Displacement and degradation: Impediments to agricultural livelihoods among ethnic minority farmers in post-war Sri Lanka.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]