When you read these lines I may have won a wager by the skin of my teeth – it depends on whether the military occupies Kilinochchi by the end of October. Novice that I am in such matters, I took the pundits (Hariharan, DBS, Iqbal and numerous others) who pollute reams of valuable newsprint, seriously; ok, ok, mea culpa, silly me. Political comrades and especially Praise-God Barebones (PGB), a friend who goes back to the 1970s, warned me not to underestimate the LTTE, to pay more attention to the army’s casualties, and to be wary of military propaganda which is treating the rest of us like mushrooms. PGB (who earned the pseudonym, like his 17th Century namesake, by preaching monotonous sermons, practising teetotalism and terrorising his children) offered me a wager several weeks ago: "The army will not take Kilinochchi by the end of October" said he. When you read this on November 2 you will know who won the bet; and if the place is still in VP’s hands, I have half a mind to send the invoice to the afore-named pundits.

And if you are wondering what all this has to do with Sumanasiri Liyanage’s valuable new book, it is that armed conflicts broaden into negotiations only when there is a military stalemate; that is when both sides are hurting badly and neither has hope of a decisive victory. There was no chance of negotiations for the last 18 months because the Rajapakse brothers, General Fonseka and his staff, and a medley of racists and war mongers thought that decisive victory was at hand. If, even now, they be proved right, obviously, there will be no negotiations. On the other hand, if B. Raman’s rather farfetched comparison with the Battle of Stalingrad turns out to contain a grain of truth, then the season for fruitful or fruitless negotiations will commence. It is only when a military stalemate scorches the trenches that adversaries agree to talk. [I hasten to add that I only mean Raman’s parallel with Stalingrad is excessive; that the army has suffered a severe setback at Kilinochchi, which will have far reaching political consequences, even if it eventually enters the town, is already an open question].

‘One Step at a Time’ is a book about the 2002 Ceasefire, its antecedents, the protracted 2002-03 negotiations, the breakdown of the peace process, and the renewal of hostilities; the stated timeline is 2001 to 2005. There is a brief and not very useful postscript that reaches into 2006, and a useful early chapter (Chapter 2) providing an overview of the history of the "Ethnopolitical Conflict". The most useful and important sections of the book are Chapter 4 ("Peace talks 2002-2003") and Chapter 5 ("From Breakdown of talks to Fourth Eelam War").

But before these we reach Chapter 3 explaining how a ceasefire came about, that is, developments leading to the cessation of hostilities. If you can cut through the thick overgrowth of sociological academic-speak, vapid Game-Theoretic line diagrams and Payoff Matrix tables, you can gain something from the chapter – why anybody taught sociologists probabilistic techniques which they use as illustrative graphics since they do not know mathematical processing, I don’t know. Anyway, when translated into everyday English, the chapter deals with the military stalemate, the inauguration of a (Ranil) government willing to explore new options and a favourable conjuncture of international circumstances – especially Norway. We can take away two important concepts form the chapter; "mutually hurting conditions" and "favourable conjuncture" – national and international. This may all seem obvious, but in the context of the fast changing situation in Lanka (battlefield volatility and Tamil Nadu effects), they are useful reminders.

Chapter 4, and the related handsome collection of four appendices (ceasefire agreement, protocol for establishing the monitoring mission, press statements of the Norwegian government after each of the five 2002-03 negotiation rounds, and the LTTE’s ISGA proposals), add up to a very good reason why you should buy and own the book. Names of participants at each round, issues discussed, and sticking points at each stage are carefully laid out. A well thought out summary table of this material is provided early in the chapter. Dr Liyanage has done a service to the general reader who wishes to learn about the negotiations within the space of 35 pages instead of ploughing through volumes of specialist literature. It is an intelligently presented, useful, chapter.

The author uses the term interregnum in Chapter 5 to denote the period from the breakdown of negotiations in April 2003 to the beginning of the Fourth Eelam War in mid-2006 – provoked by an LTTE overconfident of its military prowess. The first subsection on Interim Self-Rule is particularly good; it makes a convincing case that an opportunity to put an interim administration in place was lost because the Kumaratunga-Wickremesinge state failed to accommodate the LTTE’s need for legitimacy, recognition and administrative authority, and instead proposed development oriented councils. The second subsection considers the ISGA proposals; it is a fair assessment, but makes too much of the word "plenary" in ISGA Section 9.1 (dictionary meaning, complete, entire, absolute, unqualified). The third subsection (Changes in Power Configuration) too is interesting, but misses the matter mentioned in the next paragraph. I do not agree with the fourth subsection which takes a very negative stance on the Role of the Facilitator, Norway, and expects more than could have been delivered, given the stubbornness of the two local actors.

In the last part of Chapter 5, Prelude to the Fourth Eelam War (nor in the third subsection), does Dr Liyanage touch on something that is no longer a secret. There is a now widespread view that the LTTE ordered a Tamil boycott of the Presidential elections, thereby sanctioning a Rajapakse victory, in exchange for a promise to hand over Karuna afterwards. It is argued that the breakdown of confidence when the regime reneged accelerated the outbreak of hostilities. No one needs to endorse this theory, but it should be discussed in the chapter.

The opening sentence of the book, in the Preface, reads: "How and when my transition from class politics to peace and conflict transformation took place is unclear even to me". For everybody else the more pertinent question is not how and when, but why? It is not that this is not a good book; it is just that the old-Sumane would have written a better one. This one is sensibly rational, rich in empirical detail and provides reference to international sociological discourses, but that other one would have had greater methodological consistency and more theoretical depth. Sumane and I go back a long time, to the early 1970s and the formative years of the left tendency in the LSSP. Then, he was a rising star, a future Marxist of great potential; but for reasons "unclear" to him, and to the rest of us, that was not to be.

The methodology of "One Step at a Time" is rational historical reasoning and this approach it pursues successfully. However an irritating lapse into sociological academic-speak and mindless terminology (Drama Theory Approach, Moving Sidewalks and Trampolines, Game Theory, Deterrence Games and Pay-off Matrices) frequently mars an otherwise readable book. Dr Liyanage would do well to keep his sociology conference power-points and academic journal dialect strictly separate from Sumansiri’s intelligent political discourse.