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.
Left Strategy in the Time of the IMF Counter-Revolution
Devaka Gunawardena
Less than a year has passed since the 9th July uprising last year in Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, the contours of the...
Sri Lanka 2023: Anniversaries of Struggle
Q. M. Saul
No matter what happens for the rest of this year, 2023 will go down in the history books of Sri Lanka. This year is...
Entangled Lives and the Crisis of Care – Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka. Michele Ruth Gamburd. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2020
Asha L. Abeyasekera
Michelle Gamburd’s ethnographic monograph Linked Lives looks in depth at practices of care in a Southern Sinhala...
International Women’s Day: Sri Lankan Women Demand Democracy, Economic Justice, and Freedom
Feminist Collective for Economic Justice
Working women are bearing the debt burden!In 1908, 15,000 working women marched through New York City demanding decent...
The Left’s Choice: Revival or Surrender
Devaka Gunawardena
Two responses to my recent piece, “Resisting the Nationalist Right’s Framing of the Economic Alternative,” have...
Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka. Nira Wickramasinghe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020
Reviewed by Paul D. Halliday
“I understood I was to be carried to the country [to] which the ship was going, which was inhabited by giants and...
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.