Small-State Strategy: Navigating Asymmetry through Ambiguity

In navigating asymmetry through ambiguity, Sri Lanka’s experience is filtered through two deep and persistent frames that shape both its social consciousness and its foreign policy behaviour. The first is Sri Lanka’s long held an exaggerated sense of its own geopolitical indispensability. This perception, rooted in colonial and early postcolonial experiences, assumes that global powers view the island as a critical hub in the Indian Ocean. In practice, however, strategic value is fluid and shaped by technological and logistical developments. When Sri Lanka nationalised the British air base at Katunayake in 1956, the British swiftly developed the Gan base in the Maldives, illustrating that alternatives always exist. Over time, advances in aviation, satellite communication, and maritime technology have further reduced Sri Lanka’s earlier military and logistical centrality. Yet this inflated self-image continues to influence how decision-makers assess leverage and external engagement, often leading to overconfidence in negotiations and misjudged assumptions about international attention.

The second conditioning frame is a persistent belief that the international community is predisposed to harm or undermine Sri Lanka—whether due to ideological bias, geopolitical competition, or humanitarian critique. This perception has fostered a defensive, inward-looking national psyche that often interprets external pressure as existential threat rather than as opportunity for policy recalibration or reform.

Together, these two psycho-political frames—overestimation of strategic importance and an entrenched sense of external hostility—have deeply influenced Sri Lanka’s foreign policy behaviour. Successive political leaders have strategically mobilized these sentiments to consolidate domestic legitimacy, portraying themselves as protectors of sovereignty and national pride. However, this approach has also generated policy rigidity and self-imposed isolation. Ultimately, Sri Lankan leaders have become victims of their own narratives, as the very perceptions they cultivated for political survival have constrained the country’s strategic flexibility and reduced its capacity to engage pragmatically with an evolving international system.

In international relations scholarship, the foreign policy behaviour of small states has been a recurring site of inquiry for what it reveals about the exercise of agency under structural constraint. Classical realist and neorealist perspectives have tended to define small states primarily in terms of material capability deficits, emphasising their limited ability to shape systemic outcomes and their consequent need to navigate international hierarchies through alignment choices (Walt 1987; Rothstein 1968). Within this framework, strategies such as balancing, bandwagoning, hedging, and omni-enmeshment have been conceptualised as adaptive responses to external pressures (Schweller 1994; Kuik 2008). Yet, as critics of systemic determinism have argued, such typologies often obscure the domestic, ideational, and historical foundations of small-state behaviour (Hey 2003; Thorhallsson and Steinmetz 2017). More recent constructivist and post-structural approaches thus call attention to how small states actively construct their strategic identities, redefine vulnerability, and deploy narratives of autonomy or insecurity as instruments of statecraft (Ingebritsen 2006; Browning 2006). In this view, small states are not merely reactive but engage in continuous meaning-making processes that mediate between systemic constraints and national self-conceptions. Sri Lanka’s foreign policy behaviour, situated at the intersection of postcolonial identity, regional geopolitics, and domestic political contestation, illustrates this dynamic interplay between structural limitation and agential assertion—one that cannot be fully apprehended through systemic categories alone.

For Sri Lanka, smallness is not merely quantitative but situational: it derives from the island’s exposure to multiple centres of power within a confined maritime space. Geography ensures that external influence is perpetual; the challenge lies in managing its intensity. As such, Sri Lanka’s strategy cannot be understood simply as the pursuit of neutrality or non-alignment in a binary world. Rather, it represents a continuous process of interpretive balancing—adjusting posture and rhetoric in response to shifting configurations of regional and global power.

Central to Sri Lanka’s small-state outlook is a besieged mentality—a historically conditioned sense of vulnerability born from geography, colonial experiences, and post-independence insecurity. As an island adjacent to a continental giant and situated along vital sea-lanes, Sri Lanka has long perceived itself as simultaneously exposed and encircled. This strategic psychology has produced a defensive reflex in foreign policy: the pursuit of autonomy through caution, ambiguity, and balance.

This mentality does not imply passivity; rather, it provides the cognitive backdrop against which strategic choices are made. The fear of domination—by larger neighbours, external powers, or global institutions—has consistently shaped Sri Lanka’s diplomatic posture. It explains why successive governments have oscillated between engagement and withdrawal, openness and resistance. Whether confronting India’s regional predominance, Western human-rights pressures, or Chinese economic leverage, Sri Lankan leaders have tended to respond through a logic of managed uncertainty—keeping multiple relationships active while avoiding exclusive dependence.

In this sense, the besieged mentality functions as both constraint and catalyst. It constrains by fostering caution and a tendency toward defensive rhetoric, but it also catalyses creativity by compelling the search for diplomatic space in crowded strategic theatres. The result is a persistent preference for strategic ambiguity—a deliberate blurring of commitments that allows flexibility while signalling non-hostility to all sides. Sri Lanka’s small-state behaviour is not purely transactional; it is also profoundly normative. The island’s leaders have consistently justified diplomatic choices in the language of moral balance, restraint, and global peace. This moral vocabulary has allowed Colombo to elevate pragmatism into principle—to turn caution into an ethical stance.

D. S. Senanayake’s “Middle Path”

was the first clear expression of this ethos. As the country’s inaugural Prime Minister, Senanayake pursued moderation between rival power blocs, seeking cooperation without subordination. His vision of a balanced, independent foreign policy framed neutrality not as weakness, but as wisdom grounded in ethical restraint.

S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike

advanced this normative impulse through his aspiration to make Sri Lanka the “Switzerland of Asia.” His call for “Asian solidarity” and peaceful coexistence positioned the island as a moral actor in the decolonising world—one that could bridge East and West through principled neutrality and dialogue rather than alignment or confrontation.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike

gave this moral diplomacy its most ambitious institutional form through her leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Indian Ocean Peace Zone (IOPZ) proposal. Introduced in 1971, the IOPZ sought to transform the Indian Ocean into a demilitarised space dedicated to peace and development. This initiative embodied Sri Lanka’s attempt to recast small-state vulnerability as a platform for global moral leadership—an effort to shape international norms despite limited material power. Under her guidance, Colombo projected a peace-oriented identity that married normative aspiration with strategic foresight.

Together, these approaches reveal a continuous thread in Sri Lankan foreign policy: the fusion of strategic caution with ethical ambition. The “besieged mentality” of a small state has been reframed as a “peace drive”—the conviction that survival depends not only on careful calculation but on the ability to claim moral legitimacy in world affairs. In this sense, Sri Lanka exemplifies a broader small-state tradition in the Global South, where the projection of moral authority functions as a form of soft balancing. By framing neutrality as peace leadership, Colombo has sought to convert its lack of material power into diplomatic capital. This normative posture cannot erase vulnerability, but it provides a compelling language through which vulnerability can be managed, justified and reimagine.

However, the eruption of the ethnic conflict in the early 1980s fundamentally altered the trajectory of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy. The long-drawn war against the LTTE introduced an internal security crisis that reshaped Colombo’s external posture.

The diplomacy of moral balance and peace leadership gradually turned into the diplomacy of defence, justification, and damage control. The moral and peace-oriented diplomacy that had characterized Sri Lanka’s early decades was profoundly tested by the eruption of internal conflict. The ethnic crisis that escalated into civil war forced Colombo to shift its foreign policy focus from normative leadership to existential security. As the confrontation with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) intensified, external relations were increasingly defined by the logic of the battlefield rather than the ideals of non-alignment. Diplomacy of principle and persuasion gradually had evolved into diplomacy of defence and justification. This transition marked a turning point in Sri Lanka’s foreign policy trajectory, as the island’s international engagement became dominated by the imperatives of war and survival.

From 1984 onward, the challenge posed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) became the dominant lens for Sri Lanka’s external relations. A foreign policy once anchored in non-alignment and regional cooperation gradually hardened into security-driven diplomacy. The pursuit of weapons and international recognition replaced earlier moral–normative ambitions. Colombo’s overriding priority became obtaining military assistance free from the human rights conditions imposed by Western partners. This pragmatic shift led Sri Lanka to cultivate ties with states willing to supply arms and intelligence on transactional terms. The long civil war thus reshaped both the priorities and methods of diplomacy: trade, development, and regional dialogue were increasingly viewed through a security lens. The search for external legitimacy mirrored the government’s domestic struggle for authority, marking a clear break from the island’s earlier idealism.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the global discourse on terrorism reshaped the international environment in ways that momentarily favored Colombo. The government successfully reframed its conflict with the LTTE within the emerging global war on terror, aligning its domestic struggle with a broader international narrative. Yet this new flexibility also deepened Sri Lanka’s dependence on selective bilateral partnerships, further eroding its earlier multilateral engagement. Where Sri Lanka had once sought to influence regional and global forums as a moral voice of the Indian Ocean—guided by the winds of non-alignment—it now navigated more turbulent waters, steering toward bilateral alliances dictated by immediate security needs.

The end of the civil war in May 2009 appeared to open a new chapter in Sri Lanka’s international relations. The military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) allowed the state to reassert territorial sovereignty and reimagine its strategic role within the Indian Ocean order. This post-war moment also revealed a deeper contradiction: the triumph of military victory coincided with a loss of international legitimacy. Freed from the immediate pressures of conflict, Colombo embarked on ambitious reconstruction and development initiatives, seeking partners beyond its traditional Western sphere.

Since the end of the war, Sri Lanka’s strategic position has evolved significantly, shaped by both its geostrategic location and the international response to alleged violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) during the final stages of the conflict. Western powers—particularly the United States, Britain, Canada, and the European Union—pressed Colombo to investigate alleged war crimes committed by both the government and the LTTE. These calls, gaining traction in global diplomatic forums, led to a marked deterioration in relations with Western capitals. Responding to a series of U.S.-backed resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) became the central preoccupation of Sri Lanka’s post-war diplomacy. Driven by this overriding concern, Colombo increasingly aligned itself with powers capable of shielding it from Western diplomatic and economic pressure (Keerawella 2025)

In this context, relations with China acquired renewed politico-strategic significance. Beijing emerged as a principal defender of Sri Lanka in multilateral arenas, especially the UN Security Council, while simultaneously becoming the island’s largest source of foreign direct investment. Massive infrastructure projects—the Hambantota Port, Mattala Airport, the Southern Expressway, the Norochcholai coal power plant, and the Colombo South Harbour expansion—symbolized this deepening engagement. The 2013 Strategic Cooperative Partnership formalized cooperation across trade, finance, and strategic affairs, anchoring Sri Lanka more firmly within China’s sphere of influence. Alongside China, Pakistan and Russia offered diplomatic cover, reinforcing a pragmatic “Eastern turn” in Colombo’s diplomacy.

However, this reorientation came at a cost. Relations with the United States, the European Union, and India grew increasingly strained as accountability issues dominated international discussions. In response, Sri Lanka adopted a defensive diplomatic posture reminiscent of wartime rhetoric—reasserting sovereignty and rejecting external interference. Although official discourse shifted from war to peace and development, the underlying psychology of resistance persisted.

By 2015, the Yahapalana government sought to regain Sri Lanka’s lost international legitimacy by re-engaging with Western democracies and regional partners such as India, while preserving cooperative ties with China. This ambitious recalibration of foreign policy was closely intertwined with its commitment to domestic reconciliation and accountability mechanisms—objectives that had become central to restoring credibility abroad. Yet, these international undertakings soon collided with entrenched domestic political realities. Although the government introduced several initiatives to promote reconciliation and accountability, growing resistance in the South and divisions within the ruling coalition weakened their implementation. The Yahapalana leadership thus found itself caught between the crosswinds of international expectations and domestic opposition. Its inability to reconcile these competing pressures exposed the fragility of its consensus politics and ultimately left the government adrift—unable to sail successfully in either wind.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa

, foreign policy again gravitated toward a more security-centered and China-friendly orientation, though domestic political and economic crises soon overwhelmed these ambitions. By the early 2020s, Sri Lanka found itself entangled—by design and by default—in the geopolitical currents of the Indian Ocean, its ports, debt obligations, and maritime position becoming focal points of great-power rivalry.

The emergence of the National Peoples’ Power (NPP) government marks yet another phase in Sri Lanka’s evolving foreign policy trajectory. Inheriting a complex political and strategic heritage, the new regime faces the enduring winds and waves of the Indian Ocean—an arena shaped by competing regional and global forces. As Karl Marx observed, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx 1852). This observation aptly captures the predicament confronting the NPP leadership: they must chart a new course in external relations while bearing the weight of accumulated legacies—strategic dependence, debt, and geopolitical vulnerability. Early indications suggest that the government is navigating these turbulent waters with caution, balancing idealistic aspirations for sovereignty and equity with the pragmatic necessity of engaging major powers in a volatile regional environment. Only time will reveal whether this cautious navigation will yield a more autonomous and principled foreign policy, or whether structural constraints will once again define the limits of Sri Lanka’s diplomatic agency.

The post-2009 era thus embodies both continuity and transformation. The moral–normative ideals of earlier decades—sovereignty, peace, and independence—continue to inform official discourse, but they now coexist uneasily with pragmatic alignments, economic dependency, and strategic vulnerability. Sri Lankan diplomacy seeks equilibrium in a multipolar world while remaining haunted by the psychological legacies of siege and moral loss. This ambivalent posture is not entirely new. During the Cold War, Colombo’s adherence to non-alignment masked a pragmatic recognition of regional realities: while championing anti-imperialist causes in global forums, Sri Lanka quietly cooperated with Western and Indian security interests to safeguard its own stability. The post-2009 period represents a contemporary parallel. As Chinese investment expanded under the Belt and Road Initiative, Sri Lanka sought to reassure India and the United States through parallel gestures—naval cooperation, affirmations of neutrality, and participation in Indo-Pacific dialogues—without formally aligning with any military bloc.

Such behaviour reflects a distinctive small-state hedging strategy: economic bandwagoning combined with political balancing. It aligns with the concept of “omni-enmeshment,” whereby smaller powers embed themselves in multiple, overlapping networks—economic, diplomatic, and security-related—to mitigate dependency on any single actor. For Sri Lanka, these networks encompass bilateral partnerships, multilateral institutions, and normative appeals to international law. Yet ambiguity carries its own risks. The flexibility that preserves autonomy can also generate mistrust among partners and domestic critics alike. The controversy over the 2017 Hambantota Port lease—often mischaracterized as a “debt trap”—illustrated the delicate balance between economic necessity and perceptions of sovereignty loss. Similarly, oscillations between alignments with India, China, and the West underscore the limits of strategic ambiguity when domestic institutions are weak and policy coherence erodes. (Part III to be published tomorrow)