tions of arms trade regulation. While it is clear that all armed conflicts have their own unique dynamics and actors, some of the lessons learnt from Sri Lanka can be useful for understanding the dynamics of war, arms trade and peace-making in other countries. Having its origin in grievances along ethnic lines and a history of European colonial domination, the Sri Lankan conflict bears similarities with many of the conflicts fought in the Global South during the last decades. An important difference from many other contemporary civil wars is, however, that the conflict has not revolved around highly valuable and lootable natural resources. Instead, in Sri Lanka the relative lack of such resources has rendered external financing of the war efforts even more important, particularly for the Tamil rebels. Sri Lanka is also a clear example of how the global “war on terror” is incorporated in and affects conflicts all over the world. Although the LTTE pictured itself as a “liberation movement,” fighting for the rights of the Tamil minority, it was branded as a “terrorist group” by more and more international actors. The Sri Lankan government managed to successfully frame its own conflict as part of the global war on terror; an endeavor that was greatly helped by the ruthless methods applied by the LTTE. Another development, which is made visible in the Sri Lankan case, is how the changing global power relations impacts on civil wars locally. The emergence of China as a new superpower, and the weakening of the influence of North American and European powers globally, has – as becomes clear from the Sri Lankan case – lent increased legitimacy to governments wishing to subdue internal rebellions using military means. It has also further undermined the principles of arms trade regulations that state that arms should not be exported to countries where they are likely to increase insecurity and enable human rights violations. There are a number of lessons to be learnt from the chapters in this report from the case of Sri Lanka:
1) Relatively small amounts of arms can have disastrous effects As a proportion of the total arms trade, the weapons exported to the conflicting parties in Sri Lanka were negligible. The import by the Sri Lankan government, in the period 2000-2008, was a mere 0.3% of the volume of global transfers of major weapons (see chapter 2). This, however, did not prevent the Sri Lankan war from becoming one of the most deadly conflicts in the world, with the highest number of battle related deaths globally in 2008 and 2009.1 Thus, we can see that clearly there is no direct link between the amount or value of arms that are ex-
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1 Harbom, Lotta & Wallensteen, Peter (2010) “Armed Conflicts, 1946-2009” in Journal of Peace Research, 47 (4), p. 501.