New Books In Religion

In his recent monograph, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Benjamin Schonthal examines the relationship between constitutional law and religious conflict in Sri Lanka during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Situating his study alongside broader conversations in the field of constitutional law and specifically debates about law’s effects on religion, Schonthal challenges the widely-held idea that constitutional law, properly administered, is a useful tool for reducing conflict between and within religious communities. Drawing on unpublished and previously unexamined archival materials written in Tamil, Sinhalese, and English, Schonthal argues that in the case of Sri Lanka constitutional law has actually hardened pre-existing religious conflicts and encouraged religious actors to use the law and courts to frame a variety of legal fights in explicitly religious terms. The pyrrhic constitutionalism in the subtitl