Performing Sovereign Aspirations: Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka. Bart Klem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024 by Sakuntala Kadirgamar

War and peace have remained unsettled business in Sri Lanka. Performing Sovereign Aspirations: Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition by Bart Klem (2024) is an interesting study of the anthropology of the Sri Lankan civil war. While it explores how the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka has “enacted, imposed, contested, reworked, flipped and erased the institutions of legitimate government”, it goes beyond that. It studies the contested political landscapes…

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Made in Sri Lanka, Taxed in America, and Failed by the IMF by Taniya Silvapulle

On 2 April 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, imposing trade measures on partners across the globe. The policy included a baseline 10% tariff on all imports, along with strict, country-specific ‘reciprocal tariffs’ aimed at reciprocating tariffs the countries have placed on American exports. Sri Lanka, a nation heavily reliant on apparel exports to the U.S., was hit with a staggering 44% tariff. The move has sent shockwaves through the island nation’s…

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The Revival of the JVP after 1989 by Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

What follows is a brief account of the history of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) from 1990 to the election victory of the JVP-led broader front, the National People’s Power (NPP) in 2024.[1] Given the fact that several layers of the JVP leadership had been exterminated by the state machinery when the 1989 insurgency came to a tragic end in the early 1990s, this…

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Budget 2025: Playing A Bad Hand by Balasingham Skanthakumar

‘Budget 2025’ – delivered before parliament on 17 February by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) in his capacity as Minister of Finance and passed on 21 March – is the first concretisation of the economic agenda of the new government in national office. Prima facie, it is a statement of the revenue and expenditure plans in the year ahead. What…

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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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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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