This Government, That Opposition, and the Work Still Ours by Lionel Bopage

For sixty-six years, until his death in 2014, the legendary comrade Bala Tampoe led the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU)—and turned a clerks’ association into a militant, multi-ethnic vanguard of the working class…

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Our support for the open letter: To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped ‘between two blades of a scissors’ by Collective

The open letter was signed by a number of current and formerly incarcerated political prisoners, political organisers and scholars, including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Yasin al-Haj Saleh, Ricardo Jiménez, Michael Löwy, and Walden Bello, among others, who wrote to incarcerated people in Iran…

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Breaking the Spell of an Imperial Photo Album: The Unlikely Beginnings of ‘Colombo Histories’ by Sujit Sivasundaram

Where one is based in the world, one’s own positionality, the perspective with which one is writing, is crucial to the way research and its politics takes shape. For me, the experience of having grown up in Colombo and in tumultuous times in the 1980s…

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State Formation and Conflicts in Sri Lanka. Sunil Bastian. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. by Bhadrajee Hewage

Sunil Bastian’s State Formation and Conflicts in Sri Lanka is an ambitious and intellectually sophisticated reinterpretation of postcolonial Sri Lankan history. Rather than treating the country’s political violence, ethnic conflict, constitutional crises and economic transformations as discrete episodes, Bastian situates them…

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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.

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Current Issue

Out Now! Vol. 13 No. 2 (July – December 2025). 148 pages. #SriLanka. Politics. Cyclone Ditwah. Ecology. Feminism. Education. Justice. Domestic Violence Act. History. Culture. Work. Labour. Books. Cover Picture Sakuna M. Gamage. LKR1000 from the Social Scientists’ Association or Barefoot or SLBOOKS.lk.

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

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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.

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