Economic Development and Political Conflict

Sirimal Abeyratne

South Asia Economic Journal, 2008, vol. 9, issue 2, 393-417

Abstract: Political conflict in developing countries has been a topical issue in recent development literature. While the sources of political conflict encompass a wide range of disciplinary areas, the preoccupation with the ethnocentric perspectives on the issue appears to have concealed the importance of underlying economic factors. The purpose of this article is to redress this gap through a comparative analysis of the experiences of Malaysia and Sri Lanka, which shared much in common with respect to their initial economic, political and social conditions in multi–ethnic societies. The findings of the study suggest that Malaysia could abate the possibilities of its potential political conflict, primarily through the rapid economic development process of the country. Having failed to achieve a development process in a sustainable manner, Sri Lanka, in a deep and prolonged economic stagnancy, nurtured its political conflict in two facets — the southern Sinhala militant uprising and the northern Tamil separatist struggle.

Keywords: Political Conflict; Ethnic Conflict; Malaysia; Sri Lanka. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/139156140800900207 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:soueco:v:9:y:2008:i:2:p:393-417

DOI: 10.1177/139156140800900207

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in South Asia Economic Journal from Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().