Polity 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, with critical content on politics, political economy, history, women, ethnicity, sexualities, religion, labour studies, agrarian relations, nationalisms, violence, ecology, and much more.
Stirring the Hornet’s Nest: The NPP’s Education Reforms
Niyanthini Kadirgamar
Estate primary school in disused century-old tea plantation factory building Education occupies a special place in the...
Magic Maids: Sweeping Up a Storm at the Sorbonne
Nadeera Rajapakse
After performing in several theatres across Paris, Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera bewitched the spectators, students,...
‘When the Devil Drums, We Dance’: Sex Work and Sexual Violence in Wartime Sri Lanka
Radhika Hettiarachchi
In the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war, transactional sex work was a particularly dangerous survival strategy for...
Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka. Alexander McKinley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
Anushka Kahandagamage
Between the lines of this book, the Siripāda mountain emerges not merely as a place, but as a living, breathing...
Editorial: There is great disorder under heaven
Editors
The post-1990 world order—an ensemble of norms, rules, and institutions, informed by economic and political...
The ‘Radical Impulse’ in Music in Pre- and Post-Partition India
Sumangala Damodaran
From its second decade, the 20th century saw the need for a people’s art, a need to represent, unearth, popularise,...
Current Issue
Out Now! Vol. 13, No. 1 (2025), LKR800 from the Social Scientists’ Association and LKR1000 from Barefoot and Vijitha Yapa bookshops.
170 pages of analysis, commentary and perspective: the implosion of liberal internationalism; aspirations for, and appraisal of, the NPP government; the long march of the JVP from subversive to sovereign; feminist statements demanding action against misogyny and male violence; the May 2025 local government election and axes of polarisation; US and Lankan narratives on culling USAID; the thriving and prosperous national security state, and its gaze on queers; Richard de Zoysa’s short life, long death, and literary legacy; Asoka Handagama’s Rani and memory against forgetting in struggles against enforced disappearances; avatars of privatisation in higher education; continuities and concerns in AKD’s first budget; anatomization of an economy in permanent crisis; retrieving the political economy of SBD de Silva; an IMF poster-child in the crosshairs of Trump’s tariffs and the Washington Consensus; combating corruption in market mode; caricaturing gay representation in mainstream media; celebrating Bapsi Sidhwa’s itinerary and oeuvre; Indian and Pakistani women speak out against war and hate; the performance of Tamil nationhood in and after war; international law facts and fictions in Filastin; and Iranian voices against Israeli-US warmongering and state repression. Front cover art by Minal Naomi Wickrematunge.
Calls
Archive
Pravada (1991-2002) and Polity (2003-) back issues available here.
Social Scientists’ Association
The Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) was founded in 1977, at a turning point in Sri Lankan politics, economy, and society, marked by among other aspects: the ‘open economy’ market reforms; deepening ethnic conflict; and the growing concentration of executive power. Its initiators were academics from public universities, seeking an autonomous space to grapple with these shifts; and to promote progressive political, economic, and social change.