Our understandings of the effects of war on land and resource access following armed conflicts are often shaped (and limited) by a reliance upon remotely sensed data. Here, we analyze household-level survey and community-level focus group data collected in Sri Lanka following the end of the nation's ethno-religiously rooted civil war (1983-2009) to determine if and how the war differently affected the nation's rice farmers. Our synthetic analyses revealed geographic variation in agricultural livelihood viability in post-war Sri Lanka, demonstrating how the protracted effects of war are exacerbating the vulnerability of rural Sri Lanka's ethno-religious minority (Tamil and Moor) populations by (re-)shaping access to critical natural resources, including both land and irrigation water.
Keywords: Agriculture; Armed conflict; Ethnicity; Farmer livelihoods; Inequality; Land use.
© 2022. The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.