Category: Essay

The ways in which countries from the global North to the global South have politically managed the unprecedented public health emergency situation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has both national and global dimensions, have given rise to much anxiety among democratic communities across the world. In fact, these anxieties came to be expressed… Continue reading ‘Executive Authoritarianism’ as Sri Lanka’s New Political Normal since COVID-19* – Jayadeva Uyangoda

Source The plantation economy took root in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) with the onset of British colonialism in the 19th century. The British government in Ceylon took measures to provide the necessary fiscal incentives and initiate changes in the base structure in favour of commercialisation, with a view to promoting a minimal state and capitalist… Continue reading Tea Smallholders in Sri Lanka’s Organic Fertiliser Crisis – Kaushini Dammalage

Delete Nothing is a trilingual platform that aims to document technology-related gender-based violence (GBV) in Sri Lanka, particularly—but not limited to—the experiences of girls, women, and queer and trans people. It also attempts to break down what technology-related violence looks like; ways of dealing with such violence including and beyond the law; and connect survivors… Continue reading Making ‘Delete Nothing’: Making a Feminist Internet – Zainab Ibrahim and Sachini Perera

“Here is the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries, growing over the country-side? like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic mimic. Pointsman! Counterfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demo-graphic? oh yes even the ran-dom…” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow I built Colombo in a dream. Clean streets, spotless floors, spotless walls, and well-dressed… Continue reading World Class City – Abdul Halik Azeez

Much has been written about the insurrectionary Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP—Peoples Liberation Front). The main focus has been on the character of the organisation itself, why it emerged, and how it was defeated in 1971, and again in 1989. This paper deals with a different set of issues: the ways in which the Sri Lankan… Continue reading The Insurrectionary JVP and the Sri Lankan State – Mick Moore

Rosa Luxemburg, the early 20th century Polish-Jewish revolutionary born in Zamosc 150 years ago on March 5th this year, had no reason in her frenetic political, intellectual, and literary activism to attend to an inconsequential island in the Indian Ocean. However, decades after her murder in Berlin on 15th January 1919, Ceylon (as it then was) would become… Continue reading ‘The Oddest of Odd Corners’: Rosa Luxemburg’s Afterlife in Ceylon – B. Skanthakumar

It is with deep sadness that Polity marks the untimely loss of not one but two great Sri Lankan scholars Malathi de Alwis and Qadri Ismail in the space of five months of each other. As Andi Schubert observes in his tribute to Qadri for Polity, they were both part of a generation of Sri… Continue reading In Memoriam: Malathi de Alwis (1963 – 2021) and Qadri Ismail (1961 – 2021)

Fuck 2021. Well, that seems like an appropriately Qadri-esque way[i] to open a reflection on his untimely and sudden death, only a few months after the loss of Dr Malathi De Alwis. Qadri and Malathi De Alwis were part of a stellar generation of Sri Lankan intellectuals who came of age in the mid to late… Continue reading Qadri Ismail (1961 – 2021): Abiding, Acknowledging, and Accounting for Intellectual Debts – Andi Schubert

The current literature on diaspora makes a break from the old assimilationist and methodologically nationalist perspective on migration. The older perspective took the nation-state as the unit of analysis, assumed immigrants severed relations with their homelands, migration trajectories as unidirectional, migration ended in assimilation (Brubaker 2005: 8), and eventually immigrants become citizens of the host-state.… Continue reading Identity Formation in the Sinhalese Transnational Community in Toronto, Canada – Sankajaya Nanayakkara

 Meeting of the southern Mothers’ Front. Photo: Stephen Champion In Malathi de Alwis’ analysis the southern Mother’s Front which emerged from the ruins of the second southern insurrection, demanding truth and justice for disappearances, was “the single largest women’s protest movement of its time and arguably one of the most effective in the history of… Continue reading 30 Years Later: Reading the Southern Mothers’ Front with Malathi de Alwis – Chulani Kodikara