Sri Lanka’s post-war security is shaped as much by what people believe as by what forces control ground. This essay argues that narrative power is a central national-security domain — and that intelligence and statecraft must learn to measure and manage it.
Introduction: The War After the War
Beyond battalions and borders, a quieter contest for meaning continues to shape politics, diaspora behaviour, and international influence.
Sri Lanka’s thirty-year conflict left visible destruction and less visible fractures of meaning. Stories became the operating system through which communities processed grievance, justified action and imagined futures. For practitioners of intelligence and statecraft, narratives are not peripheral commentary — they constitute operational terrain. What societies believe alters what they will accept, resist, or mobilise around.
1. Narratives as Psychological Architecture
Stories construct identity, explain causation, and orient expectation — the cognitive scaffolding of conflict.
Narratives perform three strategic functions: identity creation (who belongs and who threatens), meaning-making (who is responsible, who is innocent), and future orientation (what is owed and what actions are justified). In intelligence language, narratives operate as cognitive infrastructure — they influence risk perception, information uptake, loyalty, mobilisation potential, and the silences that hide movement.
2. Prewar: The Era of Narrative Escalation
Parallel interpretive worlds hardened long before the first shot.
The decades preceding open conflict featured deepening narrative divergence: Tamil political grievances and claims of exclusion, Sinhala anxieties about territorial integrity, and diaspora narratives that refracted homeland memory through distance. These separate meaning systems eroded trust. By the time violence became likely, competing stories had already created predictable pathways to mobilisation.
3. During the War: Narratives as Weapons and Shields
The Eelam conflict was fought in the field and in the mind — legitimacy and endurance relied on storycraft as much as logistics.
The LTTE consolidated itself as a sole interpreter of Tamil suffering, converting collective memory into recruitment, fundraising and international advocacy. The state framed action in terms of territorial unity and existential defence. Narrative signals — shifts in diaspora rhetoric, memorialisation practices, or community discourse — often foreshadowed operational changes on the ground. Reading those signals is an intelligence function.
4. Postwar: The Vacuum That Was Never Filled
With kinetic conflict ended, multiple actors rushed to define what the war had meant.
After 2009 a narrative vacuum opened. Diaspora factions, foreign human-rights organisations, domestic political entrepreneurs and local communities each sought to apply meaning. The result is a fractal memory landscape: overlapping, competing and frequently incompatible stories. That fragmentation is not merely sociological; it is a counterintelligence vulnerability that creates seams exploitable by external influence.
5. The Current Era: Information War Without Gunfire
Algorithmic platforms, diaspora networks and strategic litigation are the primary theatres of contemporary narrative contest.
Modern narrative competition flows through transnational social networks, advocacy channels, legal forums and targeted influence operations. Intelligence must now map narrative dynamics: where trauma is activated online, which diaspora nodes mobilise funding or advocacy, how foreign actors exploit ethnic sensitivities, and where plausible falsehoods can metastasise into political action.
6. The Psychology of the Tamil Question: Why Narratives Still Matter
Unresolved trauma and competing memories act as accelerants for mobilisation.
Tamil communities carry layered and unresolved losses; Sinhala communities retain memories of existential threat and victory; Muslim communities recall episodic marginalisation; the diaspora often preserves mythic or purist narratives of loss and betrayal. Each lens filters the same events through different moral grammars — producing divergent behaviour and political appetite. From an intelligence perspective, these unresolved psychological ecologies are predictable vectors of risk.
7. Why Intelligence Agencies Must Lead the Narrative Domain
Narrative capability is not public relations; it is a sovereignty function.
Intelligence and security institutions should formalise three complementary capabilities:
- Narrative Intelligence (NI): continuous mapping and analysis of community stories, sentiment flows and diaspora discourse;
- Narrative Security (NS): early detection and mitigation of hostile influence operations and disinformation;
- Narrative Statecraft (NSC): the design and stewardship of truthful, inclusive and durable national narratives.
This is not propaganda. It is preventive statecraft: building psychological resilience that narrows the utility of grievance politics and reduces opportunities for exploitation.
8. Strategic Imperative: Build a Shared Story Before Someone Else Builds It for You
Absent an internally legitimate account of the past, external actors will impose one.
If Sri Lanka does not craft a psychologically legitimate and ethically coherent narrative about its recent past, other actors — diaspora institutions, foreign governments, or domestic opportunists — will fill the void with stories that can harden division or create leverage. Constructing an inclusive narrative ecosystem is therefore a strategic imperative for national stability and sovereignty.
Conclusion
Narratives determine not only how citizens remember but how they act. Securing Sri Lanka’s future requires translating history into a shared meaning that acknowledges trauma, preserves truth and reduces the political utility of grievance. Narrative capability must be placed at the centre of intelligence, statecraft and reconciliation efforts.