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.
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...
Nirmani Liyanage (2.2.1988-12.11.2022)
Nihal Perera
“To understand the community I am researching, i.e., the injustice and inequality its members are facing on a daily...
Terror as Stability
B. Skanthakumar
“… stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of Terror”[i] Ranil Wickremesinghe has apparently peaked...
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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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.