The formulation of the persona of Laldas from a nirgu bhakti follower to a sagu saint and deity is central to the rise and success of the religious order. The complete conversion of Laldas into a ‘Hindu’ saint requires a profound restructuring of his identity. This undertaking involves assigning him a new role while simultaneously erasing or modifying his traditional religious image, which had been distinguished by a shared form of religiosity. The changes observed within the Laldas order also signify a deliberate undermining of the saint's religious teachings and principles. This subversion of Laldas's original teachings implies a shift towards a more homogeneous understanding of the order, where the liminal elements of his beliefs are now incorporated into the broader narrative of neo ‘Hinduism’.

This new imagery of Laldas has been achieved by first transforming the traditional shrines spatially and then constructing new temples in various parts of north India to practice anthropomorphic image worship. It is also an effort to achieve a new social construction of a religious space. In fact, spaces contested for ideological, economic and religious reasons generally reflect efforts to create new meanings for them in a changed context, leading to spatial transformations (Low 1996). Currently, the shrines of Laldas are examples of what Lefebvre (1991: 164–68) refers to as ‘dominated space’ and ‘appropriated space’. More importantly, the spatial changes at the religious shrines of Laldas signify ongoing efforts to transform the meanings of a traditional sacred space. This is being achieved by the process of what Low (1996, 2009) describes as ‘the social construction of space’. In this process, new symbolic meanings imbued with new religious significance of Laldas are created. Devotees’ social interactions, memories and daily use of the material setting effectively transform Laldas's traditional shrine spaces into new arenas of ritual scenes and actions, ultimately Hinduising what was once a shared/mixed sacred space.

Most of these changes are quite recent in origin and are undertaken by the financially rich Baniya community. Moreover, their socio-economic power and traditional devotional beliefs also contribute to these spatial and architectural transformations at the traditional shrines. In analysing the domination of Hindus at these traditional religious sites, the main attention is paid to the structure, control, and agency of followers, on one hand, and new religious discourses and practices surrounding these sacred spaces, on the other.

This chapter describes the conceptual and analytical premises used in the book’s country case studies. It uses the transition studies’ multilevel perspective as a starting point to begin exploring the diverse ways in which security and defense can be connected to sustainability transitions. It starts by discussing the landscape concept and how it ties into security. The chapter then moves onto outlining policy coherence at the regime level and ends with conceptualizing security in the transition processes of niche expansion and regime decline.

One could start the story of an insurgent movement with a vignette of the frontline or a first encounter with some enigmatic rebel office. In fact, the deleted text that was once on this page did precisely that. While such an initial vantage point helpfully offers the reader a glimpse of the convoluted ground reality of an emerging state, it also risks depicting these territories as exotic and the author as an adventurous protagonist with privileged up-close knowledge of dangerous outposts. Indiana Jones turning to the camera to look his audience in the eyes one more time, before he enters a land of mystery and peril. To start on this footing would disguise that the depiction of these supposedly quaint and anomalous places derives in part from the peculiarities of international perceptions and from the compromised knowledge curve of people like me who seek to understand insurgencies. Let me therefore not start in Sampur or Omanthai or Jaffna but at the picturesque gardens on the northern outskirts of The Hague.

These parklands are home to the Clingendael Institute. As a junior researcher of the institute – perhaps best described as an academic outboard motor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – I had been put on a team of consultants that had been commissioned by a group of aid donors to write a ‘Strategic Conflict Analysis’ about Sri Lanka. It was 2005, and these donors had enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had started three years prior. However, the process appeared to be going off the rails, and donors were desperate to consider their options. Hence our assignment. Having completed several visits, interviews and consultations in previous months, I was sitting at my desk overlooking the ponds and greenery of the Clingendael estate to write up our report when the phone rang. In hindsight, my struggle with the interpretative problems around the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka that has become this book started with that phone call

This chapter establishes the theoretical underpinnings of this book and clarifies key concepts and ideas. More specifically, it reviews debates on the question of sovereignty and its murky status as the central referent of global political order, and it advances the perspective of performative politics to grapple with the contradictions and ambiguities that prevail in the context of sovereign contestation. The chapter then proceeds to apply this perspective to the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. In doing so, it also provides the reader with essential contextual and historical background to the chapters that follow.

The notion of the sovereign state as the legitimate authority over people and territory is deeply inscribed in prevalent understandings of the world today – as the referent of law, authorised force, national citizenship, democratic rule and international order. It is embedded in a whole architecture of norms and claimed entitlements. However, this framework of legitimation is ultimately circular: sovereign states are sovereign because they are. This circularity becomes exposed when the fundamentals of a state are challenged (Pegg 1998, 2017). Such confrontations come in myriad forms – indigenous communities resisting settler states, such as in Australia (Schaap 2004), Canada and the United States (A. Simpson 2014); occupied territories with a government in exile, like Tibet (McConnell 2016) or Western Sahara (Alice Wilson 2016), or a constellation like the Syrian Interim Government (Gangwala 2015; Sosnowski, under review); governments with incomplete or faltering sovereign recognition, such as the Palestinian Authority (Feldman 2008; Kelly 2006), the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (Bryant and Hatay 2020; Navaro-Yashin 2003), Transnistria (Bobick 2017), Abkhazia (Preltz-Oltramonti 2017), Kosovo (Krasniqi 2019; Van der Borgh 2012), Taiwan (Corcuff 2012; Friedman 2021) or Hong Kong (Yep 2013); insurgent groups that demand reunification with a neighbouring state, as in Northern Ireland (Aretxaga 1997; Little 2014); or separatist movements as in Catalonia (Achniotis 2021; Bárcena 2020; Enguix Grau 2021), Kurdistan (Gunes 2012; Watts 2010), northeast India (Baruah 2007) and Myanmar (Brenner 2017) – and, as discussed in this book, in northeastern Sri Lanka.

By challenging the foundational premises of state sovereignty, these movements unsettle the self-referential cycle of analytical and normative claims that undergird the notion of legitimate state sovereignty.

Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

This chapter describes international maize-breeding research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) across its first fifty years. Initially, breeders used landraces to create varieties whose seed, freely distributed through an international testing network, could be saved by farmers. A second phase in which CIMMYT forged partnerships with local and regional seed companies reflected the shift toward “market-led development.” This moderated free access to seed and fostered a gradual switch to hybrid technology. A trend among donors towards increased accountability and shorter funding cycles concurrently restricted CIMMYT’s investment in long-run research goals and accelerated a change of focus to Africa. Nonetheless, the development of germplasm tolerating drought and low soil fertility continued for decades, with eventual payoffs. Meanwhile, a long-running program to improve protein nutrition through high lysine maize varieties stalled due to lack of demand. In the twenty-first century, partnerships with global private seed companies allowed access to new technologies such as advanced screening methods, genomic selection, doubled haploids and gene editing.

At the Sherpur shrine of Laldas, I was introduced to Jogi and Mirasi bards during a religious performance. These bards were traditionally supported by the Meos under the jajmānī (patron–client) system, which gave the dominant Meos control over these socially and economically marginal Muslim communities. The landless and small landowner bards were hit most by the slow collapse of this patronage system. Additionally, the rise and popularity of the Tablighi Jamaat led most Meos to condemn their musical performances as perversion from Islam, which had once been greatly admired by them. Since the Tablighi doctrine frowns upon music, most Meos today see the bards’ performances as incompatible with Islam. Consequently, the Jogis and Mirasis felt pressured to abandon their performances, even though this was their livelihood, and they cherished their artistry.

As socially and economically marginalised communities, the Jogis and Mirasis had to negotiate the opinions and stances of their erstwhile patrons, whose hostility to their performance now threatens their everyday survival. The Jogi and Mirasi minstrels are employing the lyrics of their new poetic songs as a form of passive resistance in response to the Meo patrons’ interpretation of religious piety. More specifically, these minstrels are promoting a version of righteous behaviour that is universal and does not depend on organised religions.

Earlier, it was noted that when Muslim devotees of saints faced pressure, they resorted to tactics such as secrecy and concealment in order to deal with the Tablighi idea of religious discipline. The examples in Chapter 6 were not related to issues of livelihood but rather to the right to freely profess one's religious beliefs in saints. It was evident that the attempted imposition of the religious authority of the Tablighi Jamaat had severe consequences for many individuals beyond Sufi believers. This same theme is now being explored in relation to Muslim bards and their passive resistance against their former patrons, the Meos. The Meos frequently encouraged the bards to abandon their musical profession, join the Tablighi Jamaat and adopt its reformist principles. Considering the Indic theme of cultural interaction in the formation of all these communities, it is important to analyse the past and present forms of their interrelations and the nature of their religious subjectivity.

I wrote the initial drafts of this book over the period November 2018 to April 2020. Every time I had finished a draft chapter, Sri Lanka's appetite for power-sharing seemed to have crumbled further. The scene at the Galadari Hotel and the dim prospects of devolution in the concluding chapter are reflective of this. With Gotabaya Rajapaksa's election to president in late 2019 a new era appeared to start, and I decided to draw a line under my analysis. Academic books cannot continue to keep up with events, and it would be foolhardy to try.

Or so I told myself. Until an economic maelstrom of debt and shortages precipitated a popular uprising that ousted the Rajapaksa government, leaving Sri Lanka's entire political landscape in disarray. With the resulting whirlwind of ideas, hopes, puzzles and disillusions – as present in many readers’ minds as in mine, I presume – an epilogue is warranted to grapple with the afterthoughts to this book. As my manuscript wormed its way through the academic machinery of reviews and revisions, radio stations called me to comment on a country that appeared to have changed beyond recognition. Everything that had seemed unchangeable – the very genetic coding of Sri Lanka's political system and culture – got in flux. Through the aragalaya (struggle), as the uprising came to be known, the edifice of the state and its foundation of a sovereign people made a volte-face in the first half of 2022 – only to land roughly where they had always been, though maybe not quite, in the second half of that year. Many of the characteristics of this revolt connect to the central concerns of this book.

In late 2021 and early 2022, Sri Lanka spiralled into a foreign debt trap. The seeds for this had been sown in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, when the Rajapaksa government initiated a lending spree to bankroll a trajectory of postwar development that combined sensible infrastructural upgrades with misguided megalomanic prestige projects, as well as soaring corruption (Ruwanpura 2016). The impressive growth figures of the immediate postwar years and visions of becoming a new Malaysia or Singapore muted concerns over the debt burden from multilateral, Chinese and other loans.

Chapter 6 discusses the attempts of the European institutions, especially the European Commission and the European Parliament, to change the way in which corporations are structured and operate. This chapter tracks the European Commission’s initial ambitions to transform corporations by simultaneously improving their administrative capacity (due diligence) and reforming certain corporate fundamentals (civil liability and the remuneration of directors). After pushback by its own internal body, the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission retreated from its more transformative plans, narrowing its focus mostly to due diligence. At the time of writing, however, even the resulting less ambitious proposal was facing intense (and to an extent even unexpected) resistance. Despite the drawbacks, there may be other avenues for the EU to transform corporations. In the last section, I discuss the possibilities for engaging more directly with the fundamentals of corporate activity – by legally facilitating those organisations consciously founded on different principles (ownership and governance), such as social enterprises, which are more distributive and inclusive by design.

This chapter analyzes the interconnections between energy policy and security and defense policies in Norway. It explains the background of energy and security regimes and analyzes policy interplay. Prior to 2022, Norway had barely considered the energy–security nexus due to substantial domestic energy supplies. Some interconnections were, however, visible via three cases: the economic security provided by oil and gas exports, security of hydropower infrastructure, and internal tensions around wind power. Repoliticization of the Norwegian energy policy took place in 2022, and questions of energy sovereignty and energy security also became a part of Norway’s energy policy vocabulary. In 2022, strong degree of securitization was not evident, but, lightly framed, there have been breaks from previous energy political practices – evidenced by new support for offshore wind power and visible military protection of critical energy infrastructure.