By Kadira Pethiyagoda
Sri Lanka provides a glimpse of small power-great power relations in a future multipolar world order.
For much of the period since its independence, Sri Lanka attracted scant regard throughout the West. At the culmination of its civil war, some attention did begin to be paid to human rights issues. In the last few years, however, Sri Lanka has begun to feature as a country of strategic relevance to the great powers. For one, it sits at the center of the Indian Ocean, likely to be one of the world’s most strategically contested regions in the coming century. Sri Lanka is also halfway between China and its energy sources in the Middle East, something Beijing had responded to largely successfully until January this year when Mahinda Rajapaksa lost the presidency. Last week’s parliamentary elections were a further blow to Beijing, when Rajapaksa’s party lost to the center-right United National Party led by pro-Western Ranil Wickramasinghe
All this is far from a deathblow to China in Sri Lanka though, and Western policymakers should not see the election as cause for again taking the island state for granted. Rather, Colombo’s interactions with the great powers should provide lessons for Washington on a re-emerging paradigm in world politics, one that it should note in its approach to the Middle East. A reprioritization of certain drivers of foreign policy is needed in order to successfully compete with China in the future multipolar world order.
In the decades following independence, Sri Lanka’s future looked bright and it was expected to develop more rapidly than Singapore. The two were compared because both were small, highly educated, multicultural Asian states straddling important shipping lanes. The winds of national fortune blew in another direction, however, and Sri Lanka became bogged down in a vicious insurgency that eventually became Asia’s longest running civil war. The war received little attention from the West until its culmination, at which point discussion was centered on human rights – what strategists might deem a second order security concern.
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