Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Neil DeVotta · Stanford University Press (2004)

tlte-cite:devotta-blowback

Editorial gloss

Peer-reviewed institutional-decay account of post-independence Sri Lanka. DeVotta's central concept — 'ethnic outbidding' — names the structural ratchet by which Sinhalese-majority parties competed for electoral advantage by escalating ethnic-linguistic exclusion of Tamil-speakers. The book traces the narrowing from the 1948–49 Citizenship Acts through the 1956 Official Language Act, 1972 Constitution, standardisation, and the 1976 Vaddukoddai mandate. Used across /case/narrowing as the academic anchor for the foreclosure-of-constitutional-remedy reading; used in /case/suppression/sinhala-only-act and /case/frameworks/vaddukoddai-1976 as the principal scholarly source.

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