Buddhism, conflict and violence in modern Sri Lanka

Eight of the essays in this collection grew out of an international conference "Buddhism and Conflict in Sri Lanka" held at Bath Spa University on 28-30 June 2002. The conference was sponsored by the Buddhist Federation of Norway and the UK Association for Buddhist Studies. It brought together over 60 scholars and a dozen of key monastic players from the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition. While the conference included 15 presentations and 15 responses, initially Deegalle published 19 selected essays and responses with minimum revisions in Journal of Buddhist Ethics (vol. 10, 2003 http://www.jbe.gold.ac.uk) as conference proceedings. As well as taking the lead in organizing this international conference, Deegalle edited this book, wrote an Introduction (pp. 1-21) and the last chapter 'JHU Politics for Peace and a Righteous State' (pp. 233-254) to update and contextualize the book. This volume gathered revised versions of eight conference papers and seven new essays specially written for this volume by leading scholars in the field of Sri Lankan studies. To disseminate knowledge gathered in the conference in Sri Lanka, on the basis of the conference papers, Deegalle has published two books in Sinhala (2003) and Tamil (2005) languages. The Sinhala version (hardback and paperback) contains 19 chapters and the Tamil version (hardback and paperback) contains 12 chapters.