It's an excellent question, and it's not as academic as it initially sounds. It's political sociology. What we're talking about there is the way in which certain identity traits, religion versus language versus ethnicity, become politicized over time.
What's interesting is that the tensions in the British colonial period at the turn of the last century were Muslim riots. There were tensions between Christians and Muslims, and less so the Buddhists. It was more of a religiously flavoured tension.
After independence in 1948, as Professor Tepper alluded to, we saw the politicization of ethnicity, because it was useful politically for a party to begin to mobilize votes on the basis of identity, something that is of course completely foreign to Canada. What lessons we should draw from the comparison between the British colonial period and the independence period relate to the role of state policy in politicizing certain identity traits. When public resources come to be allocated on the basis of one's religion, language, colour, or something else, then we see that groups begin to divide themselves along those lines.
What does that mean in terms of conflict resolution, conflict management, and transformation? It means that to call Sri Lanka an “identity conflict” is a bit of a misnomer. There's nothing in particular about Buddhism, and we can discuss this, that makes it inherently conflictual. What's important is that the political lines have been drawn. There are many examples in which we can see that building incentives--economic incentives, common incentives, incentives over the health of their children--in different competing communities can help to bring them together. If we can think about ways of increasing the incentives for cooperation and communication and increasing the disincentives for conflict, then we're thinking the right way, whether it's economic investment or social investment.