Third World Quarterly 139 within the countries. The Rohingya in Myanmar are widely considered to be aliens from Bangladesh. They lack citizenship and thereby basic rights to health care, education and freedom of movement, and have been targeted by extensive violence. Other Muslim groups are officially recognised minorities, but face problems with access to identity cards, government jobs and resources, as well as widely held prejudices (ICG 2013). The escalation of violence in Rakhine 2016–2017 made Muslims all over the country targets of hate speech. Sri Lanka has a long history of peaceful coexistence between Buddhists and Muslims, which was dramatically broken with the Easter attacks in April 2019 carried out by local Muslims with links to IS. Long before that, Muslims had been accused of wielding undue political and economic power, and were the target of violent attacks in 2014 and 2018. Violent Islamist groups are a recent phenomenon in both countries. In Myanmar, Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army launched attacks in 2016 and 2017, triggering the devastating military campaign against Rohingya (ICG 2016). The 2019 Easter attacks were the first instance of global Islamist violence in Sri Lanka, and prompted further hate speech, boycotts of Muslim business and violence against Muslims and their property. A countermovement for inter-religious coexistence Peace movements in Myanmar and Sri Lanka The strength of the Buddhist nationalist organisations and their spokespersons, and the backing they purportedly enjoyed from political and military leaders and the general population, deterred challenges to them. Despite this, a number of initiatives for peace and inter-religious coexistence make up what can be understood as a social movement opposing the Buddhist nationalist groups and anti-Muslim violence. This movement intersects with, or makes up a continuation of, other movements. In Myanmar, many peace and interfaith activists have a background in the democracy movement. In Sri Lanka, leftist and liberal movements – inside and outside the political system – have challenged Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism since independence. Some civil society actors who mobilised for interethnic understanding and a negotiated solution to the armed conflict have now become central in countering the Buddhist nationalists. The availability of foreign aid has been of some importance for the formation and maintenance of organisations working for peace. In Sri Lanka, economic liberalisation in the 1970s brought an influx of foreign funding, which in the 1990s increasingly was made available to civil society groups promoting peace and human rights (Orjuela 2008). The end of the war in 2009 and the subsequent authoritarian turn led some donors to withdraw, leaving fewer resources to the peace NGOs. Myanmar, with its military regime, was internationally isolated and largely lacked space for civil society mobilisation. The cyclone Nagis, however, which killed 138,000 people in 2008, brought about an opening for international aid and the creation of a local NGO sector. Steps towards democratisation, culminating in the 2015 elections which brought National League for Democracy (NLD) and Aung San Suu Kyi to power, generated a massive interest among foreign donors to contribute to democratisation and peace, partly through civil society support (Matelski 2016). Interfaith activities were a prioritised area for some Western donors. There are overlaps between the movement against Buddhist nationalism and initiatives for peace related to the peace process between the government and ethnic rebel groups in Myanmar, and post-war reconciliation in Sri Lanka.