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Reflections on state formation by Sunil Bastian This short article explains a framework for analysing Sri Lankan state formation and understanding the current challenges that the country is facing. My interest in state formation began when trying to make sense of the data on political violence and state repression that I had collected from 1977. I realised that I could easily expand this data base to cover the entire post-colonial period. It was also clear that this violence was not an abberation or exception, but a systemic characteristic of Sri Lankan society. The data collected largely consisted of numbers and reports of individual events. It just touched the surface of the problem. To understand the impact of political violence and state repression in Sri Lankan society you need to go deeper, preferably using a case study method. This is a task for future researchers. The dominant essentialist categorisation of the ...