Aid Interrupted: Reverberations in Sri Lanka of USAID’s Dismantling | Sandunlekha Ekanayake

In a shocking move, President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ right-wing populism and economic nativism has led to defunding the United States (US) Agency for International Development (USAID). Growing negative sentiment towards USAID had been fuelled by Trump during the 2024 election campaign, with the rhetoric that funding did not have a direct return for the US people and was wasteful. What began on 20 January 2025 as a 90-day pause on all foreign aid…

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Queer Representation in Sri Lankan Media: A Double-Edged Sword? | Kasun Kavishka

Queer representation in the media is a polarising topic that has sparked many debates in recent years, revealing its transformative powers as well as its potential pitfalls in the LGBTQ+ movement’s quest for rights, inclusivity, and visibility. Media representation has the ability to define what is considered normal and true, how one looks at oneself and at others, by producing and reproducing existing social hierarchies; in other words, it shapes the collective psyche of the…

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The Sarajevo Declaration of the Gaza Tribunal | Gaza Tribunal

We, the members of the Gaza Tribunal, having gathered in Sarajevo from 26 to 29 May 2025, declare our collective moral outrage at the continuing genocide in Palestine, our solidarity with the people of Palestine, and our commitment to working with partners across global civil society to end the genocide and to ensure…

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‘Crop Top Terrorism’ and the Security State in Sri Lanka by Themal Ellawala

The evening of 28 February 2025. A friend and I left his house in Mount Lavinia to board a waiting PickMe three-wheeler. As I stepped out, I noticed a group of five uniformed army and police officers milling about outside a gate close by and immediately sensed there was trouble…

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Polity is a magazine which aims to advance democratic consciousness, gender equality, state reform, and social change in Sri Lanka, while interested in South Asia and the World.

As its predecessor Pravada (1991-2002), Polity is published by the Social Scientists’ Association in Colombo (since 2003), with critical content on politics, political economy, history, women, ethnicity, sexualities, religion, labour studies, agrarian relations, nationalisms, violence, ecology, and much more…

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Current Issue

120 pages of analysis and perspective including: Sri Lanka’s elections, politics, and parties; ‘settler tourism’ in the wake of the Gaza genocide; the spaces of the Aragalaya; child marriages and their miseries in the East; gendering climate-adaptation projects in agriculture; the ‘hidden politics’ of critical agrarian studies; Europe’s far right and its battery of women’s rights; Martin Wickramasinghe and the Sinhala short story; trans-gendered lives amidst war, violence, and displacement; South Asia’s debt crisis is missing collective action; India’s general election; race, class and multiculturalism in Hanif Kureishi’s work; and some favourite books in 2024.

Vol. 12, Issue 2 (December 2024) is now available for LKR 500, from the Social Scientists’ Association and Barefoot bookshop, Colombo 3.

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Calls

20 Years after the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act in Sri Lanka - Call for Articles

Archive

Pravada (1991-2002) and Polity (2003-) back issues available here.

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Social Scientists’ Association

The Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) is an organization working to investigate the way in which social change is contouring the multiple realities faced by communities in Sri Lanka and South Asia. The SSA is deeply committed to promoting a culture of knowledge production that informs and undergirds interventions aimed at achieving social emancipation for marginalized communities.

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