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The Afterlives of Tamil Tigers explores the experience of war, defeat, and exile among former fighters—both men and women—of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), through the testimonies of veterans now living in France. Moving beyond the organisation’s reputation for violence, Giacomo Mantovan sheds light on the everyday lives, emotions, and ideological commitment of its combatants. By tracing their life trajectories—from military training to exile, through combat, torture, loss, and survival—he examines how these experiences have left a lasting imprint on their identities and ways of being in the world.
“This is a major contribution to the study of contemporary armed conflicts. By contrast with many previous studies on the topic, it does not narrate this war story at a distance but at close-range, through gripping narratives of former fighters. This exceptional, often poignant first-hand material not only illuminates the story of the armed struggle for an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka, but more ambitiously fuels a theoretically sophisticated discussion of one of the major armed conflicts of our times.” • Dr. Laurent Gayer, Center for International Studies, Paris
Giacomo Mantovan holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), ISCTE-IUL, in Lisbon. He has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh, and a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies. His research focuses on political violence, militancy, and the experience and memory of civil war and exile among Sri Lankan Tamils, particularly former LTTE fighters. Dr Mantovan has published extensively on the narration of the self and the production of political subjectivities during war and migration, as well as on the social consequences of defeat and the commemoration of martyrs.
List of Illustrations
List of Acronyms
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Roots of the Civil War and the ‘Tamil Cause’
Chapter 2. The Making of Fighters
Chapter 3. Women on the Front Line
Chapter 4. The Body: Intersections between Violence and History
Chapter 5. For Whom the Bell Tolls
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index