Embedded institutions, embodied conflicts: public universities and post-war peacebuilding in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the interaction of public universities with peacebuilding in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, two countries marked by civil wars in recent decades. Utilising documentary evidence and qualitative interviews with staff, students, and other related actors conducted over a total of six months in the two contexts, it identifies and conceptualises key factors which can constrain the ability of public universities to contribute to peacebuilding. In doing so, the research departs from existing scholarship on the relationship between universities and peace. Much of this literature has focussed on describing particular mechanisms by which universities might act towards peace or drive conflict. To fully understand and explain the factors that can affect university contributions to post-war recovery, I argue that it is vital to consider universities both as social groups that are embedded in larger social, political, economic, and historical processes and as distinct spaces containing unique social formations. Examination of the two cases, which differ significantly in the nature of their wars and in their political and economic trajectories since decolonisation, serves to draw out the significance of these contingent features of university environments. The thesis explores the shaping of university faculties by wars and political and economic crises, the socialisation and connected mobilisation of student groups, the entanglement between universities and political forces, and the silencing of critical voices through social and political pressures. Through analysis of these phenomena, I show that narrow human capital and institutional capacity framings of universities fail to capture the full complexity of the evolving social and political relations that constitute university communities and that connect them to the societies in which they are embedded. Crucially, I contend that this social and political complexity is not incidental to university functioning. Instead, the ways in which universities as social groups embody social fracture lines, political connections, and experiences of conflict and crisis are powerfully consequential for how universities operate and for how they interact with post-war peacebuilding.