Photo courtesy of Indian Express Former president Ranil Wickremesinghe has asked the voters to elect members with experience back to the parliament at the Nov 14 election. He alleges that those who have worked with him in the past have the necessary expertise for running the government and managing the economy. Meanwhile, the SJB led by Sajith Premadasa also has ...
Photo courtesy of The China Story The focus of this article is the politics of foreign aid given by other states to the Sri Lankan state during the post-colonial period. The post-colonial period is an interesting case study to understand the politics of foreign aid for two reasons. First, its history of state formation posed numerous challenges. Second, the state ...
Photo courtesy of UN Habitat During this campaign year there are various discourses by political parties and alliances about how to develop the country or bring development in order to address the current problems faced by the people, institutions and the government. The Central Bank has its own formulae to address the debt problem. The NPP, which is headed by ...
Photo courtesy of prothomalo “They are killing my people.” Mosab Abu Toha I will not be silent. When Sri Lankan soldiers murdered seventy thousand Tamil civilians in the Vanni during the last months of the last Eelam War, there were cries of horror, petitions to the U.S. president, Secretary of State, Congress, United Nations, British Parliament, European Union. But the ...
Photos by Sebastian Posingis When a delicate object like a glass vase, ceramic bowl or porcelain cup breaks, we throw it away thinking that it is beyond repair. But in the Japanese art of kintsugi, cracks and breaks are mended with gold enamel so that they are emphasised rather than disguised. Kintsugi was the inspiration behind Anoma Wijewardene’s Venice Biennale ...
Photo courtesy of Counterpoint The public appears to be pleased with most of the measures the president and the interim cabinet have taken. Yet there is much more to be done. The recent allegations made against the NPP that its economic policy framework envisages a protectionist economy is also baseless. Ensuring food, energy and water security does not require an ...
Photo courtesy of The Washington Post The ongoing conflict in Gaza has become a chilling showcase for the perils of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in warfare. Israel’s deployment of AI-powered systems to generate target lists and guide attacks as documented in harrowing detail by Israeli-Palestinian media outlets exposes the terrifying reality of algorithms deciding who lives and dies. This isn’t a future ...
Photo courtesy of Nena News For Mosab Abu Toha He has never visited Yaffa, home of his grandfather, just forty miles away across No Man’s land and the border fence. He has not seen the Wailing Wall, stepped on the cobblestones of old Jerusalem. He is Palestinian and Israel does not give him a visa or a laissez-passer. He was ...
Photo courtesy of France 24 Sri Lanka stands at a critical juncture in its political and economic history. As the country prepares for the parliamentary elections on November 14 with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s party, the National People’s Power (NPP), projected to make significant gains and expected to win, the direction of the nation’s governance hangs in the balance. If ...
Photo courtesy of Tamil Guardian The interim NPP government wants to make negotiated changes to the IMF conditionalities already agreed upon by the previous regime. If that is not feasible, the NPP will have to move away from the thinking that any deviation from the IMF prescribed debt restructuring would further damage the country’s economy. Otherwise the NPP will have ...
Photo courtesy of Minority Rights Group Tamil politics in Sri Lanka has entered uncharted territory. The cracks in Tamil politics had been evident for some time but with the September 21 presidential elections, it has broken into fragments. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake received little support from the Tamil electorate but so did the candidate endorsed by the Tamil Nationalist Alliance’s ...
Photo courtesy of Foreign Policy The victory of the NPP at the recent presidential election has changed the political landscape of the country. It has given rise to the expectation of a novel and fundamentally different approach towards governance. The electorate expects the government and the state to move away from an autocratic, nepotistic and militaristic approach, which was the ...
Photo courtesy of Global Press Journal This article attempts to critically examine the contribution of transgender men to the transgender movement in Sri Lanka. It analyses the marginalisation faced by transgender men in the current context of transgender rights activism and LGBTQI+ rights activism in general. I take recent discourse around the contribution of transgender men toward the transgender movement ...
Photo courtesy of The Conversation As defined by the United Nations International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a child is any person under the age of 18. This period of life for any child is supposed to be marked by safety, love and development. However for many children, these formative years are marred by abuse – an ...
Photo courtesy of Lifestyled Islander Sri Lankans views of the country’s direction improved dramatically in the Institute for Health Policy (IHP) SLOTS polling for September 2024. In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, a net 43% of the public thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. This reversed after the election with a net 5% of ...
Photo courtesy of Nishan Perera This year marks a significant milestone for Sri Lanka’s biodiversity conservation ambitions – three decades of commitment to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) since its ratification after the Rio Earth Summit. In line with the CBD, Sri Lanka is currently in the process of updating its National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan (NBSAP) for 2024 ...
Photo courtesy of Zaineb Akbarally As Sri Lanka gears up for the parliamentary election on November 14, the topics for debate are depressingly familiar – bringing criminal politicians to justice, ascertaining the responsibility for the Easter Sunday attacks, the best path to economic recovery and how to combat corruption. Yet little is said about the perilous state of the country’s ...
Photo courtesy of The Union Democrat The recent incidents reported in the Sri Lankan media regarding youth suicides have revealed that the mental and emotional wellbeing of our children is in serious decline. This a global phenomenon, with adolescents all over the world experiencing high levels of stress. My thoughts expressed in this article are general observations and in no ...
Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera You say we are all traumatized by this genocide, that we are responsible as well, that we cannot hide under books or pillows from drones, fighter jets and two thousand pound bombs. But what can we do with the fat slices of pie served in these fifty states? Who shall we heal with comforting lullabies ...
Photo courtesy of Sri Lanka Guardian “The future is cloth waiting to be cut.” Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes) The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn’t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP/JVP to go from 3 percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system had to ...
