Defending heroic soldiers at the United Nations Human Rights Council: shame, honour, and sovereign masculinity

Abstract

Human rights activists worldwide rely heavily on naming and shaming rights-abusing states at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to induce them to comply with international human rights norms. However, what about national-level actors who seek to shame a government for complying with human rights? This article explores how Sinhala Buddhist ethnonationalist political leaders and ideologues in Sri Lanka invoked the trope of sovereignty as both autonomy and masculinity to shame the new United Front government (2015-19) and its UN-supported transitional justice programme designed to address war crimes committed by the state during the last phase of the civil war. In so doing, I draw on and contribute to the literature on shame and global governance and feminist and critical scholarship on sovereignty and masculinity. Moreover, this analysis contends that it is not possible to understand the logic and efficacy of these tropes in postwar Sri Lanka unless we consider the emergence of a hegemonic, anti-Western, patriotic masculinity and a new idiom of honour that supplements the concept of lajja-baya (shame and fear of shame) – a central category in the anthropological canon of Sri Lanka.