Where this sits.
Six fields of literature address fragments of what TLTE operationalises. None addresses all three protocols together. This page names the anchors honestly — including where TLTE agrees, departs, and disagrees.
1 · Transitional Justice
- Teitel — Transitional Justice (2000) — Trifocal model of justice across regime change.
- Hayner — Unspeakable Truths (2010) — Comparative reading of truth commissions and their limits.
- de Greiff — Joinet/Orentlicher reformulated (UN Special Rapporteur 2012–2018) — Four-pillar TJ: truth, justice, reparation, guarantees of non-recurrence.
Truth-recovery requires institutional infrastructure that outlasts political cycles; survivors cannot be the sole carriers of memory.
The TLTE Method explicitly refuses to become a truth-commission substitute. It is the citation route to commission-grade bodies (OHCHR, UN PoE, UN CED, ITJP, PEARL), not a parallel commission. The Mirror-Publish Protocol formalises this refusal.
2 · Archive Studies
- Derrida — Archive Fever (1995) — Archives as both preservation and authority production.
- Stoler — Along the Archival Grain (2009) — Reading colonial archives against their own assumptions.
- Caswell — Community-based archives (2014–2021) — Survivor-centred archival ethics.
Archives are not neutral; structure carries authority; community archives must own their evidentiary discipline.
Archive studies typically treats survivor testimony as core. TLTE refuses intake until six Graduation Gates close — DPO, DPIA, independent legal review, two-Archon authorisation, indemnity, accredited partnership. The refusal is itself the contribution.
3 · Postcolonial Digital Humanities
- Risam — New Digital Worlds (2018) — DH from postcolonial standpoint.
- Drucker — Visualization and Interpretation (2020) — Critique of data-as-given in DH.
- Burdick et al. — Digital_Humanities (2012) — DH as method, not tooling.
Tooling encodes politics; postcolonial corpora require their own evidentiary protocols.
The Ecumene Atlas refuses shading, ranking, or aggregated 'Tamil GDP' — it publishes spatial kinship as cited nodes only. The visualisation choice IS the methodological argument.
4 · AI Grounding / RAG Evaluation
- Lewis et al. — Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2020) — Seminal RAG paper.
- RAGAS (Es et al. 2023) — Reference-free RAG evaluation framework.
- TruthfulQA (Lin et al. 2022) — Adversarial truthfulness benchmark.
RAG systems require corpus-specific evaluation; generic benchmarks miss domain-specific failure modes.
The Velicham benchmark inverts the standard frame: must-refuse and must-route cases are first-class, not edge-cases. On contested histories, the right answer is often 'I will not, and here is who you should ask instead.'
5 · Diaspora Studies
- Wayland — Ethnonationalist Networks (2004) — Tamil diaspora and conflict reproduction.
- Cheran — Pathways of Dissent (2009) — Diaspora civic agency beyond remittances.
- Orjuela — Distant Warriors / Distant Peacemakers (2008) — Diaspora's plural roles.
Diasporas are not monolithic; civic infrastructure is the durable form of diaspora politics.
Most diaspora-politics literature treats the LTTE legacy as the central interpretive frame. TLTE explicitly does not continue, inherit, archive, or rehabilitate the LTTE — and publishes that refusal as a structural commitment (see /what-this-is-not).
6 · Tamil & Sri Lankan Studies
- Sivasundaram — Islanded (2013) — Pre-colonial and colonial Sri Lanka beyond ethnic teleology.
- Wickramasinghe — Sri Lanka in the Modern Age (2014) — Plural histories of Lankan modernity.
- Thiranagama — In My Mother's House (2011) — Tamil and Muslim displacement ethnography.
- Hoole — Palmyra Fallen (UTHR/J, 2015) — On-record critique of all armed actors.
Multi-community framing is non-negotiable. Northern Muslim expulsion (1990), Up-country Tamil disenfranchisement (1948), and Eastern multi-faith fabric are part of the same file, not separate ones.
TLTE is not a continuation of any single Tamil-studies tradition. The Twenty-One Roots provide a constitutional anchor that is neither Marxist, nationalist, nor postmodern — it is procedural.
- · Not a comprehensive bibliography — see /cite.
- · Not a claim that TLTE has surveyed every relevant work — gaps are tracked at /research/limitations.
- · Not an endorsement of any cited scholar of TLTE — endorsements (where they exist) are logged separately at /research/advisory.