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Reposted by PolityLK

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 7d

Out Now! Vol. 13, No. 1 (2025), LKR800 from the Social Scientists’ Association and LKR1000 from Barefoot and Vijitha Yapa bookshops.

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 7d

Out Now! Vol. 13, No. 1 (2025), LKR800 from the Social Scientists’ Association and LKR1000 from Barefoot and Vijitha Yapa bookshops.

Ruben Thurairajah | ‘Dead Catting’: Manufacturing Moral Panic in Sri Lanka

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 9d

A few columns, a press conference, pronouncements by the cassock-clad and saffron-clothed; suddenly, the streets are alive with suspicion and anxiety. Ruben Thurairaj on how moral panic is manufactured in #SriLanka

polity.lk/ruben-thurai...

Ruben Thurairajah is a Yorkshire-based doctor in Britain’s National Health Service; who also tweets https://x.com/RubenThurairaj and writes https://drruben.substack.com/

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PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 13d

20 years ago, the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act took force in #SriLanka. #PolityLK has a few yowls in store, but begin with this 2010 hiss from the Cat's Eye feminist collective.

polity.lk/wp-content/u...

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 13d

20 years ago, the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act took force in #SriLanka. #PolityLK has a few yowls in store, but begin with this 2010 hiss from the Cat's Eye feminist collective.

polity.lk/wp-content/u...

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 15d

FCEJ condemns the violence perpetrated by the state against the people of Mannar and demands that the right to energy be recognised alongside the right to a safe environment.

www.srilankafeministcollective.org/_files/ugd/0...

Suriya Women’s Development Centre | Family Law and Practice in Sri Lanka: Women’s Declaration

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · 23d

Women from across #SriLanka call for a reformed family law and practice that centres equality, dignity, and safety for women and children. Read, sign, amplify, and organise, around the Women's Declaration.

polity.lk/suriya-women...

This Declaration was prepared through a collective process grounded in survivors’ lived realities and Suriya Women's Development Centre's long-standing work in the Eastern Province for over three deca...

Shashik Silva | Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism and Political Legitimacy in Contemporary Sri Lanka

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Sep 16

Has #NPP rule overcome #SriLanka's deeply embedded ethno-religious cleavages? Shashik Silva thinks not in his dissection of state responses to Sinhala Buddhist sentiment and nationalist mobilisation.

polity.lk/shashik-silv...

Shashik Silva is chief operating officer of the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka, with research interests in conflict and peace, local governance, youth political participation, and public ...

Ruben Thurairajah | Man in the Mirror

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PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Sep 3

Two men once in power. Two men disgraced. In a striking comparison between Ranil Wickremesinghe and Boris Johnson, Ruben Thurairajah plumbs the depths of their hubris and its consequences #SriLanka #UK

polity.lk/ruben-thurai...

Ruben Thurairajah is a Yorkshire-based general practitioner in Britain’s National Health Service; who also tweets https://x.com/RubenThurairaj and writes https://drruben.substack.com/

Ruben Thurairajah | Man in the Mirror

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Sep 4

Join the Global Action for Gaza!
On September 6th, starting at 4pm outside the UN Office in Colombo.

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Sep 3

Two men once in power. Two men disgraced. In a striking comparison between Ranil Wickremesinghe and Boris Johnson, Ruben Thurairajah plumbs the depths of their hubris and its consequences #SriLanka #UK

polity.lk/ruben-thurai...

Ruben Thurairajah is a Yorkshire-based general practitioner in Britain’s National Health Service; who also tweets https://x.com/RubenThurairaj and writes https://drruben.substack.com/

Sakuna M. Gamage | Chemmani: Where the Soil Speaks, Where Memory Refuses Silence

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 27

In a moving photo-essay, Sakuna M. Gamage brings poetry and pictures into conversation to ponder grief, resistance, and justice, in the wake of the ongoing #Chemmanimassgrave excavation in northern #SriLanka.

polity.lk/sakuna-gamag...

Sakuna M. Gamage is a researcher with the Law & Society Trust and independent journalist and social documentary photographer based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Niyanthini Kadirgamar | Stirring the Hornet’s Nest: The NPP’s Education Reforms

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 20

Yes. #SriLanka's education system needs overhaul. No. The @NPPSLOfficial warmed-up proposals are not solutions to ongoing problems. Why squander precious political capital, asks Niyanthini Kadirgamar?
polity.lk/niyanthini-k...

Niyanthini Kadirgamar is a PhD candidate in education at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA.

Nadeera Rajapakse | Magic Maids: Sweeping Up a Storm at the Sorbonne

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 18

One week more to submit your EOI for the forum on the life, work, and legacy of Gananath Obeysekere. Send your pitch (under 300 words) to [email protected] by 25 August 2025.

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 14

Women migrant domestic workers, heroines and victims? Reviewing Magic Maids, Nadeera Rajapakse showcases how these women subtly and definitively resist these restrictive narratives through their own forms of feminist praxis.

polity.lk/nadeera-raja...

Nadeera Rajapakse is an assistant professor at the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne in the History of Economic Thought and in English for Economics. She is a member of the PHARE (Philosophy, H...

B. Skanthakumar | Ceylon’s ‘Great Hartal’ of 1953: The Masses Enter History

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 13

Please note changed assembly point and route.

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 12

#PolityArchive Today is the anniversary of the 1953 ‘Great Hartal’, when the collective action of the masses changed the course of Sri Lanka. Skanthakumar writing in 2023 on its 70th anniversary dissects the causes and reach of the Hartal, with the 2022 #Aragalaya in mind.
polity.lk/ceylons-grea...

B.Skanthakumar is co-editor of Pathways of the Left in Sri Lanka (2014, Colombo: Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue)

‘When the Devil Drums We Dance’: Sex Work and Sexual Violence in Wartime Sri LankaRadhika Hettiarachchi - polity.lk

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B. Skanthakumar 🇵🇸 @bskanthakumar.bsky.social · Aug 8

Gripping stories that stay with the reader; adding much to what we think we know (and lesser understand) of #war and #peace in #SriLanka through the prism of conflict-related sexual violence. Thanks to Radhika Hettiarachchi for sharing them with @politylk.bsky.social

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 6

Drawing from the Women’s Histories of Sex Work archive, Radhika Hettiarachchi explores powerful narratives of violence, vulnerability and agency articulated by sex workers in wartime Sri Lanka and their search for justice for their work and for themselves.
polity.lk/radhika-hett...

Radhika Hettiarachchi is a public history practitioner, researcher, and curator based in Sri Lanka.

‘When the Devil Drums We Dance’: Sex Work and Sexual Violence in Wartime Sri LankaRadhika Hettiarachchi - polity.lk

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Reposted by PolityLK

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 6

Drawing from the Women’s Histories of Sex Work archive, Radhika Hettiarachchi explores powerful narratives of violence, vulnerability and agency articulated by sex workers in wartime Sri Lanka and their search for justice for their work and for themselves.
polity.lk/radhika-hett...

Radhika Hettiarachchi is a public history practitioner, researcher, and curator based in Sri Lanka.

‘When the Devil Drums We Dance’: Sex Work and Sexual Violence in Wartime Sri LankaRadhika Hettiarachchi - polity.lk

2 1

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Aug 6

Drawing from the Women’s Histories of Sex Work archive, Radhika Hettiarachchi explores powerful narratives of violence, vulnerability and agency articulated by sex workers in wartime Sri Lanka and their search for justice for their work and for themselves.
polity.lk/radhika-hett...

Radhika Hettiarachchi is a public history practitioner, researcher, and curator based in Sri Lanka.

Anushka Kahandagamage | Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka. Alexander McKinley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

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PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Jul 31

Mountain at a Center of the World destabilises the dominant anthropocentric gaze on #Siripāda in #SriLanka. Anushka Kahandagamage hails Alex McKinley's urging of humans to re-examine our position on Earth.

polity.lk/anushka-kaha...

Anushka Kahandagamage (PhD, Otago) has researched new Buddhist trends in post-war Sri Lanka. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Divinity School 2025-2026.

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Jul 30

"Liberties of expression, association and assembly once taken-for-granted, are in rapid retreat. The liberal firewall has fallen. The traditional parties of the right, centre and even left, embrace anti-immigrant, misogynist, anti-DEI, prejudices, and language..." #Ecocide #Liberalism #IMF #PolityLK

There is great disorder under heaven | Polity.lk

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Jul 29

Anarchy. The world imagined by liberal internationalism is no more. The US battens its hatches. Europe fortifies its walls. Israel wreaks chaos in West Asia. The Earth burns. Literally. Climate change is uncontrolled. We must change course. But where, and how?

polity.lk/there-is-gre...

Sri Lanka is not insulated from any of this, regardless of the indifference of its state and government, political and civil society. Global economic growth will crawl up by 2.3% this year, the World ...

Sumangala Damodaran | The ‘Radical Impulse’ in Music in Pre- and Post-Partition India

PolityLK @politylk.bsky.social · Jul 17

The ’radical impulse’ in Indian music has influenced the political, social, and cultural trajectory of pre- and post-Partition India and continues to articulate alternative political and popular imaginaries today, writes Sumangala Damodaran.

polity.lk/sumangala-da...

Sumangala Damodaran is a scholar of people’s music, who is currently Director, Gender and Economics at the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS) in New Delhi, and formerly professor o...