postconflict context. The disability experiences presented in this chapter advance Alex Lubet’s (2011) conceptualization of social confluence. Lubet’s (2011) theory of social confluence builds on the group identity formation work of ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin (1993) and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) to argue for an even more fragmented sense of being as the fundamental unit of social organization. Lubet further draws inspiration from ethnomusicologists of colour who highlight the music experiences of the underprivileged and argues that the: individual identities constituting such communities are capable of morphing almost instantaneously and that increasingly they are becoming the fundamental unit of social organisation in globalised, technologized society through innovations like Facebook and Twitter. (Lubet 2011, p. 8) Put differently, a woman with disability can be perceived in different ways within a single context. This is a profoundly transformative approach to understandings

34 Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan of disability, not least in the context of music experiences. The theory of social confluence demonstrates that culture and physical impairment are socially constructed, thus challenging any ‘orthodox’ social model of disability that recognizes disability as essential and embodied (Lubet 2011). In the chapter, we advance the significance of context that is central to the theory of social confluence and argue that the individual can resist the radically different ways in which their disability status is perceived by constructing future-contexts that diminish their disability. In paying attention to the aspirations and goals of the individual, social confluence becomes a motivation for resistance and change. We use Vinothini’s lived experiences to conceptualize multiple disabilities. On the one hand, Vinothini’s disability experiences demonstrate social confluence in ways that amplify her marginalization in society in the present. On the other hand, she uses her life goals to craft imaginative future-contexts that diminish her multiple disabilities, enhance her music goals and achieve real freedom.

The performing self Aspiring to become a musician was not only motivated by the community’s criticism of Vinothini but was also due to the absence of other educational opportunities for Tamil disabled children growing up in rural and remote towns in the Kilinochchi District in Northern Sri Lanka. Since her childhood, Vinothini’s family faced the consequences of armed conflict: displacement numerous times, living in refugee camps for indefinite periods and disrupted education and livelihoods. Thus, the effects of armed conflict and being disabled provided fewer opportunities for Vinothini to access education, in comparison to her able-bodied peers in other parts of Sri Lanka. As a child, I didn’t receive much of an education, I didn’t have a school that could accommodate me, I wasn’t able to go to school in some instances, and therefore I stayed home a lot. I faced such problems, then finally I joined the Iniya Vazhvu Illam. The place was run by a GS [Grama Sevagar – government-appointed staff], he was also blind. He went around to all the houses in the villages and would look for people with disabilities. That’s how I met him, and he then took me to the hostel – Iniya Vazhvu Illam. During that time, I started to study but also found it very difficult to be away from my mum and dad as I was still very young. She was eight years old at the time of enrolling in Iniya Vazhvu Illam; however, she returned home within one month when it became clear that she was too young to be living away from her family: ‘We had to do everything there, even though there was a warden. We were taught how to do everything from a young age, like washing your clothes, putting on clothes, everything’. Nevertheless, Vinothini learned to be independent. Over time, she received recognition for her singing talent by local organizations and was frequently invited to perform at events. Soon after returning home, she enrolled in another school in Vellankulam

Music, resistance and change 35 in the Mannar District and continued to perform at events; as she said, ‘if there was a programme, my singing would be the first event, they would somehow ensure that there was a singing event’. When she was 13 years old, she returned to Iniya Vazhvu Illam, where she learned music professionally for the first time and became skilled at playing a range of instruments, including keyboard, accordion, harmonium, melodica and piano. Vinothini’s passion for music composed her historical self and dramatically weakened her disability identity. On stage, I can’t or don’t really think about myself or the audience. I can only tell how many people are there once I finish singing and people applaud. I don’t really get scared or shy, I tell myself that this is a platform to showcase my talent. And then, you have to feel what the song is about and bring about that feeling in yourself to sing a particular song properly. Let’s say it is a devotional song, I need to feel that way and sing. If it’s a love song, I need to feel that song and sing it accordingly. Then only the song will come out appropriately and it will reach the audience in the right manner. At that time, the only thing you should think of is that for this song. I need to be in this state of mind to perform it correctly. At critical times, her identity as a female Tamil vocalist has been problematic and dangerous. During the armed conflict, Vinothini injured her leg and was mistakenly targeted by Sri Lankan government forces who were searching for a female LTTE soldier. There used to be another LTTE female fighter who was older than me and looked just like me, our faces were so similar, especially if she wore glasses. She was also blind. She had a child and a husband. I think her child is now dead and the husband has left her and remarried. She also sings. When I was injured, the army came looking for her and instead found me, then I had to explain to them that it was not me and I somehow got away. In another example, she describes pretending to be the partner of a Tamil civilian so that the LTTE would not proscribe the civilian man, who was seen to be caring for a disabled woman. Such incidents highlighted the challenges as well as compassion undertaken from living in the conflict zone as a disabled woman. During the armed conflict, the LTTE successfully governed a de facto state in the North and East of Sri Lanka (Gemini 2019). A core part of their governance structure was to provide medical and social supports to women with disability, namely through the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO) (Stokke 2006). The TRO was a key source of support for Tamils injured in the armed conflict as well as Tamil civilians with disabilities living in the Kilinochchi District. For Vinothini, the TRO was a significant site of inclusivity, resistance and growth. They [the LTTE] used to run an organization called TRO which was the organization that looked after our Illam (hostel/school). They would buy the

36 Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan things that we would need, and another humanitarian organization used to buy things that we needed. That’s where I studied and grew up, they provided a platform for our talents, too. I used to interact with them, would learn and also sing with them. In these historical reflections of the past, Vinothini describes the confluence of diverse disabling attitudes by the community, the LTTE and government forces, while she was also constructing her own sense of self with optimism and confidence. At one level, musical performance diminishes individual and collective disability and enables Vinothini to insert her body into the music – a place where she ‘cannot think about myself or the audience’. The music provides an imaginative space to absorb, albeit for brief moments of time, Vinothini’s sensorial and physical self that is otherwise disabled by the context in which she finds herself at any given moment. As a Tamil woman with multiple disabilities, however, her narratives of music represent a type of historical resistance that has hitherto not been uncovered in wider narratives of Tamil resistance and historical injustice in their homeland. This is crucial in the light of ongoing calls by the victims of the armed conflict for transitional justice for the violations of their human rights and, in response, the government’s attempts to erase memories of Tamil survival and resistance (Perera 2016, Seoighe 2017).

Conceptualizing multiple disabilities in music experiences and gendered advocacy Vinothini’s reflections on music provide ways of thinking about the experience of multiple disabilities that could be useful to advancing understandings of gendered-disability advocacy in diverse contexts. Throughout Vinothini’s life stories, her experiences of disability in music have clear implications for how she is working towards achieving her career goals. But society looks at us blind people, those who can’t speak or hear as truly disabled people. The issue with society is that they think those who cannot see are the ones who really need to be assisted. I’ve noticed that in many places. For example, say someone who is not able to speak catches the bus and goes somewhere after facing so many hurdles due to their disability, society really doesn’t look at that and appreciate what they’ve gone through. But say someone who can’t hear uses sign language to speak to someone next to me, people would stare at them. Society looks at us differently. There is a person who plays the keyboard with her hands. Society appears amazed, however will just applaud and let it be. However, when we play the keyboard, they look at us with awe, watching to see how we figure out the settings, and the buttons, by just feeling it. That is a difference in us. Furthermore, in the manner in which we study, we use braille, the others just carry a pen and book around. When we use braille, they look at us differently.

Music, resistance and change 37 Vinothini provided further examples that demonstrate her everyday experiences of being a disabled Tamil female university student travelling from the North to Colombo, which is almost 330 kilometres away and can take up to nine hours to reach by bus. She had initially travelled with her family members, but the trips became expensive and soon she was travelling alone. Significantly, the family did not treat Vinothini differently due to her disabilities, instead encouraged her full participation in household chores and family life, while trusting her decision to pursue higher education in Colombo. Her experiences, however, demonstrate the challenges of living with a disability as a woman in Sri Lanka, where basic infrastructure, respect and dignity has been denied to them. People see us in two ways, one group sees us as their sibling and another sees us as ‘what do they know, we can do whatever we like’. There was a blind girl whom someone got married to. The husband took her into the jungle and left her there. There are people like that. Even when I travel by bus or train, I get harassed. This recent trip back home on the bus [from university], what happened was, there was a boy sitting behind us. We had made a booking and so were sitting in the front. These boys were pushing their leg through the bus seat [between the back rest and the seat]. I kept telling them to stop and they wouldn’t listen. My friend couldn’t take it anymore and stood up and hit the guy with a water bottle, even then he didn’t stop. Then she stood up, walked over to him, she is also blind, and told him to stop. Then he finally stopped. Then the bus stopped for a tea break and he got off, had a tea and came back and said, ‘I’ll simply put my leg up on the seat, what are you going to do?’ The guy was so drunk. The people around us didn’t say anything. There were other boys sitting around and they didn’t say anything. We were feeling really scared, especially because we are women. We couldn’t go to the bus driver and complain because he was up ahead, and we are blind right. There are many such issues that we face. Even if we explain it to people they won’t understand. And then there is the problem of getting the seat. People constantly take our allocated seats and yell at us to move to the back of the bus. If you are a boy, it’s okay. We have two issues: we are disabled and female. If not for the disability, they should at least respect us for being women. The travelling social model of disability Vinothini makes a number of critical points in need of further exploration. The first key point relates to how Sri Lankan society constructs the travelling Tamil female disabled body as an excess of the mobile human population. The experience also demonstrates the consequence of the lack of infrastructure and support that is available to the disabled community in Sri Lanka. Some explanation of the gendered-disability experience in Sri Lanka is necessary to understand the context of this discussion on what disability means in a historically divided society. Tamil women with disability occupy distinct spaces of exclusion and marginalization;

38 Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan it would be erroneous to conceive of them as having a typical ‘Sri Lankan disability experience’, because they symbolize the injustice and historical oppression against Tamil women by masculinized nationalist forces and militarization of the nation state. The discrimination, or the disabling conditions, that they face refers to dominant social constructions of Tamil women as they become mobile citizens of society in the post–armed conflict setting. As a blind Tamil woman who acquired a disability in the armed conflict, Vinothini represents the thriving resistance to oppressive regimes of power that attempt to silence her mobility. By defying societal pressures and continuing to travel from the North to Colombo to attend university, she challenges the travelling social model of disability that undermines her gendered mobility. There is a Sir whom I know. He is also blind, he can play a lot of instruments, and he can play a lot of instruments and can sing very well, he also teaches music. So, I also want to be like them, even if I don’t achieve the same level as them, I want to be somewhat like them. They also encourage us, he was one of the main reasons why I moved to Colombo campus. Through music education, Vinothini reconstructs the travelling social model of disability by reimagining the temporal sociality of (dis)ability, in which the music transports Vinothini to another world that is set to a different beat. Regardless of how I’m feeling, either sad or happy, I will always make time to practise. When I was in the hostel, I would go to the music room to practise, or I’d go read books at the library. They have braille books there. Or I would gather around younger children and teach them something or read them something. I’d teach them to sing or to play a musical instrument. In a social climate in which racialized and gendered-disabled bodies are discarded, the role of music seems to both sustain and challenge divisions in society. In other words, engaging music plays a pivotal role in Vinothini’s resistance to the travelling social model of disability that organizes society through gendered and able-bodied frameworks. Disability rights in practice Another point that Vinothini makes is the need for greater attention to be given to improving the socioeconomic conditions of global society (Ulldemolins 2012). In addition, gender discrimination patterns can influence decision-making authorities, which not only affects access to services, but also exposure to psychosocial and environmental risk. Here, disability rights fail to materialize in practice, as Vinothini’s experiences draw us closer to the inequities related to the dominant social determinants of disability that are based on gender, rurality, race, socioeconomic status and having a certain type of impairment.

Music, resistance and change 39 It would be good if we did know the rights of disabled people and those rights were upheld. What really is the point of knowing the rights when they are not upheld? (sarcastic) Even if we did ask for our rights. There is another issue if someone is affected 100 per cent you can call him disabled, 60 per cent affected you can call him disabled? But what if it’s someone who has lost a small piece of the finger? Compare him to someone who has lost both their hands. There are those who use such small effects [fingers beings cut off] to get aid from government and private organizations and then they go on to use the aid to do inappropriate things. The person who has lost both their hands finds it difficult to get this help. In this aspect, the organizations that do provide the assistance need to first choose the people in a proper way, if they keep giving the assistance to the wrong people it’s an issue. At present that is what is happening here. A significant fact which Vinothini expressed after her stay in Colombo was that the general atmosphere towards women with disabilities seemed to be very hostile. Vinothini further explained that she was nervous travelling around Colombo due to being unable to speak Sinhala. Thus, Vinothini and her friends only ate at Tamil restaurants, not daring to step inside Sinhalese shops. She avoided travelling around Colombo not only because of the language barriers, but also because she did not want to burden her friends. In an unfamiliar place, her friends became important sources of support. When she travelled through Colombo with her friends, she expressed how bus drivers would often be in a hurry, and as a result she had fallen off the bus many times. Moreover, people on the streets in Colombo would offer Vinothini money in response to her disabilities, which she found amusing, and which reinforced societal perceptions about disabled people as being poor and dependent. At the same time, she explained that Colombo appeared busy and rushed with no care to wait for people, as opposed to Kilinochchi which, in her words, contained people who were all injured by the armed conflict and therefore seemed to have more patience. It is significant that before being injured in the armed conflict, Vinothini was able to walk around freely in her region of Kilinochchi. However, her physical movement and mobility radically changed after she was shot, clearly marking her body with racialized, militarized domination and subjugation. Demonstrating (dis)ability advocacy Vinothini explained that there were various organizations conducting programmes for disabled people across Sri Lanka. Some of them include programmes relating to the arts, drawing on drama and plays. Certain organizations also provided training in employment skills, alongside specialist disability assistance equipment to support disabled people who were identified as having unique musical and performance talents. These programmes also observed commemorative days for the disabled and encouraged their participation. Vinothini emphasized that women

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were permitted to participate and that there was no gender discrimination. Some organizations visited those who were affected by the war and counselled them. Vinothini expressed how there were many Tamils who were traumatized by the war and wouldn’t leave their homes. She mentioned how Kilinochchi, the former administrative centre and capital city of the LTTE government was well developed in this aspect, since women with disabilities would be ‘constantly disturbed’ and checked up on. I do get involved, for example through the youth club, I used to be the leader of the youth club, we’ve run sessions where we’ve provided employment training to other disabled people with the assistance of our organization’s management. For Kilinochchi I haven’t really done anything that is noteworthy, but I will be doing work here in the future. When I was young, I didn’t really know anything about such advocacy work. But when I joined Iniya Vazhvu Illam things really changed, I started coming out of my shell and it brought out my talent. I didn’t really know what was happening around the country or anything prior to moving to the hostel. I became more aware of disabled people’s life. The hostel would be frequented by organizations which run seminars. When I saw that, I was like, if they are able to do such work why can I not do the work? Normally if we are disabled and choose to work with the disabled, one disabled person knows another disabled person’s talents. For example, if you asked another blind person whether or not I can sing, they would tell you that I can sing. If you ask a normal person they wouldn’t really know if I can sing, if they had seen me sing then they might say that I’m capable of singing, but if you ask a disabled person they will tell you with confidence that I could sing. If we keep working within the disabled community, our talent would be restricted within that community, it’s like working within the four walls of your home with your parents around. But if we step outside of the community and work in the wider community, they will get to know that this person can do everything that they want to and the only thing I need to do is to help them with their disability. And when they receive help from someone who is disabled, they will think to themselves if a disabled person is able to help, imagine what help I can offer to the community. If I help ten people those ten people may go on to help a hundred people each. That feeling keeps me motivated in doing my work. Vinothini gives an example of a cross-cutting intersection of rights, being a Tamil woman with disabilities from a rural and Tamil-dominated part of Sri Lanka. Legislation concerning disabilities is limited in Sri Lanka. Thus, it is no surprise that legislation recognizing these intersections is also scarce. Strengthening Provincial Council systems is important in this regard because of the flexibility within provincial statutes, as opposed to national legislation, to better recognize such intersections. The Disability Organizations Joint Front (DOJF) is the only umbrella body for disability organizations in Sri Lanka, formed in 2001. There are

Music, resistance and change 41 26 member organizations from different parts of the country, including the North and East, and including those that purport to represent the interests of people with sensory and physical impairments alongside the parents of children living with an intellectual impairment. DOJF (2017) aims to enable disability organizations to work jointly as a pressure group to protect the rights of women with disabilities, ensuring them a free and independent life. The Organization for Rehabilitation of the Handicapped (ORHAN) (2019) was formed in 1999 in the Vavuniya District, an area greatly affected by the armed conflict. Advocacy and lobbying by women with disability is one of the main thematic areas of ORHAN. Viluthu is another organization that engages in advocacy support for war-affected women in the North and the East (Sriyananda 2018). Training, networking, advocacy, creating a knowledge base and empowering the marginalized sections of civil society are its key programmes (Centre for Human Resource Development 2017).

Surviving social confluence In 2016, Vinothini began her tertiary-level education in Colombo, where she faced the type of social confluence that was only possible due to her status as a young Tamil woman with multiple disabilities. At university, she learned that her disability identity was subject to swift change, depending on the social, cultural, historical and institutional context of the moment (Lubet 2010). Every recollection of her university experience demonstrates the multiple ways that she was being perceived by different groups of people; ‘not only cultural manifested disability but also embodied impairment are socially constructed’ (Lubet 2010, p. 5). It was difficult in the beginning. I know people say that usually, but it was more difficult for me. I had to form a relationship with another girl, I didn’t know how to get to places, I’d always be tripping over and falling and hurting myself. I had a lot of issues with the seniors, Oh God it was so bad, and it was Sinhalese seniors, also. And I don’t really know any Sinhala. I couldn’t study with them. I’m usually singing when I’m studying but I couldn’t do that. It felt like I was in jail. At least in jail there would be some freedom. In that hostel I didn’t even have that. I would never leave the hostel, no social life, I’d go to university and back, I used to feel so frustrated. As someone who used to move around where I wanted to, she wanted to, it was so difficult to be in that hostel. I had a Sir [mentioned earlier] who was very helpful and there was another friend who was there, but she left halfway through her studies. So I stayed by myself and studied there, and over time the seniors left. Then it was just the two of us, then we moved hostels and life got a bit better. It was a Tamil hostel, in my room there were Sinhalese girls, but other girls would come and talk to me regularly. There was only the one girl who was helping me out all the time, and she would also be frustrated about helping me, she was young, 22 or 23 [years old]. If I was to talk back to her it’s not nice, so I don’t. I moved blocks at the hostel, I’ve had less issues. My room is very close to all the facilities, and now she doesn’t really fight with me, we are okay now.

42 Niro Kandasamy and Sindhu Ratnarajan The significance of Vinothini’s patience as a key response to the socio-cultural context of disability in university complicates the social process that accommodates some bodies and excludes others. By indicating that her friends were both inclusive and yet unable to assist with her day-to-day activities, Vinothini questions what it means to accept disabled bodies and build inclusive communities (Azzopardi and Grech 2012). A key issue here is one of acceptance – what is the level and type of acceptance that is required for disabled bodies to feel included? In post–armed conflict Sri Lanka, Vinothini’s experiences as a young Tamil woman with multiple disabilities at university are constructed as both accepting and marginalizing. However, what is of more importance is that the reality of where she is positioned within her university community is not simply a construction or view, as Azzopardi and Grech (2012) demonstrate; it has real visible effects and impact. Vinothini navigates the confluence of perspectives about her impairment at the university. At any one time, she must respond to the highly ableist and racial Sri Lankan university system. For example, to change one of the subjects in her sociology course she had to submit a form to the administration office. She recalled, ‘Even when I asked them to give me a supplementary subject they didn’t. But for Sinhalese people they seemed to give a supplementary subject’. She had difficulties studying subjects such as Economics because they involved graphs and her visual impairment prevented her from being able to draw the graphs. Similarly, subjects such as Geography which contained a large amount of visual content were also unavailable. It is evident that the university material for blind people studying at the university is significantly lower compared to their peers. The subject lecturers confirmed that the university had changed the subject for other people and asked Vinothini why the university hadn’t enabled her change, to which she replied, ‘I tried my best and went through a lot of hassle to change but they wouldn’t help’. At the time of the interview in 2019, she was persisting with the university administration to complete the subject transfer. Her experiences at the university have become increasingly difficult over the years, but she is determined to complete her degree. The resources available to Tamil people are even fewer due to language barriers, especially if the lectures are conducted in Sinhala or English. To overcome these barriers, Vinothini records the lectures and listens to them repeatedly, to study the content. In these instances, to receive basic student needs, Vinothini accepts that her multiple disabilities and being a Tamil woman reproduce survival social confluence. Music aspirations, managing social confluence Other than that, no major issues at university. If a programme happens, they will ask me to perform. And there is always the usual trouble between faculties. I don’t get involved in those issues. The issues do arise between faculties. If you are from the Arts faculty, they will target you, they don’t care if you are disabled. In the beginning senior students would stop me and ask me to sing, so I replied, ‘Are you asking me to sing because you are ragging [bullying] me

Music, resistance and change 43 or are you asking because you like to hear me sing? If you are asking me because you like me singing, I’ll happily sing for you, but if you are ragging me then I won’t’. They then said they like my singing and that’s why they asked, so I sang for them. They’ve come to study and so have we, so what’s with the divisions between us. I really didn’t have any convictions about what I wanted to do at university. I do like psychology and wanted to study it, especially because of the advocacy work I’m involved in. They said that psychology was not a single course and that it was combined with sociology within the sociology degree, so I chose sociology. I figured sociology would also help with the social work I do in the community. If I can get into Iniya Vazhvu Illam it would be good. Iniya Vazhvu Illam is going to be owned by the government, so I need to get into the organization before that. All the work necessary to make that happen is going on in the background, most likely it will happen next year. Who knows if I’ll get a job there through the government? I also do music on the side, I can also give classes. I can get a teaching job through that, too. I like working within the school, it’s better than being at the office where there won’t be much work to do. I don’t like earning money without doing any work. If it’s a school, I can spend time with the children and be how I want to be. How Vinothini thinks about music and disability depends on context (Bell 2017). Lubet (2011) argues that the role in which the individual finds herself in a contemporary globalized society is always changing in response to the next encounter. Indeed, disability experiences are not only subject to social confluence at any one time, but narratives of music also show how individuals are thinking about navigating social confluence in the future. For example, Vinothini reflects and anticipates instantaneous experiences of disability, which might explain why she includes her music career as a serious option for the future. Vinothini does not experience disability when she teaches music to school students. Instead, the school space allows her to shed her disability identity: as she said, ‘I can spend time with the children and be how I want to be’. In this future-context, Vinothini creates imaginative music experiences that resist the continuity of disabling attitudes of society and therefore reconceptualizes social confluence as an ever-present possibility; however, understanding the significance of context can change how she experiences disability. In discussing the past, present and future contexts in which music and disability are intertwined with gender, race, age and rurality, Vinothini negotiates strategies that may be helpful to manage the complex social processes that challenge her day-to-day life. Reflecting on the senior students who ordered her to sing during her initial days of university, Vinothini clarified their motivations before she sang. Moreover, maintaining distance from tensions between faculties at the university allows her to avoid conflict. Still, in describing her future career trajectory, Vinothini has multiple plans that demonstrate how she thinks about

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experiences of disability and the role of music in shaping her life. In retelling narratives of music over the life course, Vinothini finds ways of retelling narratives about the social confluence of her disability experiences at university.

Conclusion Vinothini’s importance extends in several directions: in the history of armed conflict and survival; in the history of music performance at the head of a line of disabled and non-disabled competitors whose collective participation in the wider community calls out for greater attention; and in the history of music education and advocacy work for people with multiple disabilities. The role of music in Vinothini’s life offers multiple points of entry for further scholarship in gendereddisability studies, post–armed conflict contexts and music, not only for conceptual and analytical work on the role of music in disability contexts but also for continual reflection on the musical performance of ability and for demonstrations of the role of musical performance that are continually inscribed with new levels of meaning at different stages of the life course. Demonstrating what disability has enabled – not in spite of, but rather by, through and because of disability – Howe and colleagues (2015) point out the role of music in describing disability as cultural and performative. In other words: What is interesting (and, for many disability scholars, ethical) about this model of disability is that it assigns stigma not to the imperfect person or to the abnormal person, but rather to the exclusionary societies that fail to accommodate bodily differences. (Howe et al. 2015, p. 6). Following this conceptual linking up of disability and music, this chapter shows the cultural malleability of disability within a musical context: in Vinothini’s lived experiences, blind singers are undermined by normative audiences, but they are not undermined among the disability community, where Vinothini is considered a cultural asset because of her disability. By contrast, her physical impairment is considered less disabling, thus amplifying the complexities of living with multiple disabilities. She explains: ‘They saw me as someone who was blind, as someone who didn’t know anything at all’. Extending Howe and colleagues’ (2015) insights to contexts of musical performance as a form of gendered-disability advocacy, we find that Vinothini’s self-performance tells a story of blindness that has survived representations of indignity, defeat, oppression and loss: her story, narrated through her performing self, moves rhythmically through social, cultural and institutional contexts that traverse peace and resistance in her life trajectory. By drawing attention to her life goals and musical aspirations in the future-context, Vinothini challenges the power of social confluence as a function of the current context. Instead, her music experiences lead us to her aspirations for another world where she performs the self in harmony with peace and dignity.

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References Appadurai, A. 1996, Cultural dimensions of globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Azzopardi, A. & Grech, S (eds.) 2012, Inclusive communities: a critical reader, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam. Bell, A.P. 2017, ‘(Dis)ability and music education: paralympian Patrick Anderson and the experience of disability in music’, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 108–28. doi:10.22176/act16.3.108. Centre for Human Resource Development. 2017, ‘Submission to LLRC by Viluthu, centre for human resource development’. viewed 30 January 2019. . Disability Organizations Joint Front. 2017, ‘The state of economic, social and cultural rights of persons with disabilities in Sri Lanka.’ viewed 30 January 2019. . Gemini, S. 2019, Structures of Tamil Eelam: a handbook, Puradsi Media, Bern, Switzerland. Howe, B., Jensen-Mouton, S., Lerner, N. & Straus, J. (eds.) 2016, The Oxford handbook of music and disability studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lubet, A. 2011, Music, disability, and society, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Organization for Rehabilitation of the Handicapped (ORHAN). 2019, ‘About us’. viewed 30 January 2019. . Perera, S. 2016, Survival media: the politics and poetics of mobility and the war in Sri Lanka, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Rowden, T. 2009, The songs of blind folk: African American musicians and cultures of blindness. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Seoighe, R. 2017, War, denial and nation-building in Sri Lanka: after the end, Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Slobin, M. 1993, Subcultural sounds: micromusics of the west, University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. Sriyananda, S. 2018, ‘War-affected women with disabilities cry for recognition.’ viewed 30 January 2019. . Stokke, K. 2006, ‘Building the Tamil Eelam state: emerging state institutions and forms of governance in LTTE-controlled areas in Sri Lanka’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 6, pp. 1021–40. Straus, N.J. 2011, Extraordinary measures: disability in music, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ulldemolins, A.R., Lansingh, V.C., Valencia, L.G., Carter, M.J. & Eckert, K.A. 2012, ‘Social inequalities in blindness and visual impairment: a review of social determinants’, Indian Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 60, no. 5, pp. 368–75. doi:10.4103/0301-4738.100529. Witek, J. 1988, ‘Blindness as a rhetorical trope in blues discourse’, Black Music Research Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 177–93. doi:10.2307/779351.

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Raging (e)motions Niro Kandasamy and Binendri Perera

In the days immediately following the Easter Sunday bombings on 21 April 2019 in Sri Lanka, Nisha, a Muslim woman with a disability, was targeted by her local community. She was accused of being connected to the perpetrators of the Easter Sunday bombings and her attempts to quash the rumours have reproduced the systemic failures of post-armed conflict peace-building in Sri Lanka. I spoke to the police and local government heads. I asked, what are the Peace Committees for? We should convene them and discuss the issue. Not just because it is my personal issue, that there is a risk of division, tension in village. I said to convene the Committee in the Buddhist temple and let’s talk about this. But that didn’t happen until today. So, what is the point of these Peace Committees, investing public money in them? There are Peace Committees at village level comprised of Buddhist and other religious leaders, public officials at the local level, police and everyone. This is like an all religion society. This is to solve inter-religious tensions like this. When I spoke to the local government head, he is like we are ready, committee is appointed and everything, but what is the point appointing? I said let’s talk of my issue and all other issue. Even the Buddhist monk in Pilimathalawa agreed to attend. He said, we should talk Nisha. Then everyone would see that there is no truth in many of these stories. No point in having these organizations in name. WDC (Women’s Development Centre) does programmes. I am determined not to attend them anymore. They are the ones who have appointed Peace Committees, but they did not engage at all in this issue. These statements present critical questions and agendas for social and political feminist agendas that exclude the existential realities of disabled women (Ghai 2002). They are powerful statements, however, because they trouble the fine line that separates non-violent resistance from rage, rage from expression and expression from violent political response (Halberstam 1993). The woman at the focus of the excerpt – Nisha – exudes a type of ‘imagined’ violence that is located in her place of rage (Halberstam 1993). In this chapter, we explore Nisha’s place of rage, which is both a personal and political space constructed by her gendereddisability activism. Nisha’s rage is constructed as an (e)motion that is linked to

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her oppression and resistance as a Muslim woman with a disability in Sri Lanka. In terms of her resistance work, the relentlessness and rage brings to vision a clear advocacy agenda: equality for all women with disabilities in Sri Lanka against intersectional forms of discrimination. The productivity of women’s anger is advanced by classical feminist theorists whose arguments take emotions seriously in life under oppression (see Lorde 1981, Narayan 1988, hooks 1995). Writing about the uses of anger in women’s responses to racism, Audre Lorde (1981) articulates women’s anger as a tool to examine and redefine the terms upon which women live and work; women’s painful anger must be used to envision and to reconstruct the world that assumes women lack humanness: Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. (Lorde 1981, p. 8) In Nisha’s case, the anger against perpetual discrimination and marginalization is marked by a mixture of emotions: a fierce pride in her own identity and capacity, relentlessness to achieve her cause, tenacity to stand up for her values and a strong compassion towards the other marginalized communities. Nisha’s advocacy work demonstrates the liberating and strengthening act of the expression of anger against oppression, personal and institutional, which brings anger into being (Lorde 1981). In her life stories, Nisha’s rage is rooted in histories of marginalization and injustice that have denied her basic rights: access to education, participation in the cultural life of community, access to welfare supports, opportunities for desirable work, freedom from discrimination and the right to personal security. In this chapter, we argue that it is through these intersecting injustices that rage advocacy is constructed, whereby historical experiences of disability have enabled Nisha to express her anger and sustain her response to new manifestations of discrimination. The concept of rage is therefore viewed not only as a source of empowerment that is loaded with energy from a lifetime of anguish at being silenced, but also as a way of forging the road to clarity (Lorde 1981).

The clarity of rage for justice In her recent essay ‘The aptness of anger’, Amia Srinivasan (2018) expands on the clarity of anger through the concept of affective injustice – in which victims of oppression are unable to express their anger due to the false dichotomy between reason and anger that pervades our political systems. Affective injustice disproportionately affects women like Nisha who are already disproportionately affected by already existing forms of injustice. Affective injustice captures the gendereddisability advocacy work that Nisha pursues in her struggle for social change, in which anger and reason collapse to reveal an ugly reality: ‘The injustice of having

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to negotiate between one’s apt emotional response to the injustice of one’s situation and one’s desire to better one’s situation’ (Srinivasan 2018, p. 135). For Srinivasan, the aptness of anger is specific to the case of oppressed people who have the greatest reason to be angry and whose anger contains productive value in the public sphere: To feel the ugly facts that structure our political reality … A rational politics would not be a politics without anger, and anger would not constitute sufficient grounds for dismissing someone from the public sphere. (Srinivasan 2018, p. 141). The phenomenon of recognizing the ‘ugly facts’ of the political reality through affective injustice confronts the intrinsic value placed on anger as justified. In the case of gendered-disability advocacy work in Sri Lanka, anger has found expression as both a product of and survival mechanism in fraught social and political climates, as evidenced in the previous two chapters of this book that have focused on the lived experiences of Kamala, a Sinhala woman with polio, and Vinothini, a Tamil woman who was blind at birth and later incurred an injury to her leg during the armed conflict. There is much to be angry about. Rage emerges in contexts of discrimination where emotional energy is otherwise disallowed and depleted, and where hope is difficult to sustain (Kay 2019). In Nisha’s life stories, anger emerges not only as an expression, but as a productive force in response to highly ableist positionings of Muslim women with disability. The gendered-disability advocacy that Nisha forges provides invaluable clarity in several ways: for building solidarity between disabled women from Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala backgrounds; for advancing women’s disability issues at the level of local and state government; for creating safe spaces for people with disabilities to coexist in peace; and for acting as a representative for women with disabilities. Crucially, Nisha’s gendered-disability advocacy work has also revealed spaces for us to think about the uses of anger for achieving social change (Ahmed 2017). Such emotions, as Ahmed (2017, p. 4) suggests, shape the surface of bodies through the repetition of actions over time as well as in response to interactions away from others towards asking, ‘What do emotions do?’ Following Ahmed’s (2017) call to take more seriously the role of emotions in society, we trace Nisha’s anger as it seeks to unsettle normative claims of justice and challenge the false dichotomy of anger and reason (Srinivasan 2018).

Raging (e)motions as a resource in gendered-disability advocacy Rage as a resource in social movements advances the sociological imagination of works that propose that emotions, rather than being static and internalized, should be seen as productive forces in shaping the social and political fabric of today’s world (Flam and King 2005, Ahmed 2017, Cohan 2017). The centring of emotions as productive rather than static in examining resistance draws insights from a number of different fields, especially sociology (Grech and Soldatic 2016,

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Kandasamy et al. 2017), human geography and political science (Nagar 2000, Bosco 2006, Joyce 2007, Chouinard et al. 2016, Hennings 2018), and resonates strongly with an increasingly interdisciplinary scholarship of the history and sociology of disability advocacy (see Ghai 2002, Pelka 2012, Soldatic and Johnson 2019). Despite its defining emphasis on emotions as ubiquitous to disability advocacy work, however, inherent within the interdisciplinary field of critical disability studies is the acknowledgement that emotions always exist in relation to intersectional forms of oppression and resistance. Illustrating this significance is Ghai’s (2019) work, which begins with her personal journey of being mobilityimpaired and how hope sustains her gendered-disability advocacy work. In earlier work, Ghai (2003) writes about how hope has an implicit and explicit role in exposing the tensions inherent in understanding both the body and identity in the context of disability: ‘If not sisterhood, at least commonality with the wider feminist discourse and the male-centric disability movement’ (Ghai 2003, p. 114). For Ghai, advancing the disability movement involves processes of both conceptualizing disability as a social oppression and, importantly, recognizing the material realities of the finer nuances of a life marked with disability. It is here that Ghai (2003, p. 52) draws us to the importance of the material reality of the impaired body, in which bodily pain and suffering is not always socially curable: ‘should I blame this pain on society? Who can I demonstrate against?’ The emotions of pain, fatigue and depression are simply the consequence of living in a disabled body that is made of flesh. This foundational submission locates a critical interest in the recognition that emotions are a key concern for advancing understandings of gendered-disability advocacy. The recognition that disability advocacy is intersectional, that gendered-disability social oppression emerges from the social relations of the past, and that emotions as an experiential reality and social structural force grounded in the social relations of the past may coexist dialectically in the experiences of individuals with disabilities, is what we indicate by means of the use of the hybrid term, (e)motion. In a similar vein to other hybrid concepts, such as (dis)ability and (dis)embody, that abound in critical disability scholarship, the sociology of (e) motion posits that disabled lives are constructed through individual and collective expressions in relation to the physical body and social reality of oppression and resistance. It recognizes that the emotions circulating within disabled individuals constitute separate yet interconnected functions that construct the self out of the historical narrative of victimhood and address the gap between socio-structural paradigms and material realities.

Gendered-disability advocacy begins with gendered-disability rage Nisha is from Kandy in the central provincial region of Sri Lanka. Kandy is a town famously known for its hilly country landscape and tea plantations as well as being home to the temple of the tooth relic that has religious significance to the Sinhalese-Buddhist community. As a Tamil and Sinhalese speaking Muslim

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woman in Kandy, Nisha finds herself navigating multiple forms of discrimination that emerge from social and cultural constructions of gender, disability, class, rurality, religion and ethnicity. Nisha’s life dramatically changed after the age of five, when she became injured in an accident at home and could no longer walk. She was hospitalized for six months following an operation and began walking later than the normal age. As she recalled, ‘I crawled always. I was bandy legged; my legs were not straight; they were curved’. As an adult, she continues to seek answers about her disability through the internet and concludes that ‘it seems there has been a problem with the technology [in] those days’. After unsuccessful medical treatments, Nisha’s parents placed her in a hospital for disabled people, a rehabilitation hospital in Ragama, located in the Western Province of Sri Lanka, when she was eight years old. After three and a half years, Nisha walked using crutches and returned home to the dissatisfaction of her father, who insisted that she could be cured further if she remained at the hospital. However, Nisha recalled doctors confirming to the family that ‘nothing further could be done’. She watched her siblings go to school but did not attend herself. She sat by the window at her house, frustrated as she watched other children going to school. Sometimes she would take books and stand in front of the mirror and ask her mother, ‘Wouldn’t this be how I look if I was going to school?’ Her gendered-disability advocacy work as an adult is underpinned by childhood experiences of exclusion that denied her the freedom and opportunities that were available to other children, as she traces the lineage of her gendered-disability discrimination: I started advocacy just because of the injustices I saw happening to our people. And myself. I wanted to stop the injustices after myself. As for me, Miss, I am someone whose rights were violated at every point in my life: my right to education was violated, my rights as a child was violated, then it was difficult to get a job when I grew up. Had I not learnt this I would not be able to do this as well. Only educated [people] are given jobs. Then our marriage right has been denied. Our opportunity to become a mother and raise children. It’s not only people who intentionally transgress gendered-disability norms who find themselves frustrated by the impossibility of ableist social structures. Eventually, the gendered-ableist system lets everyone down. Sometimes, even with all the time and effort that is put into obeying the rules, marginalized individuals get hurt. Even able-bodied Muslim men can get hurt, as evidenced later in the chapter. What happens when women advocates attain positions of power? They get more exposed to the diverse forms of gender-based violence and challenge the demands of rigid, nearly monolithic, universal systems of gender. In Nisha’s experiences, this has led to insidious levels of exclusion. Bridging the gap between women and the state, the Women’s Development Centre (WDC) which organizes the Peace Committees became a defender of women’s rights while simultaneously ignoring how gendered experiences intersect with other

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forms of discrimination, such as impairment, race and class. Instead of defending against gendered discrimination for all women, by excluding women with disabilities the WDC is unwittingly protecting a gendered-ableist reconstruction of society. For Nisha, this produces emotions of anger and frustration. We went to three committees. Last one was supposed to be in July, and we were told we would be called, but that didn’t happen yet. This was to take our final recommendations. At the last session we met the Secretary of the Caucus. She complained about us when we said that we are not called for women’s programmes, that we are only called to Social Services. Her argument was that there are VIPs coming, that there are security concerns and then we create problems, therefore we are not called. So, I spoke – and she did not have answers to what I said – and said that disabled people do not create unnecessary trouble and to show us one example of where we created a trouble. I said that the only time we make noise is when we were invited, but there is no access and we were confined to the back door. Then we would definitely question. Otherwise we would not fight, we respect the law of the country. Even now we came to the parliament through the normal security procedures, we allowed those things, we didn’t fly here. We respect the law, but we question discrimination. According to her we are an issue to national security. But we don’t take bombs. And that is what the national security procedures are for. She didn’t respond just slipped away saying there is another meeting. Nisha is suddenly positioned as a minority within the minority. She chooses to stand with the doubly oppressed. Nisha’s hurt is a response to the premise that Muslim women with disability deserve the oppression and their timely exclusion from the cultural mappings of post-armed conflict peace-building. Nisha is entitled to her anger in response to this oppression: her anger is a message to all women with disabilities in Sri Lanka to organize, get active and challenge the multiple systems of power in order to survive. She resists the oppression and the violence – she resists the tendency of the culture and politics that undermine her existence and basic human rights. She shifts the focus from what women with disability cannot do to how their rage is driving them to relinquish socially prescribed gendered-disability normativity. Nisha is now an activist. And it is clear to her that, as in any other identity politics, there is a sharp unevenness between ‘us’ and ‘them’, whereby there is no shortage of ‘them’, no shortage at all (Bornstein 2006). Drawing on Collins’s (1990) contradictory spaces of power, privilege and oppression, Cohan (2017, p. 45) argues that ‘just as our identities involve intersectionality, so too the response of rage must operate in an intersectional manner’. Cohan (2017, p. 45) says that ‘often people take less initiative to rage about the dominant aspects of their identity as they do about the ways they are oppressed’. What emerges are constructions of anger as a response to the invisibility that is contained by the weight of structurally oppressive conditions.

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Rageful invisibility and building solidarity Nisha recognizes rage as a result of being denied basic human rights that have manifested in everyday forms of deprivation, thus demanding collective forms of organizing and social change. She reflects on the collective experiences of women with disabilities and the rageful invisibility of their plight: The society has denied us all these rights. It is not because we cannot. If the doctors approve that you can marry and have children, it is the society that has said that we can’t. Society has violated our rights. For example, my friend here has no difficulty in making children. She only has a small issue in her hand. She also has old stories like me. Her family stopped her from getting her rights. Society is responsible for this. There is no point in having meetings, we should do something practically effective. Nisha’s descriptions of the lived realities of women with disabilities in Kandy captures the necessity of making visible gendered-disability rights and specifically recognizing the intersectional experiences of marginalization that affect people with disabilities unevenly, thus requiring intersectional approaches to disability advocacy: Those who have progressed do not feel the issues. Persons with small disabilities do not feel it and they do not want to make sacrifices. Educated persons with disabilities are not interested either. They don’t come, those who are employed. They do not aid us with their knowledge. We feel it because we suffered from earlier days. Indeed, obfuscating the brutality of uneven forms of disability discrimination ignores the multiplicity of discrimination that people with disabilities face and, in the case of women with disabilities in Sri Lanka, it has the historical trajectory to pit Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim women with disabilities against each other in destructive ways that exacerbate racial divides which continue to thrive under repressive state regimes. However, within the reality of Nisha’s gendered-disability advocacy, the solidarity between Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala women with disabilities appears as an inevitable outcome of the long-term, systemic oppression that has forced them to address their rageful invisibility. We all have a common problem, we disabled people, that’s what I saw, didn’t matter what ethnicity. Among Muslims, there is a difficulty in getting the women to engage in these works. Those women want to, but their families do not like to send them out. Among Tamils, I see no special issue, but they have weak economy from the families. For instance, those who are in estates. They have aggravated problems regarding housing and health. Commonly, all women with disabilities have health problems that they cannot speak of. Issues relating the menstruation, sanitary facilities, use of bathrooms.

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When there are language issues, we help each other. I see Sinhala and Tamils have more confidence in me to tell me their problems because I am Muslim. I say I am impartial, tell me the issues no matter what ethnicity. But I see more confidence in me coming from the language, because I can speak Sinhala and Tamil. Whenever I had trouble Sinhalese were the closest to me and they looked out for me. During family troubles as well as troubles we faced as Muslim ethnicity. Sinhala people stood close to me more than the Tamil and Muslim people. When I was in the hospital, during the training, when I was working for disability rights, nowhere have I been condemned because of my ethnicity or have not let me do things. Not till now. There are many things that beckon solidarity building among women with disabilities across Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala divides. These include: addressing historical racial divides; showing respect and empathy for each other; identifying and challenging intersecting systems of oppression that manifest in intimate settings and the broader society; resisting the homogenizing of women with disabilities; adopting new strategies to communicate disability issues to society, even if it means disrupting the status quo; making additional efforts for real collaboration, especially for Sinhala women who represent the majority group that has historically oppressed Tamil and Muslim groups; understanding the oppression, even if it means unravelling and confronting uncomfortable truths about the past that continue to affect the lives of women from marginalized groups; showing willingness to sustain the gendered-disability struggle as new manifestations of oppression emerge within an everchanging social, political and geographical climate; committing to be a voice for all women with disabilities; recognizing that, at times, women disability advocates may want to work on their own and will take up the responsibility of being a strong voice for their people; and responding to the collective (e)motions of rage as a mechanism of not only survival, but as a political strategy. Nisha recognizes rage as a mechanism for survival, not only in terms of her own life, but as a mechanism for surviving intersecting oppressive conditions and reclaiming the freedom and aspirations of all oppressed people. Crucially, she reflects on sustaining the rage of the Muslim community that faces highly racialized forms of exclusion in their everyday lives. A widely publicized example in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings is Dr Shafi Shihabdeen, a doctor at the Kurunagala Teaching Hospital. Dr Shihabdeen was initially arrested in May 2019 and detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for dealing with and accumulating illegal wealth through terrorist groups (Colombo Page 2019). He was also accused of sterilizing Sinhala-Buddhist mothers during caesarean deliveries (Times Online 2019). However, the subsequent investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department of Sri Lanka did not find any evidence to substantiate the accusation that Dr Shihabdeen had linkages with terrorist groups. The investigation further revealed that the hospital administration had misrepresented and fabricated evidence of him carrying out illegal operations (Wipulasena and Borham 2019).

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In response, Dr Shihabdeen filed a fundamental rights petition before the Supreme Court for violation of his rights to equal protection of law and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention (Daily News 2019). According to Cohan (2017), the anger within society is twofold: there is the anger that is unbearable and fuels hatred, hostility and violence towards people, and there is the second type, rage against imposed silence, marginalization and invisibility, such as that described in the experiences of Nisha and Dr Shihabdeen. The fact that Dr Shihabdeen and Nisha are unable to reach out to the people that are a part of their everyday lives highlights the pervasiveness of oppressive social forces. Its potency is amplified for Nisha, whose anger is sustained by intersecting oppressive social forces that leave her in a powerful state of resistance that captures her pain and survival. Rageful gendered-disability advocacy While rage is viewed as a productive force that is mobilized for change, in the case of Nisha’s gendered-disability experiences, rage is deployed as a specific advocacy strategy. Rageful gendered-disability advocacy is about changing political decisions and social norms that affect the everyday lives of women with disabilities ensuring that such changes lead to implementation and bring real change. Such rageful advocacy is enabled by gendered-disability experiences and is directed at government officials, community members and representatives as well as leaders whose actions influence government outcomes, such as the media and powerful non-government organizations. It is possible, then, to articulate the (e)motive features of Nisha’s rageful gendered-disability advocacy work in Sri Lanka. Anchoring the suffering to build advocacy capital Nisha began her gendered-disability advocacy work in response to the personal and collective suffering of people with disabilities. She has built advocacy capital by sharing the experiences of discrimination and exclusion that have been faced by women with disabilities, and how their experiences are compounded by their gender, race, type of disability, class, caste or location. Such anchoring work is historical. Nisha became aware of the collective suffering of people with disabilities in the three and a half years of her adolescence that she spent at the rehabilitation a hospital in Ragama. I was thinking I was the only disabled person in the world. That mentality changed after going to Ragama. We realized that there were people like us. We were socialized there. We were put to play, we were taken to places, we were put to play games, we were taken on trips to the zoo, Kelaniya. After classes, we made flowers from ribbons, we sold them for like fifty rupees. And I found out the problems of disabled people. I realized that I was not the only one with family problems and discrimination by society. From there itself the students have given me the leadership. They always told me to do,

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saying Nisha do. I stood up for their rights even then and fought with missies there at times. Here, the suffering becomes a means of communication that created an empowerment-based, grassroots approach to Nisha’s gendered-disability advocacy. I was thinking why these things happen to people, is there no solution for disabled people? Therefore, I came out of that place (Ragama) determined to start some organization. It was like starting a job, I didn’t know exactly what I would do, but I knew I have to do something. I was trying to do something after I came to Kandy. Students from there wrote to me frequently saying, ‘Nisha, you are the only one who can help us, you must do something’. No one wants to stay at home. Everyone wanted to stay together. We want that even now. Raging disappointment at the politics of exclusion During the process of organizing a gendered-disability movement, Nisha was faced with the consequences of being a Muslim person in Sri Lanka with the intensification of anti-Muslim violence. Her disappointment became a defining feature of her advocacy work, and more specifically her attempts to challenge the rumours being spread in the local community that she was connected to the Easter Sunday bombings. Lots of people advised to go to the police for the future safety. I had no way to go to the police, so I called the officer-in-charge at our police station, our village officer, local government office and social services officers. They said we heard of the news already, but we know who you are, so don’t be afraid, don’t be shaken. But I had no way to take the message of my innocence to the community. My biggest disappointment was that people who saw me and spoke to this day and evening, those who knew me from childhood and knew how we grew and progressed to this place also believed this. That was a big problem. I was really disappointed. For the first time I was sad about being born in Sri Lanka. I came to the point of deciding not to stay … even in my village. As we write this chapter in October 2019, details about the network behind the attacks continue to emerge; however, human rights advocates and scholars challenge the simplistic narrative that the perpetrators of the attacks were Muslim and that the attacks were motivated by religious hatred (Jegatheeswaran 2019). What has emerged clearly is the intensification of demonization of Muslim communities across the country: rioters have targeted Muslim-owned businesses and homes; President Maithripala Sirisena banned the burqa on security grounds; copies of religious sermons inside mosques now need to be submitted to government authorities as part of a new monitoring protocol; and on social media the Muslim community is being blamed for the attacks. These are tied up in Nisha’s raging disappointment at the circumstances of Muslim people. Such disappointment can

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lead to resistance, in terms of enabling Nisha to access the possibilities of living elsewhere and continuing her gendered-disability advocacy work and its connection to broader social and political structures. Rage for advocacy clarity In developing the advocacy strategy for women with disabilities, and in the light of the current political environment, Nisha is determined to address realistic objectives, such as employment and access to public spaces through better infrastructure. Nisha connected with the Social Services department and began attending programmes for people with disability in Kandy, where she learned about the processes of organizing, disability rights, disability laws and societal barriers, and described using the learnings to develop a formal organization. For Our Right is an independent organization we established ourselves and we lead by ourselves. We did a programme from that at the temple of the tooth relic as well. It has a limited number of members who can do something. They are not dependent. We have our own lending mechanism as well. Our main target is to increase access to places. I have also given a suggestion to have a uniform sign indicating the seat reserved for persons with disabilities. Even though it is reserved for persons with disabilities, sometimes they don’t get it. The sticker sometimes says for persons with disabilities, for disabled, and names that condemn the people. There should be a one sticker that gives a message everywhere in Sri Lanka. We submitted this suggestion to the local government authorities. I met my friend and everyone else in my clique there. We recognized so many issues in the society in our journey. First, we saw the economic issues and our dependent mentality. So we worked for those aspects. We worked to strengthen the economic side. What I saw was also that our people are never satisfied, no matter how strong the economy is. But after all those years now I firmly believe even more than the economy, but simultaneous to strengthening the economy the infrastructure environment and the attitudinal environment must improve. No matter what businesses we do, what is the point if we cannot sell it to the society? What is the point if we cannot enter the society and get something done? The government has also organized Suwa Shakthi Organizations and other committees, but even within them I don’t see rights aspect being spoken. Everyone speaks of rights very little. All are addicted to the aid of five thousand rupees that the government gives to the disabled people, people work for that most of the time. Raging (e)motions to challenge the universality of disability rights Nisha recognizes the significance of implementing rights-based approaches to disability advocacy; however, she questions the effectiveness of the universality

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of disability rights. Rather, Nisha’s rage is targeted at the consequences of advocacy work in Sri Lanka that is shaped by civil unrest, political instability and potent social and cultural traditions that leave women with disabilities unable to access so-called disability rights. We have worked practically in ensuring access. For example, in Kandy area we have spoken about it a lot. They are making the Kandy bus halt accessible, they have accepted my suggestion. They are also repairing the Kandy lake circle and they have taken our suggestions on how to make those facilities accessible. They met with me and another blind person to ask how we need access. We did several programmes with the Human Rights Commission in the Kandy station and hospital, giving them suggestions on what should change in the infrastructure environment. Nisha’s disability advocacy therefore challenges the ableist-liberalization nexus in Sri Lanka that is largely silent on questions of gendered-disability inequality and their social and cultural implications for implementing disability rights. Thus, the formation of Nisha’s disability organization, For Our Right, is about working ‘practically’, whereby the upfront embrace of rage is a core gendered-disability advocacy strategy. Nisha mobilizes the promise of rage to ensure that women with disabilities in Sri Lanka use the power of their voice to speak out against gendered-disability inequality and the violence of disability discrimination. Nisha represents a new type of gendered-disability advocacy in Sri Lanka that is propelling the need for disability rights discourse to address the intersectional discrimination facing women with disabilities. As a Muslim woman with a disability, her value to the gendered-disability advocacy movement is a culmination of the multiple uses of (e)motions that shape gendered-disability resistance (Soldatic and Meekosha 2012, Chouinard et al. 2016, Soldatic 2019, Ghai 2019).

Conclusion Recognizing the multiplicity of voices and (e)motions is salient not just in terms of understanding how women with disabilities describe the material realities of their lives, but also for conceptualizing their experiences within oppressive social structures that discriminate against them. This chapter argues that rage is both an emotion and a productive force that sustains the gendered-disability advocacy carried out by Nisha – a Muslim woman with disability in Sri Lanka. Nisha’s experiences provide a useful case study to examine how difficult it is for women with disabilities to navigate life in unstable political climates, especially when they are of Muslim backgrounds. The effect of managing the intersectional experiences of discrimination as a Muslim woman with a disability is extraordinary in the face of the growing power afforded to Buddhist nationalist groups, such as the Bodu Bala Sena, Sinhala Rawaya and Rawana Balaya. Nevertheless, Nisha’s rage sustains the gendered-disability advocacy work that challenges intersectional oppressive systems.

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The chapter locates the rage that sustains Nisha’s gendered-disability advocacy as an (e)motion of social thought and disability activist struggles, and emphasizes the need for collective change. Rage is both an emotion and a productive force – an (e)motion that drives change. Nisha’s experiences ultimately provide a necessary voice to build stronger feminist and disability understandings of the false universality of disability rights and presumptions of sisterhood; as Nisha’s resistance to the Women’s Development Centre demonstrates, there is clear recognition that differences exist among women that must be challenged (Ghai 2002). In the post-armed conflict setting, the gendered-disability advocacy work that is sustained by rage holds a significant capacity to transform the disability movement in Sri Lanka by advancing the clarity of rage for justice, using raging (e)motions as a resource in advocacy work, appreciating and mobilizing spaces and temporalities of exclusion and discrimination, and building solidarity between women with disabilities. For global disability scholarship, such dimensions propel closer attention to the diverse realities and consequences of gendered-disability discrimination, not least because it can be a matter of survival for women. Nisha advocates, ‘There should be research on the needs of all people with disabilities’.

References Ahmed, S. 2017, Living a feminist life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Bornstein, K. 2006, ‘Gender terror, gender rage’, in S. Striker & S. Whittele (eds.), The transgender studies reader, Routledge, London, pp. 236–43. Bosco, F.J. 2006, ‘The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights activism: embeddedness, emotions, and social movements’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 96, no. 2, pp. 342–65. Chouinard, V., Belle, C., Khan, H. & Adrian, N. 2016, ‘Embodying disability in the global South: exploring emotional geographies of research and of disabled people’s lives in Guyana’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the global south: The critical handbook, Springer, Cham, pp. 583–98. Cohan, D.J. 2017, ‘Rage and activism: the promise of black lives matter’, in S.E. Weissinger, D.A. Mack & E. Watson (eds.), Violence against black bodies: an intersectional analysis of how black lives continue to matter, Routledge, New York, pp. 38–52. Collins, P.H. 1990, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, Routledge, New York. Flam, H. & King, D. (eds.) 2005, Emotions and social movements, Routledge, London. Ghai, A. 2002, ‘Disabled women: an excluded agenda of Indian feminism’, Hypatia, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 49–66. Ghai, A. 2003, (Dis)embodied form: issues of disabled women, Shakti Books, New Delhi. Ghai, A. 2019, Rethinking disability in India, Routledge, New Delhi. Grech, S. & Soldatic, K. (eds.) 2016, Disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham. Halberstam, J. 1993, ‘Imagined violence/queer violence: representation, rage, and resistance’, Social Text, vol. 37, pp. 187–201. Hennings, A. 2018, ‘The dark underbelly of land struggles: the instrumentalization of female activism and emotional resistance in Cambodia’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 103–19.

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Hooks, B. 1995, Killing rage: ending racism, Henry Holt and Company, New York. Jegatheeswaran, D. 2019, ‘Violence is easily kindled in Sri Lanka, where ethnic and religious tensions have been allowed to fester’, The National, 25 April. viewed October 2019. . Joyce, D. 2007, ‘In a world of her own…’: re-presenting alienation and emotion in the lives and writings of women with autism’, Gender, Place and Culture, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 659–77. Kandasamy, N., Soldatic, K. & Samararatne, D., 2017, ‘Peace, justice and disabled women’s advocacy: Tamil women with disabilities in rural post-conflict Sri Lanka’, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 41–59. Kay, J.B. 2019, ‘Introduction: anger, media, and feminism: the gender politics of mediated rage’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 591–615. Lorde, A. 1981, ‘The uses of anger’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 7–10. Nagar, R. 2000, ‘Mujhe Jawab Do! (Answer me!): women’s grass-roots activism and social spaces in Chitrakoot (India)’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 341–62. Narayan, U. 1988, ‘Working together across difference: some considerations on emotions and political practice’, Hypatia, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 31–48. Pelka, F. 2012, What we have done: an oral history of the disability rights movement, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Soldatic, K. 2019, Disability and neoliberal state formations, Routledge, Oxon. Soldatic, K. & Johnson, K. 2019, Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Oxon. Soldatic, K. & Meekosha, H. 2012, ‘The place of disgust: disability, class and gender in spaces of workfare’, Societies, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 139–56. Srinivasan, A. 2018, ‘The aptness of anger’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 123–44. Wipulasena, A. & Borham, M. 2019, ‘Dr Shafi case: CID reveals hospital director falsified complaints’, Sunday Observer, 14 July. viewed September 2019. .

5

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law Dinesha Samararatne

Introduction In this chapter, I draw on the experiences of the research collaboration discussed in the previous chapters of this edited volume to propose answers to the following question: in a post-war context, how do you engage in advocacy for policy and legal change to improve respect for human rights of women with disabilities? The research collaboration, as discussed in more detail in the introduction to this volume, was initially established between the Law & Society Trust (Colombo, Sri Lanka) and the University of Western Sydney (Australia) and was aimed at developing an understanding of the life experiences of war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka (Samararatne et al. 2018). From its inception, this collaboration was committed to advocacy on the basis of its research findings. This collaboration was subsequently extended to include other non-governmental organizations that are based in rural Sri Lanka – Viluthu, Navajeewana and the Association of Women with Disabilities (AKASA). The substantive findings of the research collaboration are thematically discussed in the other chapters of this edited volume. In this chapter, I focus specifically on advocacy with three objectives in mind. The first is to document the experiences in advocacy during this collaboration and the second to evaluate the impact of the advocacy efforts. The third is to draw on these experiences to propose a working model for engaging in advocacy for rights of women with disabilities in contexts that are similar to Sri Lanka. This chapter is organised in three parts. In part I, I locate the research collaboration and its advocacy efforts in its global context, and I present the theoretical approach that informed our work. I begin by placing the experience of this research collaboration in the context of the ongoing discourse on women, transitional justice and peace-building. In the next section, I place the advocacy experience in the wider Sri Lankan context of advocacy for social change for rights of women with disabilities. Against this backdrop, in Part II, I describe how, why and when advocacy was undertaken in this collaboration. I assess the process that we followed in analyzing the research findings of the project and the development of the recommendations. These recommendations became the basis for our subsequent advocacy efforts. I then discuss the multiple advocacy strategies

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 61 that were adopted during the research project. This is followed by an analysis of the targeted advocacy that was undertaken after the publication of the research report. In part III of the chapter, I evaluate the challenges that we experienced in implementing our advocacy strategies. Drawing on that analysis, I present what I see as a ‘working model’ for engaging in advocacy for the rights of women with disabilities in contexts that are similar to that of Sri Lanka. I claim in this chapter that in the global South, particularly in post-war contexts, advocacy for law and policy change and reform that will improve respect for human rights of women with disabilities ought to be developed and designed in the following way: the process must include women with disabilities in the work from its inception, research ought to be viewed as being closely tied up with advocacy and with specific commitments to advocacy, and advocacy ought to be understood as an ongoing process throughout the research collaboration. Furthermore, the project and the project cycle ought to be as flexible as possible, so that the project can be reviewed and re-designed through an inclusive, ongoing review and consultation process.

Part I In this part, I consider the ways in which our research collaboration relates to current understandings of the following: 1) The global discourse on women, transitional justice and peace; 2) The advocacy for policy and legal change in Sri Lanka; and 3) The production of knowledge about disabilities and the legitimation of such knowledge. Women with disabilities, transitional justice and peace In the global context, recognition of the concerns of war-affected women with disabilities, and the unique experiences of women within that category, is quite recent. Together with Karen Soldatic I have argued elsewhere that while communities affected by the internal armed conflict in Sri Lanka identified disability as a central concern, the national and international discourse on transitional justice was yet to offer a commensurate focus on disability (Samararatne and Soldatic 2019). Ortoleva has pointed out in her work that the Women, Peace and Security agenda developed by the United Nations through Security Council resolution 1325 and the follow-up resolutions have not adequately recognized the impact of disability on war-affected women (Ortoleva 2010, 2012). This marginalization at the international level is mirrored at the national and local levels in Sri Lanka, as pointed out in the final report of our research collaboration (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 11). It is only as recently as June 2019 that the Security Council adopted resolution 2475, recognizing its ‘primary responsibility’ to ‘address the disproportionate impact of armed conflict and related humanitarian crises on persons with disabilities’ (UN Security Council 2019). The resolution calls on member states, among other things, to ‘eliminate discrimination and marginalization of persons

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on the basis of disability in situations of armed conflict’, with special emphasis on ‘those who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination’ (UN Security Council 2019, para. 8). The resolution ‘urges’ member states to ensure ‘the meaningful participation and representation of persons with disabilities’ in ‘humanitarian action, conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, reconstruction and peacebuilding’ (UN Security Council 2019, para. 6). The resolution draws special attention to the obligation of states to ensure that assistance for ‘reintegration, rehabilitation and psychosocial support’ is offered to women and children with disabilities (UN Security Council 2019, para. 4). Resolution 2475 is a much-needed intervention. It has laid the normative foundation at the international level for mainstreaming disability in legal and policy interventions in the context of armed conflict. In the meantime, however, women with disabilities have made progress in advancing their cause in local and national contexts. Kandasamy and Soldatic, for instance, note that the ‘passionate efforts of women with disabilities in their leadership roles have successfully mobilized disabled women’ and that, in the global South, ‘this has increasingly resulted in positive legal and social outcomes for women with disabilities more broadly’ (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2020, p. 150). The research collaboration that is the focus of this edited volume is an example of such initiatives. These efforts at mobilization and advocacy occur despite and alongside what Kandasamy and Soldatic describe as ‘cultural processes of stigmatization around disability’ and ‘longstanding cultural norms around what is acceptable for women’ (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2020, p. 151). Particularly in the global South, disability intersects with gender, rurality and poverty, resulting in multiple cultural, geographical and economic barriers for women with disabilities (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2020, p. 151). In post-war contexts, other forms of discrimination, such as discrimination based on ethnicity and religion, further compound an already complex scenario. In the next section, I describe how these challenges have impacted advocacy and activism for the rights of war-affected women with disabilities in the Sri Lankan context. Advocacy in the Sri Lankan context Advocacy for policy and legal change in Sri Lanka has been organized mostly around human rights violations arising from the internal armed conflict. Women’s activism in Sri Lanka’s modern history has been traced back to the suffrage movement (Alwis and Jayawardene 2001). As the internal armed conflict developed in the early 1980s, women mobilized particularly in calling for peace and in protesting against enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings (Samuel 2006, p. 12). Women’s organizations were active and vocal in demanding accountability for human rights violations, not only from the state but, in the North and in the East, also from Tamil separatists (Alwis 2009). Eventually, however, as Alwis notes, the gradual ‘institutionalization and professionalization of feminism’ has had a negative impact on women’s activism in Sri Lanka and has limited its potential (2009, p. 86).

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 63 In this evolution of advocacy and activism, numerous organizations with a disability focus were also established and have continued to function. As noted by Campbell (2009), ‘Sri Lanka has the full spectrum of disability-focused NGOs’, that is to say, from local organizations to international agencies and from religious organizations to state-supported associations. She notes that ‘overseas-funded and/or overseas originated religious charities’ are the most predominant type of organizations (Campbell 2009, p. 117). The Disability Organisations Joint Front (DOJF) has served as an umbrella organization since 2001 for Sri Lankan disability-focused local organizations (Campbell 2009, p. 119). I have noted elsewhere that in Sri Lanka, disability-focused organizations have thus far remained distinct from other local organizations working on human rights issues more broadly (Samararatne 2020). Consequently, advocacy efforts by disability-focused organizations have not benefitted from the experiences of advocacy for human rights in Sri Lanka. Nor have the disability-focused organizations benefitted from the specialized human and other resources that have been developed over time in Sri Lanka more generally for advocacy for law and policy reform. I have pointed out that this divide between disability-focused organizations and other NGOs is reflective of the fact that disability is not in the mainstream in Sri Lanka across different spheres (Samararatne 2020). Among these organizations the Association of Women with Disabilities (AKASA) remains the only NGO in Sri Lanka that has a focus on women with disabilities. Even within the limited range of advocacy and activism by disability-focused organizations, they often do not reflect the ethnic diversity in Sri Lankan society. As Kandasamy and Soldatic note, ‘ongoing violence on the war-torn island… is embodied in the social and political realities’ of women with disabilities (Kandasamy and Soldatic 2020, p. 150) and the membership and outlook of disability-focused organizations, too, seem to have been affected by these realities. These social and political realities in Sri Lanka include an unresolved ethnic conflict as well as patriarchy. As established by Soldatic and myself elsewhere, these issues have been reflected in how the impact of disability is understood and also in how disability-focused organizations carry out their work. We note that AKASA has been an exception to this general trend, in that it has sought to bring women with disabilities from different ethnic groups together in some of its activities (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). In general, however, as Kandasamy and Soldatic (2020, p. 156) note, ‘very few women disability leaders’ are included at ‘key decision-making forums’. In addition to increasing women’s involvement in disability-focused organizations and bridging the gap between these organizations and other NGOs, nongovernmental organizations working in human rights require capacity-building on the subject of disability. Writing in 2009, Campbell observed that, ‘For legal and social policy mobilization to occur, all stakeholder sectors need to be fully cognizant of the multi-layered dynamics of disability consciousness’ (Campbell 2009, p. 122). She further noted that ‘Disabled people with postsecondary education are thin on the ground, as are disabled people with macro-knowledges of sociological and legal issues’ (Campbell 2009, p. 124). In comparison to activism

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and advocacy in other fields, therefore, the institutional infrastructure and capacity for mobilizing for legal and policy changes in the field of disability are weak. Taking these ground realities into account, we designed and developed our research collaboration to be inclusive, to involve capacity-building and to feature advocacy that not only targeted state institutions but also local NGOs. In that process, we developed a particular approach to the research enterprise – to how we understand knowledge, its production and validation. I assess this approach in the next section. Creating, legitimizing and promoting knowledge In the context of advocating for the human rights of women with disabilities, what we identify as knowledge, how we generate that knowledge, who generates it and who will endorse it as legitimate/acceptable are significant precursors to the actual process of advocacy. In contexts where women with disabilities are marginalized and where communication methods are limited, the mainstream approaches to developing knowledge are not useful or effective in understanding the life experiences of women with disabilities. We approached this research collaboration bearing these challenges in mind. Consequently, we were in a position to innovate methods of creating, legitimizing and promoting knowledge about war-affected women with disabilities in the Sri Lankan context. This approach has four distinct aspects, which I explain below. First, those of us in the research team who were ‘non-disabled’ identified ourselves as ‘disability allies’ (Soldatic and Johnson 2020, p. 13). Particularly within the Sri Lankan context, disability allies ‘are essential to any action that seeks social change’ (Soldatic and Johnson 2020, p. 13). In the Sri Lankan context, I see two justifications for disability allies. One is that disability is a marginalized subject across most spheres in Sri Lanka. The other related reason is that policy and law reform fora are not accessible (physically or otherwise) to the community of women with disabilities. Disability allies can serve as facilitators in this context. However, I am mindful that the involvement of disability allies in this work can also have negative and/or unintended outcomes. Soldatic and Johnson, for instance, note that the involvement of disability allies in disabilityfocused research and advocacy ‘can also undermine claims for respect, rights and redistribution’ (Soldatic and Johnson 2020, p. 13). In the research collaboration, we therefore, like Soldatic and Johnson, consciously adopted ‘a self-critical and reflexive position’ (Sodaltic and Johnson 2020, p. 13). I learned more specifically about what such a position would entail through my previous research collaborations with Karen Soldatic and with N. Kamalawathie (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). I actively sought to sensitize the other members of the research collaboration – who, like me, were (at that time) persons without disabilities – to the need to adopt the position of a self-critical and a reflexive ally. Second, we committed to respecting inclusivity throughout the research collaboration. That is to say, inclusivity was built into the research process, into determining the strategies for advocacy, into the sharing of research findings and

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 65 into our actual advocacy. Globally, inclusive research has been developed primarily as a research method for working with persons with intellectual disabilities. Drawing on previous work (see, for example, the work of Walmsley 2014 and Johnson 2020), Johnson and colleagues (2020, p. 172) describe the principles of inclusive research as having the following attributes: 1) It aspires to social change and to improve the quality of life of an excluded group; 2) The agenda is determined according to the experiences of the members of the excluded group; 3) The research recognizes and seeks to promote the contribution made by the group; 4) It provides information that the group can use in advocating for further social change; and 5) The researchers empathize and/or align themselves with the group that is the focus of the research. Johnson and colleagues point out that these principles require an ‘integral relationship between advocacy, activism and inclusive research’(2020, p. 173). An inclusive approach to disability-focused research therefore required more from the researcher than the actual research work. Furthermore, in the context of disability-focused research, often additional expectations are placed on disability allies., Pinto, for instance, notes the following as challenges that academics face in adopting an inclusive approach to disability-focused research: 1) The time taken to engage in activities that have no value in the academic field; 2) Expectations regarding leadership during and after the research collaboration; 3) Role (in)definition – the absence of clear boundaries between the roles of researcher, research participant, activist etc.; 4) The lack of critical mass, which requires the same individuals to continue with engagements with the risk of burn-out; and 5) The lack of recognition for these types of support and activist functions performed by the academic, by her academic and professional institutions (Pinto 2020, pp. 506–07). As a result, working as a disability ally can be a mixed experience for academics. On the one hand, the novel and unique challenges provide opportunities for creativity, and the cross-institutional collaboration can be refreshing. On the other hand, the lack of recognition, the hidden hours and the additional effort involved can be difficult to cope with. A related and third aspect is the way in which disability-focused research impacts on the academic and on how knowledge about disability is represented. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work, Pinto observes that ‘the academic and activist fields are structured by different rules and modes of symbolic and material recognition that can sometimes come into conflict’ (Pinto 2020, p. 491). Pinto notes that academics are drawn to ‘achieve the highest possible prestige, recognition and reputation’ (Pinto 2020, p. 493). However, inclusive research often displaces ‘non-disabled’ researchers from a position of leadership in a research collaboration to the position of a collaborator. Moreover, approval for research collaboration from activists or women with disabilities is often in conflict with recognition given by mainstream knowledge institutions and communities, such as universities or professional bodies (Pinto 2020, p. 494). To disability allies, this can often be a source of confusion and frustration. Pinto therefore asks the question, ‘How can one produce knowledge that is critical and emancipatory, rather than objective and neutral, and still call it science?’ (Pinto 2020, p. 496). Pinto proposes

66 Dinesha Samararatne ‘emancipatory disability research’ as a way of bringing together academic rigour undertaken in a manner that is recognized by women with disability as relevant and that will also benefit them. Pinto suggests that giving more control over the research process to women with disability, including in the choice of research methods, being accountable to the community of women with disabilities and taking their life experiences into account in research, ought to be the guiding principles of this approach (Pinto 2020, pp. 497–98). The approach that we adopted in our research collaboration reflects attributes of ‘emancipatory disability research’ as it is described by Pinto, even if our advocacy is yet to yield emancipatory outcomes. In part II, I discuss the specific ways in which we undertook advocacy and I evaluate the impact of our advocacy efforts as well. Despite the effort that went into these attempts and the long-term research collaboration, the outcomes of our advocacy were modest. I hesitate, therefore, to describe our collaboration as being ‘emancipatory’. More theoretical work remains to be done in terms of advocacy, law and policy reform before we can make this claim. Emancipatory outcomes for women with disabilities in Sri Lanka require sustained advocacy over a period of time that extends beyond each research collaboration.

Part II The advocacy component of our research collaboration had internal, intra-institutional and inter-institutional dimensions to it. In this part, I explore and assess the design, development and implementation of these advocacy efforts. In doing so, I highlight the specific challenges and opportunities we experienced in undertaking this research collaboration in Sri Lanka’s post-war context. Setting the agenda We developed the agenda for advocacy as a team and through a continuous process. Consultations were undertaken during the training of potential researchers, during the debrief after the conducting of interviews, with the pre-consultation report and with the launch of the report. These consultations were resource-intensive. However, this research collaboration had been developed on the basis that women with disabilities who were involved in the project as researchers/participants had ‘expertise by experience’ (Shakespeare 2018, p. 160). Therefore, the advocacy strategy could only be determined through an inclusive consultation process. These consultations were based on various documents, including the project proposal, the guide for the interviews, the pre-consultation report and the final report. Each of these documents were drafted in English and subsequently translated into Sinhala and Tamil, the two local languages. Only the pre-consultation report and the final report were made available in braille. We eventually realized that the translation of these documents was a three-stage process. The first stage was the translation by professional translators who had no discipline-specific

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 67 context to the report. The second stage was the copyediting of this translation by the two local lead researchers, so as to ensure that the language and the structure of the report were accessible. The third stage was a further set of revisions to language during consultations when the other researchers pointed out unfamiliar or unclear content and/or use of terms. We realized during this process that when working in a multi-linguistic context among women with disabilities, documentation requires significant additional attention. The content, style, structure and length have to be accessible as far as possible. For instance, we became mindful of the implications of structure and length when documents were converted to braille. Converting our footnotes to braille, for instance, resulted in the braille version of the report being heavy. These experiences in ensuring that documentation served its purposes were a valuable lesson. In the Sri Lankan context, advocacy for the rights of women with disabilities that is inclusive and led by women with disabilities requires additional resources. Moreover, it requires that substantive issues and discussions be communicated in an accessible manner in the different local languages. More time, financial resources and expertise have to be allocated to documentation when planning for similar collaborations in the future. The recommendations in the final report were finalized through the above described process and are reproduced below. The recommendations are with regard to all levels of state action (local, regional and national) as well as the international level. We, the research team, identified two state institutions that we would target for advocating for legal and policy reform work. One was the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the other was the Parliamentary Sectoral Oversight Committee on Women and Gender of the Eighth Parliament of Sri Lanka. Recommendations Implement CRPD and CEDAW Constitutional, legislative, policy and administrative reforms should be introduced to ensure that Sri Lanka’s obligations under the [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities] CRPD and [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women] CEDAW are fulfilled. Periodic review of these reforms should be carried out to identify gaps and weaknesses in implementation. Respect for the human rights of women with disabilities as per international human rights treaty law must be assured. Mainstream disability with a multisectoral approach Disability needs, supports and programs should be mainstreamed to ensure that all sectors address and include disability accessibility and participation within their mandate. Disability should be mentioned specifically and addressed in a targeted manner in all programmatic and policy interventions. This could be through legislative structures that require departmental

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Dinesha Samararatne annual targets and reporting to improve public accountability and outcomes. Disability Access and Inclusion Plans, such as those legislative instruments administered via Western Australian Parliament, are one example that can potentially be adopted. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of women with disabilities should be taken into account in policy and programmatic interventions. For instance, ex-combatants with disability, women with disabilities who faced the last stage of the war and women heads of household with disability are examples of specific groups that require targeted intervention by the state. Redesign the national census survey to capture disaggregated disability data The national census survey should be redesigned, particularly its process of categorisation and disaggregation in relation to disability, identity and gender, including, but not limited to, women with congenital disabilities, women with disabilities created due to the war and women heads of household with disabilities, alongside identifying daily activity restrictions and associated levels of required support. Such rich and nuanced data is necessary to ensure the long-term development and implementation of appropriate government policy and funding for progressive disability rights realisation. Shift from welfare to rights-based approach with required institutional reform and design An Inter-Ministerial Committee should be established under the President to ensure a high level of recognition is provided to the committee. This committee should ensure that disability is no longer a matter for social welfare but that it is recognised as a human rights concern. Departmental inclusion should encompass planning and infrastructure, local government, national statistics and census bureau, education and training, employment and industrial relations, and social welfare. Develop grounded knowledge of disability Disability should be understood from the point of view of women living with disability. This would help avoid stereotyping of women with disabilities and also contribute to developing more meaningful responses to their needs. Develop specific programmes for war-affected women with disability As demonstrated in this report, the experience of acquiring disability due to war, living with disability acquired due to the war, and the experience of the war due to disability is traumatic and gives rise to specific concerns. These should be acknowledged and taken into account in determining post-war programs, policies and legislation, including policies for accountability, justice, reparation and reconciliation.

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 69 Access to justice A specific program must be designed and implemented to ensure access to justice for women with disabilities. Such a program must address physical access, accessibility of services (such as welfare services) and accessibility of institutions, such as the police and the judiciary. Training for police personnel, administrators and the judiciary must involve sensitisation with regard to disability, women’s issues and issues related to the armed conflict. The Legal Aid Commission must be made accessible and further strengthened to ensure that women with disabilities have access to justice. Legal literacy Public education programs that are accessible must be implemented immediately to address the lack of legal literacy, lack of awareness of measures taken to ensure transitional justice and the current constitutional reform process. Human rights education must be made available throughout the island. Mainstream disability in civil society organisations Civil society organisations should mainstream disability as a core area for programs, research and advocacy, and partner with advocates of the rights of women with disabilities and their organisations in sustained ways. The impact of the intersectionality of gender, disability, ethnicity and so forth, particularly in post-war contexts, must be considered. Include disability in the agendas of international human rights organisations International organisations and international donor agencies that exercise a mandate with regard to human rights must ensure the inclusion of disability as an area of concern. (Samararatne et al. 2018, pp. 23–25) Multilevel advocacy Advocacy was central to the design and implementation of the project because it was identified as a priority by the women with disabilities who participated in our research collaboration. It was made clear that any research undertaken among women with disabilities must be accompanied by a commitment to making an impact in the sphere of law and policy. Advocacy, therefore, was woven into each step of the project. In contexts such as that of Sri Lanka, where recognition and respect for rights of women with disabilities is minimal, women with disabilities often reject research on the subject that does not include some form of advocacy or implementation. During our consultations, some women with disabilities often spoke of feeling that they had been taken advantage of by researchers who were only interested in conducting an interview with them. The organizations that we

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collaborated with also spoke of the dissatisfaction and frustration that research participants felt with research projects that did not include any components that had some tangible benefit either for the participants or for the community of women with disabilities. Similar views have been expressed by women with disabilities in other contexts. Mike Oliver, for instance, describes this effect as ‘alienation’ (Oliver 1992, p. 103; see also Morris 1992, p. 158). He notes that research participants felt alienated ‘from the product of research, from the research process, from other research subjects, and from one’s self’ (Oliver 1992, p. 103). Taking these views into account, we identified advocacy as a priority for this research project. In implementing the project, we learnt that advocacy in the context of rights of women with disability in Sri Lanka had at least four dimensions to it. The first is the internal organizational dimension. Within this dimension, the very task of designing this project and seeking other local partners to liaise with amounted to a form of advocacy. Due to the three-decade-long internal armed conflict, civil and political rights have been central to the work of organizations promoting human rights in Sri Lanka. Rights of women with disabilities had not been on the agenda of most of these organizations. Therefore, in initiating our project and in seeking other local partners, we were effectively advocating for two outcomes. One was for established human rights organizations in Sri Lanka to include rights of women with disabilities in their agenda and to focus specifically on the rights of war-affected women with disabilities. The other was to encourage collaborations between organizations that engaged more broadly with human rights issues and organizations that had been working more specifically on the rights of women with disabilities. The second dimension of advocacy in this project was the personal. We soon realized that engaging in activities that improved the legal literacy of the participants of the project in itself amounted to advocacy. This was most evident during the week-long training in research methods that we conducted in December 2016. The participants were highly engaged and interactive throughout the week, but mostly so during the session on the law and rights of women with disabilities. Their questions were based on their personal experiences and that of other individuals with disability. Often, participants responded to our answers by declaring that they would use the information or knowledge shared with them to intervene in an ongoing issue concerning the application of the law or a welfare policy. It was evident during those exchanges that the personal was political and that the private was public. These exchanges were an affirmation that advocacy had a personal and immediate dimension in this field. Empowering one person at a time is highly significant in the context of disability, as women with disabilities are often in the margins of society and are denied opportunities to exercise their autonomy or agency. The third and fourth aspects of advocacy were the more conventional methods of engaging the public through the media and engaging policy-makers. The launch of the report was used as the springboard for both dimensions of the advocacy strategy. We faced several challenges in organizing the event to launch the report. The logistics of organizing an inclusive public event in Colombo are

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 71 significant. These challenges included ensuring physical accessibility, providing transport and assistance to attendees with disabilities, and providing simultaneous translations for the event. The actual launch was designed to give voice and recognition to women with disabilities from the different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka. The speakers at the event were diverse in terms of identity, education and exposure to public events. In briefing the speakers, we deliberately avoided a prescriptive approach, but rather requested speakers to highlight what they understood to be significant in their contribution to the project. The audience was equally diverse. Ensuring a smooth flow during the launch was challenging, in that presenters were speaking not only in different languages but also in different ways. The epistemological positions of the speakers were significantly different, thereby offering the audience rich insights, but perhaps without the bridging that would have been possible in a more tightly managed launch. Sri Lanka’s print and electronic media functions in three languages – English, Sinhala and Tamil. The launch of the report was reported positively in newspapers and received some attention in Sri Lanka’s social media sphere as well (Daily FT 2018, Daily News 2018, Sriyananda 2018 in The Catamaran). These engagements attracted a significant amount of attention to the status of war-affected women with disabilities at a national level. The media coverage led to increased awareness and sensitivity on disability more generally, but also in relation to the internal armed conflict. Advocacy with policy-makers The launch of the report was effective in attracting the attention of policy-makers. Subsequent to the launch, the Law & Society Trust and several of the researchers involved in the project were summoned by the Parliamentary Sectoral Oversight Committee (PSOC) on Women and Gender. Some of us were also invited to speak and attend a consultative meeting at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, specifically on the subject of women with disabilities. The summons by the PSOC on Women and Gender gave us direct access to high-level representatives of state institutions in addition to having an audience with elected representatives. At the first meeting, the discussion on our report was one of several other issues being taken up by the PSOC that day (6 September 2018, meeting at the Parliament of Sri Lanka). During that meeting, the PSOC was convinced of the need for a more focused discussion on the recommendations of our report. It decided to reconvene specifically to discuss the report and to invite representatives from a wider range of state institutions. The second meeting (held on 10 October 2018 at the Parliament of Sri Lanka) proved to be focused and effective. The meeting was also attended by a few members of parliament who were not members of the PSOC. The PSOC was highly receptive to our recommendations and was focused on seeking explanations from the different state institutions. One of the main points of discussion was the procedures adopted in granting compensation for persons affected by the war. Another concern that was discussed at length was the selection and grant of

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welfare funding to women with disabilities. Our team was able to represent, to the PSOC and the representatives of the relevant state institutions, the lived experiences of women with disabilities in terms of accessing social welfare as well as other services provided by the state. The challenges faced by women with disabilities in making police complaints and in being involved in court proceedings as witnesses was also discussed. The dialogues at this meeting were positive and it was evident that the PSOC and the state representatives were receptive, at least in principle, to the idea of mainstreaming disability. It was evident that this positive endorsement and receptivity to the call for mainstreaming disability could now be carried forward to the next stage of advocacy targeted at specific programmes and their implementation. During the same time, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs also convened a meeting (on 15 November 2018 at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs of Sri Lanka) to discuss the recommendations made in our report. The ministry invited representatives from state institutions, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka and NGO representatives to attend this meeting. This dialogue was different in that the NGOs working with women with disability were better represented. The discussion included issues related to the national census, implementation of welfare programmes and the need to include women with disabilities within the mandate of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Because disability has traditionally been under the purview of the Ministry of Social Services, women with disabilities have not been included within the mandate of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, though women with disabilities have lobbied for some time for this. The successful launch of the report led to these high-level advocacy opportunities at the PSOC as well as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. In the dialogue and discussions at these institutions, it was evident that disability was an aspect of life that was generally invisible and unaccounted for in policy-making, except in social services and social welfare. It was also evident that the participation and inclusion of women with disabilities at these types of high-level meetings was rare. Our advocacy interventions therefore had a strong impact, in terms of giving voice to women with disabilities, making them visible and bridging the gap between formal laws/policies on disabilities and their implementation. Inclusivity in advocacy In designing and engaging in advocacy as part of this research project, one of the challenges that we faced was that of ensuring inclusivity. Given the weak respect and recognition for rights of women with disabilities, this was to be expected. Our collaboration was one of the first attempts at research undertaken over a relatively long duration and in a project spanning from data gathering to advocacy to an international academic publication. The experiences of this research collaboration therefore gave us the opportunity to identify and analyze the challenges faced with regard to inclusivity. These challenges broadly fall into three categories: first, in the design and implementation of inclusive research methods, reporting and academic writing and in

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 73 national-level advocacy; second, physical accessibility and linguistic and ethnic diversity, challenges which we had previously faced in undertaking research work in this field; and third, working with individuals with different forms of disability. In this project, we were able to deal effectively with the issues of physical accessibility as the Law & Society Trust allocated adequate funding for travel, assistance and accessible accommodation where necessary. We accounted for linguistic and ethnic diversity in the design of the project, through the provision of funds for simultaneous translations. Moreover, the research team had the necessary language skills, social skills and cultural sensitivities with which we could ensure that ethnic and linguistic diversity was respected and accommodated. Regrettably, in this collaboration, as with our previous collaboration, we failed in our efforts to ensure the inclusion of people with different disabilities (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). This is a lesson learnt in terms of undertaking similar studies in the future. More funding, effort and engagement is required if research in this field is to be more representative and inclusive of different forms of disabilities. In identifying and implementing inclusive research methods within the Sri Lankan context, we faced several hurdles. Due to the lack of access to education for women with disabilities, it was difficult to identify and recruit suitable participants for our week-long training workshop on research methods. This posed the greatest challenge over and above the challenges of ensuring ethnic, linguistic, regional and gender diversity among participants. The actual group that attended the workshop included participants who had read for an undergraduate degree to participants who had completed only primary education. Nevertheless, the workshop was a rich learning experience, as it allowed for reflection on the relevance of lived experiences in knowledge production. The issues that were discussed included the requirements of research ethics, responding to the material needs of research participants, and the funding of research. The discussions made it evident that it was difficult to match the interests of individuals living with disabilities and their communities with the formalities of undertaking research. Inclusivity in the actual design and implementation of research and advocacy in the field of disability was ethically and practically challenging for us. As Walmsley points out, ‘supporting inclusive research is a skilled activity’ and that ‘the power imbalances…continue to be camouflaged by a rhetoric of participation’. Navigating through these issues and ensuring effective and meaningful inclusion remained a central challenge throughout this project (2004, p. 66). Writing a report and subsequently a scholarly book with an international publisher in an inclusive manner also raised potential difficulties. In writing the report, we addressed these by way of adopting the following strategies. The report itself was deliberately written as a short document which focused on the most significant aspects of the project. As mentioned earlier, the translation of the report into Sinhala and Tamil was followed up with another round of copyediting to ensure that the language of the report was accessible to the interviewees and our research team. The reports were then converted to braille. The pre-consultation report was thereafter presented to the interviewees for their reactions and feedback. In addition to the feedback on the substantive aspects of the report, we received positive

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feedback from the researchers and the research participants about this consultation. A participant with a visual impairment observed that this was the first time she had ever had the opportunity to read a document of this nature in braille. She also said that this was the first time she had ever been consulted on the findings of a research project that she had been interviewed for. The consultation at this stage and the debrief with the researchers demanded significant human and financial resources. It extended the duration of the project by about six months. Nevertheless, this was our strategy for addressing inclusivity in writing the report. Drawing on our experiences in this study, we reviewed our book project with a view to writing it in an inclusive way and to allow for the voices of women with disabilities to be heard. In our attempts to do this, we followed the previous examples of the collaborative model. As discussed in the introduction to this edited volume, we partnered war-affected women with disabilities with researchers to develop a scholarly account of lived experience that we could include in our edited volume. Ensuring inclusivity in the advocacy meetings involved another set of challenges. In addition to the anticipated challenge of lack of translation facilities, the research team had to object to certain meeting spaces and negotiate physical spaces that were not accessible in order to be present at the meetings. My personal observation of these events was that the experience of having to overcome the multiple barriers of access left me feeling exhausted and spent even before the meeting commenced. It affected the entire team’s ability and capacity to engage at these meetings. Sympathy and the charitable dispensation of the other participants and organizers of these meetings often undermined the impact of our interventions as a research team. As a team, we felt that the public display of disabilities invoked pity, sympathy, curiosity and so on from the non-disabled participants such that they were distracted from the substantive issues being raised.

Part III Drawing from my analysis thus far in this chapter, in this part I theorize on two lessons learnt from the advocacy efforts of our research collaboration: 1) The challenges of disability-focused research in a post-war context; and 2) The sustainability of advocacy. I conclude by proposing a ‘working model’ that draws on the ideas of emancipatory research and transformational research. Challenges of disability-focused research post-war In carrying out our research and advocacy in this collaboration we encountered two challenges that limited the scope of our research and the reach of our advocacy efforts. The first was managing any personal security risks that the interviewees were facing or could face in the future. The second was ensuring that our research collaborators and/or our interviewees collectively reflected a range of disabilities.

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 75 As pointed out elsewhere in this edited volume, the post-war political and social climate in Sri Lanka has specific implications for disability-focused research. Our interviewees referred to the stigma they faced in their immediate community and beyond due to their physical disabilities. Among them, former combatants were particularly vulnerable not only to stigmatization but also to risks to their security and privacy. Former combatants include those who have been in detention for extended periods, required to go through a rehabilitation process and subsequently released (Satkunanathan 2019, p. 192). Such former combatants have not been charged or found guilty of a specific crime. Subsequent to release, former combatants are under the surveillance of the military and are under obligation to report regularly to state authorities (Satkunanathan 2019, p. 193). In this context, we were aware that requesting a former combatant to engage publicly with us in advocacy efforts could potentially place her security at risk. Our strategy therefore was to continue to work with the local collaborating organization, Viluthu, and to include the coordinator in the advocacy work. On the one hand, this decision ensured that our research and advocacy efforts were not placing anyone at risk. However, not including former combatants in our advocacy work meant that they were absent in the physical sense. Their physical absence, in advocacy efforts which focused on war-affected women with disabilities, was felt. The second challenge that we faced was with regard to the diversity of disabilities among our research team and among our interviewees. For instance, despite the numerous attempts at involving collaborators or interviewees with hearing impairment, we failed in that regard. Several women with hearing impairments who attended the launch raised questions about the non-inclusion of women with hearing impairment in our research collaboration. Those questions made it possible for us to discuss, in a transparent manner, our failed attempts at ensuring the representation of other forms of disability in our collaboration. It also allowed us to discuss with them the possibilities for future collaboration. As noted in our previous research work, engaging with women with intellectual disabilities remains a challenge in the Sri Lankan context, as women with intellectual disabilities are often confined to their homes and are difficult to reach out to (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015, p. 763). Conducting interviews with them according to approved ethical research practice remains a challenge, obtaining informed consent being one example. It was clear to us that we need to innovate and engage in knowledge sharing in order to develop conceptual tools that can effectively deal with these challenges on the ground. Sustainability In our experience, ensuring the sustainability of advocacy for the rights of women with disabilities has a specific dynamic. As with any other project, sustainability of funding for a project is a key consideration. Project managers ought to be allowed to exercise some discretion in managing that funding. Projects ought to be implemented in a flexible manner that is responsive to realities on the ground. For instance, in our project, we had initially anticipated that the report would be

76 Dinesha Samararatne launched in selected regions in Sri Lanka. Practical considerations, such as ensuring inclusivity at such regional launches and the financial, human and physical resources it would require, prevented us from implementing that plan. Sustaining momentum was another consideration in implementing this project over a period of two years with a research team that was working part time. The collaboration required a diverse team of individuals from different geographical locations working together over an extended period of time. We were able to maintain a healthy momentum during the two years because the team members were highly motivated with regard to promoting the rights of women with disabilities. Strong working relationships and partnerships that had been built among us over time made it possible for us to maintain this momentum. The entire team was willing to review and revise the project as it developed, to ensure that each step was effective and accessible. This work involved a high degree of volunteerism and self-initiation. Subsequent projects of this nature would require that these dynamics be institutionalized where possible, which would allow for sustainable advocacy efforts in the future as well. In Sri Lanka, and in similar post-war contexts, the political environment can be volatile. When governments change, policy directions also often change in significant ways. The political instability can result in violence, as was the case in Sri Lanka in 2019, when more than 250 people died in suicide-bomb attacks carried out on Easter Sunday by a local organization allegedly inspired by Islamic State (Gunasingham 2019). These attacks were followed by tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, resulting in reports of incidents of assault, harassment, discrimination and damage to property (Human Rights Watch 2019). The change of government in November 2019 has signalled a change in the government’s approach to transitional justice. These political developments have undermined the impact of our advocacy efforts in 2018. The sustainability of advocacy in these contexts requires researchers and their collaborators to develop strategies for adapting to these unpredictable and volatile political and social developments. A working model? The research collaboration that resulted in the production of the report ‘Out of the Shadows’: War-affected Women with Disabilities in Sri Lanka and the advocacy efforts that followed the publication of the report allowed us to develop a working model for inclusive research and advocacy in Sri Lanka’s post-war context. Marcia Rioux and colleagues (2016) have pointed out that yet another paradigm shift is unfolding in disability research, that of disability research in the global South. They note that ‘the changing North–South paradigm dynamic’ in disability research is evident in the changing nature of relationships between researchers, funding agencies, universities, NGOs and communities of women with disabilities (Rioux et al. 2016, p. 532). They employ the term ‘transformational research’ to describe this emerging research paradigm and suggest that, ‘rather than imposing northern research agendas and models onto the global South’, transformational research ‘is considerate of South–North politics, addresses local priorities and

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 77 concerns, provides a voice to local communities, and thus contributes to building from the ground up a sustainable, long-term, independent strategy in which disability organizations take ownership of research processes and outcomes’ (Rioux et al. 2016, p. 542). As I have suggested in this chapter, our research collaboration is possibly an example of a working model within this emerging research paradigm. Through partnerships between international, national and local institutions and actors, we were able to develop a model which permitted us to engage in inclusive research that was emancipatory in its orientation. That is to say, the process was designed through an ongoing partnership among a diverse range of actors and institutions: academics (international and national), human rights organizations (national and regional), organizations with a focus on disability rights, and war-affected women with disabilities. Our research findings were identified and prioritized by the research team in consultation with the interviewees. Through this collaboration, we were able to build bridges across the divide between human rights–focused organizations and their activism and disability-focused organizations and their activism. Moreover, by adopting a broader definition of ‘war affected’, we were able to draw from experiences of women with disabilities across the three main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka –Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim. The result was a rich descriptive evidence base, which we were able to disseminate in all three languages used commonly in Sri Lanka in print form and in braille. Our advocacy efforts were effective in that we were invited to present and discuss our findings at the highest level, the Parliament of Sri Lanka and at the Ministry for Women’s Affairs. At these events, high-level representatives of all the relevant state agencies were required to respond to the findings and recommendations of our report. The media coverage complemented these efforts by generating wider interest and discourse about the issues faced by war-affected women with disabilities. This approach to research and advocacy de-centres the ‘academic/researcher’ and replaces it with an organizational structure that is not hierarchical but collaborative. Being led by the lived experiences of individuals in the target group, this approach displaces conventional methods of knowledge production. Research methods are revised and adapted to capture these life experiences in a manner that is ethical and legitimate. The purpose of research is linked to commitment to advocacy that will lead to social, institutional and legal reform. The research output is validated not only by the academic community but also by members of the community or group that is the focus of the research. Informed and constantly shaped by this approach, to me, this working model allowed us to be respectful, reflexive and responsive to the life experiences of war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka.

Acknowledgements This chapter was written in 2019 based on research undertaken in 2016–18. The writing of this chapter was partly funded by the Australian Government through

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the Australian Research Council Laureate Program ‘Balancing Diversity and Social Cohesion in Democratic Constitutions’ at the Melbourne Law School of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Reference Alwis, M. de & Jayawardena K. 2001, Casting pearls: the women’s franchise movement in Sri Lanka, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo. Alwis, M. de 2009, ‘Interrogating the ‘political’: feminist peace activism in Sri Lanka’, Feminist Review, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 81–93. Campbell, F.K. 2009, ‘Disability, legal mobilisation and the challenges of capacity building in Sri Lanka’, in C.A. Marshal, E. Kendall & R. Gover (eds.), Disabilities: insights from across fields and around the world, volume 3, Praeger, Westport, CT, pp. 111–28. Daily FT 2018, ‘War-affected women with disabilities cry for recognition’, Daily FT, 14 August. Daily News. 2018, ‘Creating space for war-affected women with disabilities’, Daily News, 13 August. Gunasingham, A. 2019, ‘Sri Lanka attacks: an analysis of the aftermath’, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 8–13. Human Rights Watch. 2019, ‘Sri Lanka: Muslims face threats, attacks: authorities should act against incitement by Buddhist nationalists’, 3 July. viewed 27 February 2020. . Johnson, K., Hopkins, R. & Minogue, G. 2020, ‘Research, advocacy and activism: a necessary interaction?’ in K. Soldatic & K. Johnson (eds.), Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, chapter 8. Kandasamy, N. & Soldatic, K. 2020, ‘Kamalawathie: gender, disability and leadership in Sri Lanka’, in K. Soldatic & K. Johnson (eds.), Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, chapter 7. Morris, J. 1992, ‘Personal and political: a feminist perspective on researching physical disability’, Disability, Handicap & Society, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 157–66. Oliver, M. 1992, ‘Changing the social relations of research production?’ Disability, Handicap & Society, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 101–14. Ortoleva, S. 2010, ‘Women with disabilities: the forgotten peace builders’, Loyola LA International & Comparative Law Review, vol. 33, no. 83, pp. 83–142. Ortoleva, S. 2012, ‘Who’s missing? Women with disabilities in UN Security Council resolution 1325 national action plans’, ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 395–412. Pinto, P.C. 2020, ‘When academia meets activism: the place of research in struggles for disability rights’, in K. Soldatic & K. Johnson (eds.), Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, chapter 21. Rioux, M., Pinto, P.C., Viera, J. & Keravica, R. 2016, ‘Disability research in the global south: working from a local approach’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 531–44. Samararatne, D. 2020, ‘A Janus-faced affair: Sri Lanka’s ratification of the CRPD’, in K. Johnson & E. Kakoullis (eds.), Recognising human rights in different cultural contexts: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, 179-199.

Women with disabilities, advocacy and the law 79 Samararatne, D. & Soldatic, K. 2015, ‘Inclusions and exclusions in law: experiences of women with disability in rural and war-affected areas in Sri Lanka’, Disability & Society, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 759–72. Samararatne, D. & Soldatic, K. 2019, ‘Transitioning with disability: justice for women with disabilities in post-war Sri Lanka’, in R. Shackel & L. Fiske (eds.), Rethinking transitional gender justice: transformative approaches in post-conflict settings, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, pp. 315–37. Samararatne, D., Soldatic, K. & Perera, B. 2018, ‘Out of the shadows’: war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka – final report, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales. Samuel, K. 2006, A hidden history: women’s activism for peace in Sri Lanka, 1982–2002, Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo. Satkunanathan, A. 2019, ‘The treatment of former combatants in post-war Sri Lanka: a form of arbitrary detention or rehabilitation?’ in F. de Varennes & C.M. Gardiner (eds.), Routledge handbook of human rights in Asia, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, chapter 13. Shakespeare, T. 2018, Disability: the basics, Routledge, Abingdon and New York. Soldatic, K. & Johnson, K. (eds.) 2020, Global perspectives on disability activism and advocacy: our way, Routledge, Abingdon and New York. Sriyananda, S. 2018, ‘Out of the shadows’, The Catamaran, 30 August. . UN Security Council. 2019, ‘Resolution 2475. Protection of civilians in armed conflict’. viewed 26 February 2020. . Walmsley, J. 2004, Inclusive learning disability research: the (nondisabled) researcher’s role. British Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 65–71. Walmsley, J. The Central England People First History Project Team. 2014, ‘Telling the history of self-advocacy: a challenge for inclusive research’. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 34–43.

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Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity The role of reparations and gendereddisability justice Binendri Perera

Introduction A reparations process in Sri Lanka must take into account the complexity of loss and trauma suffered by individuals and groups as a result of ethno-religious violence and the civil war. The Sri Lankan government’s most recent attempts at transitional justice partly came through co-sponsoring of the United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution on ‘Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka’ in 2015 (UN Human Rights Council 2015). This resolution has the ambitious aim of establishing a range of mechanisms for redressing war-related injustice, alongside mechanisms for accountability, justice, reparations, reconciliation and independent oversight of the security system. Through the resolution, the Sri Lankan government promised to establish a four-pillared transitional justice mechanism comprising an Office on Missing Persons, a judicial mechanism, a Truth Commission and an Office of Reparations. While the Office on Missing Persons was established by the Office on Missing Persons (Establishment, Administration, and Discharge of Functions) Act (2016), the reparations process commenced through the enactment of the Office of Reparations Act (2018). This chapter evaluates the ways in which this reparation mechanism could and ought to engage with and cater to the needs of women with disabilities. In Sri Lanka, as in other war-affected contexts, women with disabilities have been subject to and continue to face direct discrimination and marginalization. Often these experiences are a result of prejudice, indifference or lack of awareness. The first section of the chapter discusses the position of women with disabilities in the international human rights framework and the international legal discourse on the right to a remedy. The second assesses the recognition of, and provision for, women with disabilities in the Sri Lankan reconciliation process. These sections attempt to expose the neglect of women with disabilities in reparation discourse at both the international and domestic level. Insisting on the need to take a victim-centric approach that mainstreams the experiences of women with disabilities, I analyze the purpose, process and substance of the Sri Lankan reparation mechanism facilitated by the Office of Reparations Act. I emphasize the need

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 81 to design and implement reparations in a transformative manner that emancipates and empowers women with disabilities.

Focus on women with disabilities in the international legal framework The domestic mechanism for reparations was initiated as a result of the obligations Sri Lanka took on before the UN Human Rights Council in 2015. These obligations have to be interpreted in light of Sri Lanka’s obligations under the human rights treaties. The design and implementation of the reparation mechanism must accord with these international obligations. However, the multilateral international legal framework takes a top-down approach and focuses on the obligations of the states in upholding human rights (Kennedy 2001). Conversely, the domestic application of this framework must be more nuanced and take a bottomup approach to cater to the micro-level needs of diverse people residing in the country. The focus of this chapter is on the needs of war-affected women with disabilities. In this section, I highlight the limitations of the international human rights framework in the ways in which it recognizes and provides for the human rights of women with disabilities in the context of reparations. I suggest that the gaps in the international framework lead to certain tensions between the international and the domestic approaches. Gradual recognition accorded to women with disabilities by international human rights law Building on the idea of formal equality expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the UN Treaty framework declares the human rights of all peoples. This is signified through Article 1 of the UDHR which states that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. The equal entitlement of all humans to the rights contained thereunder is presented as if humans are a homogeneous entity. The treaty glosses over the dispositional, social, cultural, economic and geographic diversity of humans (Glendon 1998, pp. 1154–55). However, since the adoption of the UDHR, international human rights law theory and jurisprudence have developed concepts of substantive and transformative equality to address the deficiencies of formal equality (for example, see UN Economic and Social Council 2009 – General Comment No. 20: Nondiscrimination in economic, social and cultural rights). Groups such as women with disabilities face discrimination due to their multiple identities (Shakespeare 2018, p. 13). They carry simultaneous identities of gender, disability and their ethnic, religious, linguistic, social, economic and political identities (de Silva de Alwis 2009). While such intersectionality is common to all human beings, groups such as women and children with disabilities face heightened vulnerability and structural marginalization as a result (de Silva de Alwis 2009). However, the fiction of formal equality can eclipse the fact that these marginalized groups have disproportionate difficulty in enjoying the human rights guaranteed under

82 Binendri Perera international human rights law. Such groups require specialized redress to remedy the exacerbated and complex effects of rights violations they experience. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which give binding effect to the UDHR, continue the top-down approach in promoting the rights enumerated thereunder. Article 2 of the UDHR and Article 2, paragraph 2 of the ICESCR prohibit discrimination based on specific grounds. General Comment No. 20 on equality and non-discrimination illustrates different forms of discrimination as formal and substantive, direct and indirect, systemic and multiple (UN Economic and Social Council 2009, p. 2). Discrimination based on sex as well as disability is expressly prohibited (UN Economic and Social Council 2009, pp. 6, 8). The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) focus on groups of people who are particularly susceptible to rights violations due to being members of specific groups. Disability is a factor that affects groups discussed by each of these conventions, not just the CRPD. Yet even then, the CEDAW does not explicitly discuss the rights of women with disabilities until the General Recommendation No. 18 (UN CEDAW 1991). This recommendation noted that state parties have provided ‘scarce information’ on women with disabilities (UN CEDAW 1991, p. 3). Further, it identified that women and girls with disability are subject to ‘double discrimination’ and calls on state parties to provide information on upholding the rights of women with disabilities. More recently, General Recommendation No. 30 on ‘women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations’ recognizes that women with disabilities face heightened risk and ‘multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination’ in such situations (UN CEDAW 2013, pp. 9, 15). Not only do women face ‘disproportionate’ effects of conflict, but conflict heightens the risk of disability for women and women with disabilities face increased vulnerabilities (UN CEDAW 2013, pp. 10, 13). The recommendation also highlights the importance of engaging women in the design and implementation of reparation mechanisms (UN CEDAW 2013, pp. 22, 23). Most importantly, the recommendation emphasizes that ‘women are not a homogenous group and their experiences of conflict and specific needs in post-conflict contexts are diverse’ (UN CEDAW 2013, p. 3). The CRPD complements such foci on women and girls with disability by specifically referring to the rights of women with disabilities in its preamble as well as in Article 6, which states that women and girls with disabilities face multiple discrimination. The states are called upon to ensure their equality and take measures to advance and empower them. Article 6 is further elaborated through General Comment No. 3 to the CRPD, which emphasizes the state’s obligation to provide reparations when women and girls with disabilities face human rights violations (UN CRPD 2016, p. 7). The above analysis shows that the recognition within international human rights law of the complex nature of the human rights violations experienced by women with disabilities and of state obligations to redress

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 83 such violations has been gradual, and only very recent in the context of armed conflict. In the next section, I suggest that this is particularly evident in the right to remedy and in the context of reparations. Neglect of women with disabilities in international law on the right to remedy The right to remedy is recognized in the UDHR as well as in the ICCPR. Article 8 of the UDHR and Article 2, paragraph 3 of the ICCPR state that everyone has a right to an effective domestic remedy for violations of fundamental rights recognized by domestic law. General Comment No. 31 to the ICCPR elaborates the scope of the legal obligation set out by Article 2, in that state parties are first called upon to respect and protect the covenant rights. Second, states are required to promote these rights by taking active measures to uphold them. Third, mechanisms of redress must be domestically available (paragraph 3 of Article 2). The provision of reparations to victims who have suffered violations of rights is a central component of this right to remedy (UN Human Rights Committee 2004, p. 6). While the General Comment mentions that vulnerable groups should receive special attention, there is no further discussion on identifying such groups. The General Comment does not offer specific guidelines on tailoring reparations (UN Human Rights Committee 2004, p. 6). General Comment No. 9 to the ICESCR (UN Economic and Social Council 1998) also refers to how administrative and judicial structures have an obligation to ensure that remedies for violation of economic, social and cultural rights are not themselves discriminatory. However, once again, this General Comment does not include guidelines on how such remedies should cater to the micro-level circumstances of victims of human rights violations. Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly (2006) adopted the resolution, ‘Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law’. These principles elaborate on the entitlements of victims who have suffered violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law. This resolution, too, operates on the implied basis of homogeneity of victims. It does not take into account the impact of multiple forms of discrimination and marginalization that ought to be considered in any reparation policy. UN Security Council Resolution 2475, the first-ever resolution on protection of persons with disabilities in conflict, highlights that persons with disabilities encounter barriers in accessing reparations for violations of international humanitarian law. Thereby, the resolution insists that persons with disabilities must be provided with effective access to remedies and reparations (UN Security Council 2019, p. 2). The ten resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council on ‘Women, peace and security’ operate on the same basis (resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242, 2467 and 2493, from 2000 to 2019). Gender-specific reparations are considered significant in reconciliation processes envisaged by these resolutions (as in resolution 2122, UN Security Council 2013). However, they

84 Binendri Perera make minimal reference to the experiences and perspectives of women with disabilities (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015, pp. 762–63). The focus is on women’s entitlements, but not on how conflicts affect these women in different challenging circumstances. Resolution 2475 on protection of persons with disabilities in conflict calls upon the states to respond to the ‘specific needs’ of women with disabilities (UN Security Council 2019, p. 2). The resolution further urges the state to eliminate discrimination and marginalization for people who face ‘multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination’ (UN Security Council 2019, p. 3). However, the resolution does not elaborate on the complexity inherent to intersectional discrimination and the consequent necessity to employ a range of mechanisms to eliminate such discrimination. Disability complicates the experiences of internally displaced women, female heads of households and women relatives of missing persons (Fonseka 2017, p. 239). While Moffett (2016) points out that distinctions between victims and perpetrators are not watertight, based on his analysis of incidents in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Peru (see also Theidon 2012), female ex-combatants with disabilities face further complex challenges due to suspicion and stigma. They can experience suspicion and stigma from within their community, from those outside their community and also by the state (Gomez 2016, pp. 56–57). The international human rights discourse on the right to a remedy does not recognize these microlevel circumstances of women with disabilities, which needs specific focus when providing redress. Women with disabilities are often more vulnerable because of the intersectional factors, which contribute to discrimination and marginalization of diverse subgroups within any seemingly homogeneous group (de Silva de Alwis 2009). Such vulnerability is heightened during conflict situations. Yet they remain marginalized in mechanisms for transitional justice. Interventions that mainstream the human rights violations of women with disabilities and their right to reparatory justice become critical in this context.

Engagement of women with disabilities in Sri Lanka’s reconciliation process This section traces the engagement of women with disabilities in Sri Lanka’s reconciliation process thus far. The section is an attempt to highlight how the neglect of intersectional experiences of women with disabilities in the international legal framework has had subtle consequences that have manifested through the domestic reconciliation process in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan engagement with international law on providing reparations Since 2012, the UN Human Rights Council has been adopting resolutions regarding human rights violations that took place during the last stages of the civil war (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 2). The Office of the High Commissioner’s Report (OHCHR Report) produced after the UN Human Rights Council Resolution of

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 85 2014 provides detailed instances of human rights abuses. Even while revealing micro-level rights violations, this report fails to record the diverse experiences of women with disabilities affected by war (Samararatne et al. 2018, pp. 2–3). Through the OHCHR Report the non-recognition of the human rights violations of women with disabilities in international human rights law impacts on how human rights violations are framed in the domestic context. Consequently, most marginalized groups are overlooked when international human rights standards are applied in practice. This is the danger of the operating assumption of homogeneity entrenched through the macro-level focus of international human rights. Continued neglect of the intersectional identity of women with disabilities in the domestic framework The Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC Report) was produced by a committee appointed by the president in 2010. Their mandate required them to inquire into the sequence of the conflict between 2002 and 2009 and propose mechanisms for restitution and non-recurrence (LLRC Report 2011, pp. 5–6). A consultation task force appointed by the prime minister in early 2016 sought the views of the public regarding the transitional justice mechanisms proposed in accordance with the UNHRC Resolution 2015/30/1. The Consultation Task Force Report (2016) (CTF Report) makes specific recommendations for transitional justice and reconciliation mechanisms in light of domestic needs. Whereas the report refers to ethnic minorities, women and persons with disabilities as separate vulnerable groups needing special attention in a reparation process, there is minimal appreciation of the compounded impact due to intersectionality of the overlapping identities (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 4). The LLRC Report has the same lacuna (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 3). Similarly, Sri Lanka’s National Policy on Reconciliation and Coexistence (2017), while referring to victim centrality, does not mainstream the experiences of women with disabilities and other marginalized groups affected by the armed conflict. Therefore, even the official reports that are supposed to capture the views and experiences of people at the micro-level do not effectively capture the specific challenges faced by women with disabilities and the human rights violations that they have experienced. The common shortcoming of these reports signifies the extent of the marginalization faced by Sri Lankan women with disabilities. However, ‘Out of the Shadows’: War-affected Women with Disabilities in Sri Lanka – Final Report (Samararatne et al. 2018) focuses on the specific experiences of war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka. The report highlights that women who have acquired disabilities due to the armed conflict experience severe psychological trauma and stigma. According to the women who were interviewed for this report, acquiring disabilities due to the armed conflict (especially as combatants) gave rise to stigma. These women are further marginalized through systemically entrenched stigma attached to disability through cultural, religious and gendered norms.

86 Binendri Perera Women with disabilities have unique perspectives that must be considered within the reparations process. Their experiences relate to how they have coped with injuries caused by the war and to aggravation of these injuries due to lack of treatment and neglect during the armed conflict. They also speak of watching their family members die before their eyes, and the impact they continue to suffer when the breadwinner of their families is detained indefinitely. Some of the women also experience daily difficulties and family scorn due their inability to perform simple tasks, such as using the washroom or combing their hair, as a result of their war-acquired impairment. These women with disabilities allude to the stigma and shame they face at family events and when moving about in public spaces. They further elaborate on how they prioritize protecting and taking care of their children over their own self-care. Ex-combatant women with disabilities face further challenges because of surveillance and resultant breaches of privacy by security forces – mostly men (Samararatne et al. 2018). Subsequent to the recommendations made by the CTF Report, the government enacted the Office of Reparations Act (2018) to commence the reparation process. This Act repeals the Rehabilitation of Persons, Properties and Industries Authority Act (1987), which was adopted to provide for rehabilitation of persons, repair and restoration of properties, industries and businesses affected by the riots of July 1983 (Weerakoon 2012). The anti-Tamil riots of July 1983 led to over 300 deaths, rendered about 100,000 people homeless and caused proprietary damage estimated to be about 4% of the country’s gross national product (Eleanor 2008). The office established by the Act has two main roles: first, to design reparation policies for those who were affected by the armed conflict in the north, subject to the approval by the Cabinet of Ministers. Second, the office is to facilitate and implement those policies. The Act mentions women and persons with disability as participants and beneficiaries of the reparation process. However, the intersectionality of gender and disability does not find explicit expression, which is an issue that has persisted throughout Sri Lankan official reports on transitional justice.

Inadequate focus on experiences of women with disabilities in the Sri Lankan reparations mechanism The foregoing sections discussed how the experiences of women with disabilities have been overlooked through the international as well as the domestic legal discourse and policies on reconciliation and reparations. I consider the establishment of an office dedicated to drafting specific policies on reparations as a crucial turning point to focus on the specific experiences of marginalized groups, including women with disabilities. Even though the LLRC Report and the CTF Report have missed the opportunity to take a nuanced, micro-focused approach, the Office of Reparations has another chance to do so during its consultations with the aggrieved persons. An international example is the reparation mechanism of Colombia, legislated through Victim Law No. 1448 of 2011, which is based on 12 sets of victim categories, and is expanded on by the Constitutional Court

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 87 (Dixon 2016, p. 93). The Sri Lankan Office of Reparations needs to adopt a similar victim-centric approach. This section analyses the ways in which the micro-level experiences of different marginalized groups affected by war can be incorporated into Sri Lanka’s reparation mechanism. Due recognition of these experiences is a prerequisite for formulating and implementing a multisectoral reparation mechanism that would be effective in redressing intersectional and structural discrimination. Focus on women with disabilities in the aims of reparations at present The CTF Report discusses five purposes of reparations: alleviating immediate suffering, recognizing suffering as a result of structural violence and discrimination, making restitution of property and rights, and holding accountable the state as well as non-state actors (CTF 2016, pp. 36–43). References to disability are made in only one of these purposes: alleviation of immediate suffering for persons with disabilities in desperate financial circumstances. The report relies on the ‘pleas for urgent support to survive’ by families who have taken care of persons who became disabled during childhood due to the armed conflict and those who are unable to work due to disabilities acquired due to the armed conflict. Yet the report does not quote any such experiences of women with disabilities. The report refers to gender, ethnicity, caste and class-based systemic discrimination, sexual violence faced by women, and extreme poverty and vulnerability of femaleheaded households (CTF 2016, pp. 36–40), but how all these circumstances are aggravated through intersectionality with a disability is not discussed. The Office of Reparations Act contains a provision with more specific aims. Making ‘specialized policies on public education, memorialization and on children, youths, women and victims of sexual violence and persons with disabilities’ is one objective of the Act, Section 2 (b). However, it is also important to recognize that persons with disabilities need to be considered in specialized reparation policies on public education, memorialization, children, youth, women and victims of sexual violence. Children, youth, women and victims of sexual violence with disabilities suffer aggravated damage and trauma due to the intersectional nature of their vulnerability, marginalization and discrimination (de Silva de Alwis 2009). Therefore, while recognition of persons with disabilities in the Act is commendable, it is not sufficient to provide them reparations for the human rights violations they have experienced. Importance of a multisectoral approach to mainstream recognition of women with disabilities The ‘Out of the Shadows’ report (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 17) refers to the lack of ‘public recognition and acknowledgement’ of women with disabilities. In light of this finding, the report recommends a multisectoral approach whereby inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities is promoted by all sectors (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 23). The report elaborates that disability should be

88 Binendri Perera ‘mentioned specifically and addressed in a targeted manner’ in policy-making, legislation, financial allocations, administration, implementation and monitoring (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 23). Such an approach can only emanate from a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the experiences of women with disabilities through direct engagement with them. The objectives of the Act do not expressly recommend taking a multisectoral approach in providing reparations to war-affected persons with disabilities. This omission can be detrimental when dealing with structural and multiple discrimination faced by women with disabilities. Therefore, the Office of Reparations must aim towards engaging meaningfully with women with disabilities and all other marginalized groups during their consultations. Only such effective engagement would ensure that the reparation policies that they submit to the cabinet of ministers cater to the ground realities.

Participation of women with disabilities in designing a reparation mechanism: present position and potential The process of providing reparations is considered as significant as the substance of reparations because justice is an experience in which victims’ personalities and dignity are respected (Dixon 2016, p. 99, Moffett 2017, p. 391–95). The preamble of the CRPD, section (e), defines disability as an ‘evolving concept’ that arises whenever persons with impairments are denied ‘full, effective and equal societal participation’ due to ‘attitudinal and environmental barriers’. Section (k) reiterates that persons with disabilities ‘continue to face barriers in their participation as equal members of society’ despite ‘various instruments and undertakings’. UN Security Council Resolution 2475 (2019) on the protection of persons with disabilities in conflict specifically highlights that persons with disabilities face barriers in accessing reparations (UN Security Council 2019, p. 2). Therefore, it is imperative that persons with disabilities, and women with disabilities who face further barriers due to their gender, are made equal stakeholders in the reparation process. Section (f) of the preamble of the CRPD emphasizes the importance of such ‘influence’ in ‘promotion, formulation and evaluation of the policies, plans, and actions’. Resolution 2475 emphasizes the significance of mainstreaming disability inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in ‘humanitarian action, conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, reconstruction and peacebuilding’ (UN Security Council 2019, p. 2). Article 7 of the CEDAW enshrines the right of women to participate in political and public life, including participating in the design and implementation of government policies. In this section, I analyze the extent to which the Office of Reparations Act facilitates such participation. Impact of amendments made according to the Supreme Court determination The Draft Reparation Bill 2017, which was made public pursuant to an order of the Right to Information Commission, defined a victim eligible for reparations

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 89 thereunder as a ‘person who has suffered a serious violation of international human rights or humanitarian law’. ‘Human rights’ were defined to include ‘all fundamental rights recognized by the Constitution of Sri Lanka, and rights contained in international human rights treaties ratified by Sri Lanka’. However, the Supreme Court determined that the identification of victims according to these provisions would require the Office of Reparations to interpret the fundamental rights chapter of the constitution as well as the international treaties (Parliamentary debates, 8 August 2018, pp. 738–42). This was regarded by the Supreme Court as a usurpation of the judicial power delineated in Articles 3 and 4 of the Sri Lankan Constitution 1978. Therefore, the court required a two-thirds majority in parliament and the people’s approval at a referendum for these clauses to be passed. Consequently, the references to human rights were substituted by the alternative phrases suggested by the courts: ‘damage suffered as a result of the loss of life or damage to their person or property’. Sri Lankan courts regularly use administrative law principles to interpret the right to equality and fundamental rights standards in exercising its writ jurisdiction (Gomez 2006). Due to this cross-fertilization of fundamental rights jurisprudence and administrative law, the right to equality has become a ground for judicial review of executive action. Therefore, in any event, administrative bodies are expected to respect the right to equality. To do so, administrative bodies inevitably have to ascertain the scope of this right. Moreover, the state has a responsibility to guarantee human rights and, thereby, the legislature and the executive have a co-equal authority to determine the scope of rights. As long as the Supreme Court has the final power to determine whether the actions of the executive are in line with the Constitution and Sri Lanka’s international obligations, the judicial authority of the court would not have been usurped by the activities of the Office of Reparations. The issue that the Supreme Court raised has to be understood within the broader Sri Lankan context. In fulfilling its commitments under UNHRC Resolution 2015, the government established two institutions: that of an office of missing persons and an office for reparations. UNHRC Resolution 2015, paragraph 4, refers to ‘judicial and non-judicial measures’ and the government’s proposal ‘to establish a commission for truth, justice, reconciliation and non-recurrence, an office of missing persons and an office for reparations’. Had the government followed this order in establishing reconciliation mechanisms, the judicial mechanism and the truth commission would have preceded the office of reparations. Consequently, the judicial function of assessing violations of human rights and humanitarian law would have been performed by a mechanism for which the judicial authority was duly provided by Sri Lanka’s constitution. The CTF Report notes that the public also considered the sequencing proposed in the UNHRC resolution as important. The report records that some people indicated resistance towards meting out reparations ahead of justice and truthseeking mechanisms as well as state engagement towards building trust with the victims (CTF 2016, p. 43). Such an attempt is condemned as trying to ‘buy people’s silence’ (CTF 2016, p. 44). However, the CTF Report also notes that

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one international organization stressed the prioritization of reparations to signal ‘inclusiveness and rebuilding a national community’ (CTF 2016, p. 53). The Sri Lankan government has not disclosed the reasons for prioritizing the reparation mechanism over the other mechanisms. While the importance of urgency is manifest through the hardships faced by the affected people, the question arises at what cost the reparations mechanism will be achieved. The normative significance in the legislation explicitly recognizing that international human rights law should guide the reparation process is high. Nevertheless, reference to only ‘serious’ violations of human rights can limit the application of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Moffett 2017, p. 384). This limits the reparation mechanism’s ability to remedy the economic and social marginalization of war-affected victims, which will be especially detrimental to women with disabilities. Therefore, removing the reference to ‘serious violations of international human rights’ through the Supreme Court’s intervention also has the potential to broaden the scope of the Sri Lankan reparation mechanism. Bulankulama v Secretary, Ministry of Industrial Development ([2000] 3) SriLR 243) states that Sri Lankan judicial and administrative bodies can be guided by international law to which the country has shown formal commitments, even if they become binding law only upon the enactment of enabling legislation (Bulankulama, pp. 274–75). Women with disabilities as expert consultants in designing the reparation mechanism Section 12 (1) (c) of the Office of Reparations Act highlights the importance of being guided by principles of ‘non-discrimination, victim-centrality and fairness’ and ‘due consideration to the special needs of women, children and persons with disabilities’. Section 12 (1) (d) (iii) also signifies the ‘need to provide special measures for vulnerable aggrieved persons including women, children, and persons with disabilities’ as a relevant factor to be considered. Each instance that persons with disabilities are mentioned in the Act presents them as a vulnerable group and a factor to be considered in the design of reparations. Yet the rhetoric of women with disabilities being passive recipients of reparations is in direct conflict with the principles of the CRPD, namely Article 3 (c) and Preamble (m), recognizing their ‘full and effective participation’ in decision-making processes which affect them, and denies them the opportunity to contribute to the reparations process. This approach reaffirms and perpetuates the stereotype of incapability of women with disabilities to participate in a public process. However, these pitfalls can still be redressed in the implementation of the Act. It is within the mandate of the Office of Reparations to accept the applications submitted by aggrieved persons or their representatives (section 11 (1) (b)), and also to seek consultation with affected parties and experts on its initiatives. In section 12 (1) (a), the Act provides for such consultation with ‘aggrieved persons, organizations representing aggrieved persons and any other authority, person or body of persons’. This necessarily includes persons who have suffered disability

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 91 as a result of the armed conflict as well as organizations and persons who are engaged in advocacy of rights of persons with disabilities. Section 12 (1) (b) further refers to the need of expert advisors on ‘gender responsiveness, and the specific needs of aggrieved persons who are women, children, and persons with disabilities’. Women with disabilities are qualified to be such expert advisors, on gender responsiveness and the specific needs of aggrieved women and persons with disabilities as well as the compounded effects arising from the intersectionality of their identities. The ‘Out of the Shadows’ report notes that despite the weak legal literacy and lack of knowledge in their rights and transitional justice mechanisms among women with disabilities, they have shown resilience, empowerment and hopefulness (Samararatne et al. 2018). Such women could provide expertise on reparations to further enhance their autonomy and dignity. ‘Out of the Shadows’ delineates how disability-inclusive research methodologies can facilitate the participation of women with disabilities as ‘expert knowers’ of the challenges they face (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 3). Staff of the Office of Reparations must be equipped to effectively include marginalized groups and handle ‘the politics of community participation’ to ensure that they are not left out. Otherwise, dissatisfaction with the reparation process could perpetuate rifts between communities, as opposed to reconciliation (Firchow 2017, p. 332). The Act provides for the regulation and training of the office staff to be sensitive to the needs of specific groups, such as women and children. For this purpose, section 11 (1) (f) provides for the making of ‘gender and child responsive policies’ to be followed by the staff and ‘to provide training including gender responsiveness’. However, there is no analogous mention of sensitivity towards persons with disabilities. The need to meet accessibility requirements of persons with disabilities and the need to accommodate the diversity of persons with disabilities also does not find expression in the Act. Compared to the CEDAW and the CRC, reading the CRPD into the Act becomes less intuitive in the absence of reference to ensure sensitivity towards the needs of persons with disabilities. Where legislative incorporation of Sri Lanka’s international obligations is ambiguous, the Bulankulama precedent allows for judicial incorporation of such obligations. However, this can only happen when the Act’s sensitivity towards rights of persons with disabilities is challenged before the courts. At present, Sri Lankan efforts to improve environmental access and reforming of attitudes prejudicial to facilitating persons with disabilities with meaningful access have been weak and haphazard (Jiffry and Perera 2018). Even the attempts to facilitate accessibility through judicial interventions in Perera v Minister of Social Services (see SC FR No 221/2009 SC Minutes 27 April 2011 and SC FR Application No. 273/2018 (18.04.2019)) have not been complied with in practice (Jiffry and Perera 2018). As a result, women with disabilities, and persons with disabilities more generally, have missed out on many opportunities to participate in public life (Jiffry and Perera 2018). ‘Out of the Shadows’ in particular notes that disability is relegated to the private sphere as a burden for which persons with disabilities and their relatives should take sole responsibility (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 20). Therefore, the absence of focus on

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disability in the section which guides the staff of the Office of Reparations has the risk of neglecting the setting up of disability-inclusive accessibility mechanisms.

Positioning experiences of women with disabilities in the reparations policy The conceptualization of reparations calls for due consideration of ‘long-term transformation’ and empowerment of aggrieved persons, rather than providing ‘short-term assistance’ or ‘care’ (Dixon 2016, p. 100). The ‘Out of the Shadows’ report finds that the women who have acquired disabilities due to the armed conflict expect reparations (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 20). This section focuses on the substance of the reparations policy, which is yet to be drafted. The section has an ambitious view of reparations as having the potential to achieve a multisectoral transformation that would provide effective redress for women with disabilities, alongside other marginalized groups. Assessing the eligibility of women with disabilities for reparations The CTF Report mentions that disabled soldiers from Anuradhapura criticized their categorization based on where they had been and how they were injured. People from the north, east and south have agreed with this criticism of the method used by the governmental authorities to categorize people for the purposes of granting compensation (CTF 2016, p. 49). People are suspicious of the numerical scaling of disability on the basis that they do not understand it and therefore find arbitrary. Such attempts to measure disability through a points system can violate the dignity of persons with disabilities, as recognized by the CRPD. Moreover, women with disabilities could suffer further injustice and marginalization because generalizations heighten the risk of overlooking gender-specific violations of rights. The CTF Report (CTF 2016, pp. 49–50) and ‘Out of the Shadows’ report (Samararatne et al. 2018, p. 17) record that hidden injuries, such as shards of bullets buried within the body, can be overlooked in the ascertainment of ‘damage to the person’ (section 27 of the Act). The collateral medical conditions and health-related issues arising from war-acquired physical disability, too, should be anticipated in providing reparations to ensure health and wellbeing across the life course. A further complicated issue is ascertaining psychological distress, damage and trauma, and the design of reparations to provide appropriate treatment for recovery. Provision of services and support for long-term, psycho-social emotional wellbeing for victims with longstanding post-traumatic stress disorder is yet another challenge. Women risk being stigmatized by their communities for discussing the sexual violence they have been subjected to and related trauma (CTF Report 2016, p. 50). Women with disabilities experience further social barriers in speaking up about and against such violence (Dowse et al. 2016, pp. 323–36). There is a dearth of research on the sexual violence that occurred in the armed conflict and, therefore,

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 93 the gravity of this issue is yet to be comprehensively assessed (Gomez 2016, p. 58). Despite its importance and the urgency, investigating the extent and impact of conflict-related sexual violence raises complex questions regarding research ethics, consent, privacy of victims and sensitivity towards the trauma and stigma inherent to such instances of violence. Section 11 (1) (g) of the Act vests in the Office of Reparations the power to recommend criteria on eligibility for reparations, criteria for the nature and severity of the grievances, the form of reparations, criteria for eligibility for financial reparations, criteria for urgent reparations and criteria for prioritizing reparation applications. These decisions involve a significant component of categorization, evidentiary requirements and administrative complexity, which poses a myriad of ‘logistical, moral and political challenges’ (Moffett 2017, pp. 384, 397–98). To achieve reconciliation, these decisions must be reached through a transparent process that engages with and gains stakeholder approval (Firchow 2017, p. 332). Paradox of facilitating emancipation and perpetuating dependence inherent to monetary reparations The CTF Report notes a scepticism among the people, especially the most indigent groups, such as persons with disabilities, about the adequacy of reparations to meet their basic needs. Submissions the task force received have emphasized the need for ‘sustained support’ rather than ‘one-off payments’, especially for persons with disabilities (CTF Report 2016, p. 48). However, the global trend, as seen in South Africa and many other countries, has been to take the easy way of one-off payments (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2008, p. 27). Many persons with disabilities live in ‘abject poverty’ (CTF Report 2016, p. 48), a fact emphasized in section (t) of the CRPD’s preamble. Therefore, any specialized policy of reparations for persons with disabilities needs to ascertain mechanisms of sustained support which deal with longstanding structural inequalities and vulnerabilities that arise through disability discrimination and stigmatization. The Office of Reparations Act, section 27, defines individual reparations in terms of compensation and a range of structural reparations. Section 12 (d) (v), (vi), (vii), and (viii) sets out the specific factors to be considered in relation to monetary compensation. Availability of resources, the suitability of compensation (i.e. whether to make lump-sum payments or staggered payments), the best interest of the aggrieved persons, the need to restrict the monetary compensation to persons with the most serious grievances, and prioritization of compensation based on the severity of rights violation, indigence and availability of resources are the considerations mentioned thereunder. The Act does not disclose the extent of the government’s financial commitment to funding the reparations, which is a critical consideration as highlighted in international documents (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2008, pp. 32–33). For instance, the Colombian reparations law was drafted simultaneous to the recognition and registration of victims. Nevertheless, the country is facing difficulties

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in providing compensation and assistance as the number of recognized victims increases (Firchow 2017, p. 320). Sri Lankan mechanisms dealing with assisting persons with disabilities thus far have always focused on providing monetary compensation in a way that entrenches their dependency on informal care networks, including family members. Persons with disabilities are generally considered to fall under the Ministry of Social Welfare. The ministry provides persons with disabilities below a certain income level with monthly monetary assistance (Jiffry and Perera 2018). Apart from that, further lump-sum payments are provided for medicinal expenses, building of houses and for educational assistance. Women with disabilities face a lack of information and cumbersome administrative procedures, which hinder them from accessing even these monetary aids (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). People with disabilities are commonly seen as people who depend on others for sustenance, which is very much in line with the definition provided by section 37 of the Protection of the Persons with Disabilities Act No. 28 of 1996. This negative definition fosters the charity-based approach towards people with disabilities (Campbell 2009) and affirms the stereotype of people with disabilities as being incapable. Hence, there is a paradox in that monetary assistance may constrain women with disabilities into perpetual dependence. Provision of monetary compensation as reparation must not have the consequence of undermining the independence, autonomy and dignity of persons with disabilities or persons affected by war (de Mel and Kodikara 2018, pp. 67–69). Therefore, it is important to design recurrent compensation structures that either decrease or increase based on the need. For example, persons with disabilities who can find work would need sustenance up to that point and assistance in finding employment. A person with a disability who cannot find employment and might need further care in the future would need recurrent payments that increase with time. It is also crucial to communicate the basis on which such uneven assistance is meted out to different people, to ensure that people do not feel discriminated against or excluded (Firchow 2017, p. 332). On the other hand, such a detailed policy would require an administrative structure for implementation and monitoring and is dependent upon the discretion and efficiency of the administration for its effectiveness. The Colombian example shows the difficulty of administering the complicated legal and regulatory framework to provide reparations (Firchow 2017, p. 333). While monetary compensation is crucial to relieve persons with disabilities of their indigence, the structural shortcomings which trap them in continued poverty should be remedied, too (Ferrante and Joly 2018, pp. 151–66). Structural reforms geared towards transforming entrenched cultural norms would be especially important in the case of women with disabilities. Otherwise, the monetary assistance will merely ensure sustenance without assisting them to achieve autonomy, dignity and independence. Empowering women with disabilities through long-term reparations Section 27 of the Office of Reparations Act lists long-term reparations that aim to remedy the human rights violations resulting from war and to potentially

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 95 empower individuals affected by war. Such reparations include micro-financing and concessionary loans, educational and vocational programmes, administrative assistance, welfare services, psycho-social support, restitution measures including the provision of land and housing and other measures delineated by the office. Section 12 (d) (vi) contains a requirement for the office to consider the appropriateness of the reparations. The range of reparations allows for the Office of Reparations to exercise broad discretion in designing them. Structural reparations require significant resource allocation, longer term procedural and substantive commitment, and comprehensive design (Fonseka 2017, p. 243, Roht-Arriaza 2017). For example, while the Colombian Victim Law made provisions for a range of reparations, concerns were raised about the insufficient funds allocated for the purpose and weak state support (Amnesty International 2012, Moreno 2014). While these reparations have ambitious goals of sustainable empowerment and forward-looking societal transformations (Moffett 2017, p. 382), the materialization of these effects is delayed. Therefore, in the absence of any benchmarks on provision of such reparations in the Act, there might be an incentive towards short-term gratification of the aggrieved persons through generalized payments of monetary compensation. This would be detrimental for women with disabilities who face structural discrimination. The list of structural reparations indicated by the Act relate to core rights enshrined in the CRPD, such as right to education, right to health, right to habilitation and rehabilitation, right to employment and right to an adequate standard of living and social protection. The CRPD complements these ICESCR rights with approaches of inclusion, reasonable accommodation, non-discrimination, equality and other specific methods of support to meet the needs of diverse persons with disabilities. Therefore, structural reparations require extensive ‘coordination and financing agreements among several government ministries and several levels of government’ (Roht-Arriaza 2017, p. 424). The Colombian example affirms how existing institutions are called on to play a crucial role in bringing about structural reparations (Dixon 2016, p. 100). The Sri Lankan attempts at implementing the CRPD have, thus far, been weak and insufficient. Other than the Ministry of Social Welfare, none of the other ministries mainstream disability within their mandate. Even though a National Policy on Persons with Disabilities 2003, a National Action Plan on Disability 2013 as well as a National Action Plan on Human Rights 2016–2020, which discusses rights of persons with disabilities, have been adopted, none of these documents are effectively implemented (Samararatne et al. 2018). Accessibility Regulations of 2006 and 2009, which the Supreme Court has ordered to be implemented, have also only been implemented haphazardly (Perera v Minister of Social Services 2019). Consequently, persons with disabilities face insurmountable barriers in accessing education and any other public place, from birth. The current educational system is not disability-inclusive and hence children with disabilities are ostracized. Vocational programmes for persons with disabilities suffer from the shortcoming of not enhancing their employability (Jiffry and Perera 2018). Even though the Public Administration Circular No. 27/88 of 1988 states that the public service should have persons with disabilities

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making up 3% of its workforce, persons with disabilities are often denied the education and professional qualifications necessary as well as the accessibility to qualify under this quota (Jiffry and Perera 2018). Moreover, the failure to regulate the micro-financing system has especially affected women in different parts of Sri Lanka, where they face dire economic circumstances (Ivan 2019). Women and their families face threats and harassment from microfinance companies because they are unable to pay the loans. Sri Lankan women also face discrimination in access to ownership of state land passed through grants and permits (Pinto-Jayawardena and de Almeida Guneratne 2010). Therefore, the Office of Reparations faces a formidable challenge in establishing a reparation mechanism in an institutional and attitudinal context that is inefficient and indifferent in multiple ways towards accommodating women with disabilities. While a robust non-monetary reparations policy to complement the monetary reparations can avoid trapping persons with disabilities into further dependence, these mechanisms must be well regulated and effectively executed in order to be effective.

Acknowledgements I am thankful to Dr Dinesha Samararatne and Dr Karen Soldatic for the valuable comments and critique they provided during the editing of this chapter.

References Amnesty International. 2012, Colombia: the victims and land restitution law, Amnesty International Publications, London. viewed 26 February 2010. . Campbell, F.K. 2009, ‘Disability, legal mobilization, and the challenges of capacity building in Sri Lanka’, in C.A. Marshall, E. Kendall, M.E. Banks & R.M.S. Gover (eds.), Disabilities: insights from across fields and around the world, volume 3 – responses: practice, legal, and political frameworks, Praeger Publishers, West Port, CT, pp. 111–28. de Mel, N. & Kodikara, C. 2018, ‘The limits of ‘doing’ justice: compensation as reparations in post-war Sri Lanka’, in D. Mehta & R. Roy (eds.), Violence and the quest for justice in South Asia, Sage Publications, India, pp. 39–73. de Silva de Alwis, R. 2009, ‘Mining the intersections: advancing the rights of women and children with disabilities within an interrelated web of human rights’, Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law, 1697. viewed 26 February 2010. . Dixon, P.J. 2016, ‘Reparations, assistance and the experience of justice: lessons from Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 88–107. doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijv031. Dowse, L., Frohmader, C. & Didi, A. 2018, ‘Violence against disabled women in the global south: working locally, acting globally’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 323–36 Eleanor, P. 2008, ‘The massacres in Sri Lanka during the Black July riots of 1983’, Online Encyclopaedia of Mass Violence. viewed 26 February 2020. . Ferrante, C. & Joly, E. 2018, ‘Begging and disability: a paradigmatic way to earn one’s living’, in S. Grech & K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the global south: the critical handbook, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 151–66 Firchow, P. 2017, ‘Do reparations repair relationships? Setting the stage for reconciliation in Colombia’, International Journal for Transitional Justice, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 315–38. Fonseka, B. 2017, ‘The importance of reparations within Sri Lanka’s reform agenda’, in B. Fonseka & V.P. Kendraya (eds.), Transitional justice in Sri Lanka: moving beyond promises, Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo. Glendon, M.A. 1998, ‘Knowing the universal declaration of human rights’, Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 73, p. 1153. Gomez, M. 2006, ‘Blending rights with writs: Sri Lankan public law’s new brew’, Acta Juridica, vol. 451, pp. 453–477. Gomez, S. 2016, ‘Women in post-war Sri Lanka: linking policy to reality’, in A. Barrow & J.L. Chia (eds.), Gender, violence and the state in Asia, Routledge, London, Chapter 3. Ivan V. 2019, ‘Micro financing & the exploitation of rural women in Sri Lanka’, Sri Lanka Brief. viewed 3 April 2020. . Jiffry, A. & Perera B. 2018, Status of persons with disabilities in Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka: state of human rights 2017, Law & Society Trust, Colombo, pp. 99–136. Kennedy, D. 2001, ‘The international human rights movement: part of the problem?’ Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 15, pp. 99–126. Moffett, L. 2016, ‘Reparations for ‘guilty victims’: navigating complex identities of victim–perpetrators in reparation mechanisms’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 146–67. Moffett, L. 2017, ‘Transitional justice and reparations: remedying the past?’ in C. Lawther, L. Moffett & D. Jacobs (eds.), Research handbook on transitional justice, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, Chapter 19. Moreno, X.C.B. 2014, ‘Victims and reparations: limitations and challenges Colombia Victims Law (Act 1448 of 2011)’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 153–64. viewed 3 April 2020. . Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2008, Rule-oflaw tools for post-conflict states: reparations programmes, United Nations, Geneva. viewed 3 April 2020. . Pinto-Jayawardena, K. & de Almeida Guneratne, J. 2010, Is land just for men? Critiquing discriminatory laws, regulations and administrative practices relating to land and property rights of women in Sri Lanka, Law & Society Trust, Colombo. Roht-Arriaza, N. 2017, ‘Reparations in Latin American countries: lessons for Sri Lanka?’ in B. Fonseka & V.P. Kendraya (eds.), Transitional justice in Sri Lanka: moving beyond promises, Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo. Samararatne, D., Soldatic, K. & Perera, B. 2018, ‘Out of the shadows’: war-affected women with disabilities in Sri Lanka – final report, Law & Society Trust, Colombo. Samararatne, D.W.V.A. & Soldatic, K. 2015, ‘Inclusions and exclusions in law: experiences of women with disability in rural and war-affected areas in Sri Lanka’, Disability & Society, vol. 30, no. 5. doi:10.1080/09687599.2015.1021760. Shakespeare, T. 2018, Disability: the basics, Routledge, London.

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Theidon, K. 2012, Intimate enemies: violence and reconciliation in Peru, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. UN CEDAW. 1991, ‘General recommendations nos 16, 17 and 18, adopted at the Tenth Session, 1991, A/46/38’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN CEDAW. 2013, ‘General recommendation no. 30 on women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations, CEDAW/C/GC/30’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN CRPD. 2016, ‘General comment no. 3, Article 6: women and girls with disabilities, CRPD/C/GC/3’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Economic and Social Council. 1998, ‘General comment no. 9: the domestic application of the Covenant, E/C.12/1998/24’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Economic and Social Council. 2009. ‘General comment no. 20: non-discrimination in economic, social and cultural rights (art. 2, para. 2, of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), ESCR E/C.12/GC/20’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN General Assembly. 2006, ‘Basic principles and guidelines on the right to a remedy and reparation for victims of gross violations of international human rights law and serious violations of international humanitarian law, A/RES/60/147’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Human Rights Committee. 2004, ‘General comment no. 31 [80], The nature of the general legal obligation imposed on States Parties to the Covenant, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/ Add.13’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Human Rights Council. 2015, ‘Promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka, resolution 2015/30/1’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Security Council. 2013, ‘Resolution 2122. Women, peace and security’. viewed 26 February 2020. . UN Security Council. 2019, ‘Resolution 2475. Protection of civilians in armed conflict’. viewed 26 February 2020. . Weerakon, B. 2012, ‘Handling disasters: the man-made disaster of July 1983 (Part 2), Groundviews’. viewed 3 April 2020. .

Cases cited Bulankulama v Secretary, Ministry of Industrial Development, [2000] 3) SriLR 243 Perera v Minister of Social Services, SC FR No 221/2009 SC Minutes 27 April 2011 Perera v Minister of Social Services, SC FR Application No. 273/2018 (18.04.2019) Reports cited, Sri Lanka Consultation Task Force Report (CTF Report) 2016 Hansard, Parliamentary debates, 8 August 2018 Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC Report) 2011

Learning about rights, claiming a gendered-disability identity 99 Legislation, Sri Lanka Office of Reparations Act (2018) Office on Missing Persons (Establishment, Administration, and Discharge of Functions) Act (2016) Protection of the Persons with Disabilities Act No. 28 Rehabilitation of Persons, Properties, and Industries Authority Act (1987)

7

Conclusion and recommendations Enabling women with disabilities’ advocacy and activism in the peace-building landscape Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne

As the women with disabilities in this book argue, there is an urgent need to understand the impact of long-term war and conflict on their lives, particularly under transitional arrangements with the end of armed conflict. Outside of a few small papers and projects, there is almost no research that examines the day to day lives of women with disabilities within post-war or post-conflict contexts. Nor has there been the development of substantive research that documents women with disabilities’ subjective experiences of transitional governance, policy and programming and how they are included and/or excluded from a society emerging from protracted armed conflict. The aim of this project has been to directly address this very issue, and we feel that the small contribution offered here by women with disabilities, who have been actively involved with transitional structures of peace building, illustrates the significant role they do play as central actors in local practices, communities and structures that support broader peace-building efforts. Most significantly, the narratives of the women with disabilities in this book reveal that women with disabilities are active agents of civil society processes of peace-building – both during armed conflict and also throughout the transitional process. This advocacy was individuated working alone, advocating for their own rights and access to appropriate resources, and also as a collective organisation of women with disabilities, engaging in the building of highly localized disability social movements and organizations. Importantly, through this process, the lives of the women documented here critically question the general assumptions that underpin normalized narratives of peace-building processes about women with disabilities and persons with disabilities generally. That is, too often, as people who are passive recipients and beneficiaries of international and NGO peace building initiatives. This is not to suggest that women with disabilities in armed conflict situations and landscapes do not experience higher levels of vulnerability. As identified here, these assumptions of ‘who they are’, ‘what they can’t do’ and ‘what they can’t be’ propels them to become active agents, not only to claim their own rights, but also to form social networks and organizations and to build coalitions to ensure that their aspirations, needs and desires, are fully realized. There is no doubt, as articulated by the women involved in this project, that they do experience some of the highest levels of gender-related violence, abject poverty, stigmatization and exclusion, both during war and also within the aftermath

Conclusion and recommendations 101 of militarized violence (Samararatne and Soldatic 2015). There is no denying that this continues to be the case. However, as the women with disabilities in this book suggest, they are continually organizing to build social structures of solidarity, support and justice for the full realization and recognition of their rights as agental subjects. It is an ongoing struggle, yet collectively, their efforts distributed amongst their positions demonstrate that they will actively seek out opportunities to interrupt and disrupt ableist peace-building initiatives, strategies and programs that position them only as the recipients of the benevolence of others. We positioned the life narratives of women with disability alongside a critical account on reparations and an assessment of the advocacy efforts of our research collaboration. Our aim in doing so was to foreground the linkages between the personal and the political, the private and the public, and women with disabilities’ experiences with transitional justice. Bringing these perspectives together allows us to unsettle accepted approaches to transitional justice, to understanding ‘peace’ and even to the existing understandings of research and knowledge production. Post–armed conflict societies, such as Sri Lanka, are instructive to the world at large in developing a more relevant response to transitional justice, peace building and reconciliation. Gendered-disability approaches to research, advocacy and policy-making at the local, national and global levels will enable these insights to be drawn upon.

Recommendations In that spirit, in ending this book, we would like to end with a set of recommendations that the women with disabilities who participated in the project over the years, as a broader collective, have asked us to put forward on their behalf. To reiterate, through drawing upon disability-gendered methodologies of co-creation, development and engagement, the book mapped the lived experiences of women with disabilities living within the war-affected areas of Sri Lanka. ‘War affected’ is defined in this work to include women from areas where sustained hostilities took place, that is, the Northern and Eastern provinces; women from the ‘border-villages’ of the primary areas where hostilities took place; women from a community expelled from the Northern and Eastern provinces and living as long-term internally displaced persons; women from the Southern Province; and women from the Malayaha community. These recommendations were iterative in their development, as the research moved through its circular six-stage process that significantly focused on building the research expertise of women with disabilities, enabling their participation in the project as expert knowers of the interstice of gender and disability under transitional arrangements. Spanning a period of more than 24 months of fieldwork, the outcome of the research is a clear set of recommendations to advance the rights of women with disabilities in law, policy and institutional practice: (1) That the Sri Lankan Government implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the

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(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, including ongoing periodic review to identify gaps and issues in need of redress in relation to the interstice of gender and disability. That the Sri Lankan Government adopt and design mainstreaming strategies of disability inclusion across governmental departments and institutions to ensure that disability rights, accessibility and inclusion are a core consideration of national and local law, policy, infrastructure development and programming, and that this includes high-level annual parliamentary reporting of annual targets, developments and outcomes. That the Sri Lankan Government undertake significant reform of the national census survey, particularly redesigning its process of categorization and disaggregation in relation to disability identity and gender, including, but not limited to, women with congenital disabilities, women with disabilities created due to the war and women heads of household with disabilities, alongside identifying daily activity restrictions and associated levels of required support. Such rich and nuanced data is necessary to ensure the long-term development and implementation of appropriate government policy and funding for progressive disability rights realization. That the Sri Lankan Government establish a national presidential directed committee to drive the necessary institutional reform to advance disability rights realization across all parliamentary responsibilities and portfolio areas. This will include the development of reform strategies with allocated budgetary provisions that encompass broad-scale consultation with disability rights organizations and women with disabilities. That the Sri Lankan Government establish a research and public consultation fund to develop well-grounded knowledge of the lived experience of disability, including the central role of public policy in redressing disability discrimination, poverty and disadvantage. That the Sri Lankan Government recognize the unique needs of waraffected persons with disability, specifically women with disabilities, and design, develop and implement specific programs to ensure longevity of social inclusion and economic participation of this group. That the Sri Lankan Government implement an ‘access to justice’ program to effectively facilitate processes of inclusion for women with disabilities, including physical accessibility of the built environment and sanitation facilities; institutional processes and procedures that are non-discriminatory; and the funding and provision of disability communication facilitators, such as sign interpreters, alongside material in accessible formats, such as braille and plain language formats for all local language groups, and support for people with intellectual disability and so forth. That the Sri Lankan Government implement a disability-accessible training program within the national education curriculum on legal literacy to build the capacity of women with disabilities to engage with legal processes and institutions and to develop the capacity of non-disabled citizens to identify issues of disability discrimination, exclusion and marginalization.

Conclusion and recommendations 103 (9) That civil society organizations mainstream disability as a core area for programs, research and advocacy, and partner with advocates of the rights of women with disabilities and their organizations in sustained ways, paying due attention to the impact of the intersectionality of gender, disability, ethnicity and so forth, particularly in post-war contexts. (10) That international organizations and international donor agencies with human rights mandates ensure the inclusion of disability as an area of concern and identify the specific issues facing women with disabilities. (11) That future inclusive research with women with disabilities examine both public and private issues, such as the right to family, reproductive rights and sexuality; accessibility to public and private institutions, including the banking and financial sector; and service provision at key transitional points, including support for ageing.

Reference Samararatne, D. & Soldatic, K. 2015, ‘Inclusions and exclusion in law: experiences of women with disability in rural and war-affected areas in Sri Lanka’, Disability & Society, vol. 30, no. 5, p. 759.

Index

access to remedies and reparations 83 accountability 62, 68, 80 activism 3–5, 12, 16, 62–3, 65, 77; see also disability advocacy 3–5, 11–13, 17, 27–9, 36, 40–1, 43–4, 47, 50, 54–8, 60–7, 69–77, 91, 100–1, 103; see also disability Ahmed, S. 48 Appadurai, A. 33 armed conflict 2–3, 5, 9–10, 13, 17, 23, 26, 29, 32–6, 38–9, 41, 44, 48, 61–2, 69–71, 83, 85–7, 91–2, 100; see also postarmed conflict Association of Women with Disabilities (AKASA) 11, 60, 63 Azzopardi, A. 42 Bailey, M. 19, 29 belonging 12, 16–18, 20, 25 Berents, H. 2 Black feminist disability 19, 29 blindness 32–4, 36–8, 40, 42, 44, 48, 57 Bodu Bala Sena 9, 57 Brockelman, K.F. 18, 29 Buddhism 12, 21, 46, 49, 53, 57 Campbell, F.K. 63, 94 Cohan, D.J. 48, 51, 54 Collins, P.H. 19, 51 constitution 5–6, 9, 67, 69, 86, 89 Consultation Task Force Report (CTF Report) 85–7, 89–90, 92–3 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 67, 82, 88, 91 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) 82 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) 10–11, 67, 82, 88, 90–3, 95, 101

Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 82, 91 crutches 4, 25, 27, 32, 50 Davis, F. 24 dependence 93–4, 96 Disability Organizations Joint Front (DOJF) 40 disability: activism 12, 46, 58; advocacy 10, 12–13, 16–21, 24–30, 36, 44, 47–50, 52–8; allies 64–5; focused 63, 65, 74–5, 77; gendered 5, 10–13, 16–21, 23–30, 33, 36–7, 44, 48–58, 101; identity 17– 21, 24, 29–30, 35, 41, 43, 102; issues 48, 53; justice 3–4; mainstream 62, 67, 69, 72, 88, 95, 103; movement 3, 12, 18, 24, 27, 30, 49, 55, 58; organizations 3, 26, 40–1, 57, 63, 77; perception 18, 21, 24, 29–30; politics 18, 26; research 65–6, 74–6; rights 11, 13, 19, 26–7, 38, 52–3, 56–8, 68, 77, 102; theory 19; women’s 19, 26, 48 disabled people’s organization (DPO) 1, 11 disabled: bodies 37–8, 42, 49; child 25, 34; persons 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 17, 23, 25–6, 36, 39–40, 50–2, 54–6, 63; women 2–5, 10–13, 16–18, 20–1, 24, 26–8, 35, 46, 48, 62 disproportionate effects 82 diversity 16, 63, 73, 75, 81, 91 double discrimination 82 Easter Sunday bombings 46, 53, 55 emancipation 93 (e)motion 46, 49, 53, 56–8 equality 5–6, 47, 81–2, 89, 95 experiences 10, 12, 18–21, 23–6, 28–30, 32–4, 36–8, 42–4, 47–50, 52, 54, 57–8, 60–1, 63–7, 70, 72–4, 77, 80, 82, 84–8, 92, 100–1

106

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feminism 2, 46–7, 49, 58, 62; transnational 3; see also Black feminist disability For Our Right 56–7 Ghai, A. 16, 19, 46, 49, 57–8 Grech, S. 42, 48 Howe, B. 44 human rights 5, 10, 13, 36, 51–2, 55, 58, 60–4, 67–70, 77, 80–5, 87, 89–90, 94, 103; see also conventions; United Nations; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) identity 12, 18–20, 22, 32–3, 35, 47, 49, 51, 68, 71, 85; see also disability; multiple identities independence 5, 21, 94 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 82–3 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 82–3, 90, 95 intersectionality 51, 69, 81, 85–7, 91, 103 invisible 16–17, 24–5, 72 Johnson, K. 30, 49, 64–5 Kamalawathie, N. 64 Kandasamy, N. 12, 16, 18, 20, 49, 62–3 Law and Society Trust 11, 60, 71, 73 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) 85–6 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 5–9, 32, 35–6, 40 life histories: Kamalawathie (Kamala) 12, 17–30, 48; Nisha 12–13, 46–58; Vinothini 12, 32–44, 48 Lorde, A. 47 Lubet, A. 33–4, 41, 43 McEvoy-Levy, S. 2 Mac Ginty, R. 1 Maddison, S. 20 marginalization 24, 34, 37, 47, 52, 54, 61, 80–1, 83–5, 87, 90, 92, 102 Meekosha, H. 17, 19, 57 Ministry of Social Welfare 94–5 Ministry of Women’s Affairs 67, 71–2 mobilization 16, 23, 29, 62–3 Mobley, I.A. 19, 29 Moffett, L. 84, 88, 90, 93, 95

Mohanty, C.T. 19 multiple identities 81 multisectoral approach 67, 87–8 Muslim 6, 9, 48–50, 52–3, 55, 57, 76–7; communities 9; law 6; women 6, 8–9, 12, 19, 46–8, 51–2, 57 Muslim Personal Law Reforms Action Group (MPLRAG) 6 Navajeevana 11 ‘normal’ 18, 24–7, 29 Office of the High Commissioner’s Report (OHCHR) 84–5 Olney, M.F. 18, 29 Organization for Rehabilitation of the Handicapped (ORHAN) 41 Ortoleva, S. 61 Parekh, P.N. 19 Parliamentary Sectoral Oversight Committee (PSOC) 67, 71–2 ‘passing’ 24–5, 29 Peace Committees 46, 50 peace-building 1–4, 10–13, 16, 46, 51, 60, 100–1 perception management 17–18, 21, 29–30 Perera, B. 9, 12–13, 36, 91, 94–6 Pinto, P.C. 65–6 polio 18, 22, 24–5, 27, 48 post-armed conflict 17, 20, 38, 44, 46, 51, 58, 101; landscape 17–18; Sri Lanka 20, 30, 32, 42 postcolonial: context 16–17, 19–20; nation 16; Southern 16–18, 20, 23, 26–7 post-war 6–7; context 17, 26–7, 60–2, 66; Sri Lanka 9, 13, 66 rage 13, 46–9, 51–8 Ratnarajan, S. 12 Rawana Balaya 57 reform 6, 61, 63–4, 66–9, 77, 91, 94, 102 Richmond, O. 1 right to remedy 83 Rioux, M. 10, 76–7 Samararatne, D. 5, 9–11, 13, 21, 60–1, 63–4, 69, 73, 75, 84–8, 91–2, 94–5, 101 Sands, T. 16 Scalmer, S. 20 Shihabdeen, S. (Dr) 53–4 Sinhala 18, 39, 41–2, 48, 53, 66, 71, 73; women 19, 21, 48, 52–3

Index Sinhala Ravaya 9, 57 Sirisena, M. (President) 55 Slobin, M. 33 social confluence 33–4, 41–4 Soldatic, K. 3, 5, 9–12, 16–20, 30, 48–9, 57, 61–4, 73, 75, 84, 94, 101 Srinivasan, A. 47–8 Straus, N.J. 32 Suwa Shakthi Organizations 56 Tamil 5–6, 11–12, 32–6, 39–42, 48–9, 52–3, 62, 66, 71, 73, 77; women 6, 12, 19, 32–3, 36–8, 41–2, 48, 52 Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO) 35 Tesawalamai law 6 trauma 40, 68, 80, 85, 87, 92–3 truth 46, 53, 89; commission 80, 89 United Nations (UN) 1, 5, 61, 81; see also conventions United Nations Economic and Social Council 81–3 United Nations General Assembly 83 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 93

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United Nations Human Rights Council 10, 80–1, 83–5, 89 United Nations Security Council 61–2, 83–4, 88 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) 1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 81–3 Viluthu 11, 41, 60, 75 violence 2–6, 12–13, 46, 50–1, 54–5, 57, 63, 76, 80, 87, 92–3, 100–1 visible 17, 19, 25, 27, 29, 42, 52, 72 Walmsley, J. 65, 73 Weerawardhana, C. 1–2 welfare 9, 47, 68–70, 72, 95 wheelchair 22–3, 25, 27; competitions 21–3 Wilson, D. 18, 24–5, 27 Witek, J. 33 Women’s Development Centre (WDC) 11, 46, 50–1, 58 women’s movements 6 Women’s Parliamentary Caucus 11 working-class 18, 21–3, 25