Unraveling the Nexus: Politics, National Security, and the Securitisation of Islam in the Aftermath of Easter Sunday Attacks

Abstract

A bunch of religious fanatics, inspired by the ISIS ideology, blew themselves up in high-rise hotels and Churches in several parts of Sri Lanka on 19th April 2019, killing more than 300 innocent people. This event, known as the Easter Sunday Attacks, led the Sri Lankan state to frame Islam, Islamic religious expressions and activities as a security threat.  As a result, the government imposed several regulations and policies that restricted the religious space of the community on the pretext of safeguarding national security. Against this background, this study aims to dissect the entire process of how the state constructed Islam as a security threat after the Easter Sunday Attacks, exploring the primary actors, their actions, and the discursive context. To that end, the main argument of the study is that the securitization of Islam in Sri Lanka is an outcome of a collaboration between political and state elites and ultra-nationalist majoritarian forces in the country. Furthermore, as the study highlights, the state has been successful in securitizing Islam because it has capitalized on the multi-layered discursive ecosystem, such as Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, the dominant security studies paradigm, the ex-Muslim phenomenon, and unintended consequences of Islamic revivalism, to legitimize its claims. Finally, this qualitative study utilized primary and secondary sources to gather data, and the thematic content analysis method was employed for data analysis.