Social Capital and development, A case study of post-conflictual Sri Lanka

Abstract: Development has become a matter of security, and therefore development has a new strong role in the liberal peace-building, though not all theoretics agree to this hegemony. Social capital has become a global term when discussing development, and though the concept derived from a Western civil society, social capital cannot be ignored as a deeply rooted concept describing social structures of trust, networks and reciprocity in other contexts as well. I use the concept of social capital in the context of post-conflictual rural Sri Lanka to find out whether there is a coherence between social capital and development. I transfer the results of Dhammika Herath's field study to answer my research question. The study consist of six villages, three poor and three non-poor. Embedding two Muslim, two Tamil, two Sinhalese villages. Here he finds a significant coherence between bonding social capital and development, which is the conclusion of my assignment.