“Who Wants to Sterilise the Sinhalese?” A Discourse-Historical Analysis of Extreme Speech Online in Post-War Sri Lanka

Abstract

During 1983–2009, Sri Lanka lived a bloody civil war that left more than 100,000 casualties. Far from being peaceful, the long-awaited post-war phase has witnessed several periodic episodes of violence between some of the different ethnoreligious groups in the island. This chapter analyses the comments made on YouTube videos on the attacks on Sri Lankan Muslims in Ampara and Kandy’s districts in 2018. Applying the Discourse-Historical approach as the main theoretical framework and, precisely the argumentation strategy of topoi (Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage, 2015), I explore how linguistic structures of online extreme speech embody and shape stereotypes of the targeted Muslim minority, hinder the process of reconciliation and contribute to deepening the ethnic and religious division in the country