Demos at war: Revisiting the democratic boundary problem with a performative lens

This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different conceptions of the demos. Sri Lanka's conflict protagonists have advanced a wide range of institutional forms for their competing ideological projects. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, reenacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: Constitution, election, court, checkpoint, and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed.