A Study on 'Aawa Gang` : Measures to Overcome Future Threats to National Security of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Three decades of civil war marked the end of the defeat of LTTE terrorism through a war victory in 2009. Since then, Sri Lanka has been experiencing a post-conflict phase throughout past nine years. The ‘conflict trap theory’ has been already overthrown with the expiration of five years since the end of war. Therefore, one may assume no terrorism would arise in Sri Lanka in the near future. However, in the recent past, with a chain of criminal incidents that occurred in Jaffna, for which a gang famously known as “Aawa” was held responsible, paved a considerable space of suspicion regarding the national security of Sri Lanka. In this backdrop, the research problem of this paper is focused on Aawa gang in order to evaluate methods to overcome future threats to national security. Literature review of this paper will be mainly based on criminological perspectives on Classical and Positivists thoughts and ‘crime-terror nexus’ theory to access Aawa gang’s current status and to seek its probabilistic opportunities to become terrorists. Therefore, research methodology of this paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies based primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include data gathered through in-depth discussions with police officers, intelligence officers and inhabitants of Jaffna and secondary sources include statistics of Sri Lanka Police, CCTV recordings, media and internet. Further, the research is limited to the data from January 2014 to July 2018 and has excluded Biological Positivism in research analysis. Finally, it is the prime objective of research outcomes to reveal the possible future challenges to the national security of Sri Lanka and to provide practical measures to overcome such challenges.