Image courtesy Wallaad The most exiting academic course I have ever taken was “Conflict and Strategy” taught at Harvard University by Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, one of the most brilliant persons I have known. After I took that course in late 1984, and another that he taught in early 1985, he invited me to stay […]
Image courtesy the Sunday Leader The recent elections to three provincial councils, namely the Northern, North Western and Central and the consequent results together with the general political expectations that several more provincial elections would be held next year followed by national, presidential and general elections, make the opposition or non UPFA political landscape a […]
The President’s recent and wide-ranging interview on Al Jazeera is interesting on a number of counts (download the episode in HD here). For starters, our President is clearly grossly uninformed or deliberately seeks to misinform. Take for example his assertion, around 8:50 into the interview, that European Union election monitors said the recently held Provincial […]
Image courtesy Simon Fraser University On September 21, 2013, Sri Lankans Without Borders in partnership with Groundviews launched the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism. As noted on SLWB’s website, Lasantha Wickrematunge led the fight for press freedom in Sri Lanka, “unbowed and unafraid,” for a number of years before he was assassinated in […]
The Lasantha Wickrematunge Memorial Lecture held recently featured, as noted on the website of Sri Lankans Without Borders (SLWB) website, “…leading journalists from Canada and Sri Lanka [in] a panel discussion to examine press freedom in Sri Lanka in commemoration of the life and times of leading Sri Lankan journalist and human right activist Lasantha […]
I read with great interest this article in the Guardian about nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admitting to committing rape according to a new UN study. As Sri Lanka was one of the countries that were a part of the study I looked around a little more and came across a few articles in […]
Screen capture from video of President’s address to the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 24, 2013, New York, posted by the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Washington D.C. In what would have been an unprecedented engagement with Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa during his visit to the UN in […]
Image courtesy Mind Adventures Theatre Company We may applaud Mind Adventures’ Paraya for many things. We may celebrate it for its visual mastery, its bold dialogue and the intensity and physicality in the acting. We may perhaps hail the innovation in its mode of presentation as brilliant. We may even call the message it offers […]
Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images The elections to the North Western, Central and Northern provincial councils are over and the results have been largely as many political analysts predicted. The UPFA won in both the North Western and the Central provinces, while the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) romped home in the North. The political landscape […]
Image courtesy AFP The TNA has swept the polls in the North. More importantly, the Tamil people have voted courageously, convincingly, and clearly. It was an expected outcome, but as President Rajapaksa took off to New York, he would have known that numbers and statistics on paper, more than just mind-made presumptions, can have a […]
Photo by AFP, via Al Jazeera No, not in Sri Lanka, as readers may have hoped, but in Chile. In Chile, last week, on the fortieth anniversary of the military coup by General Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the Chilean Judges Association issued an anticipated but unprecedented apology for the […]
Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian The sweeping rate of post war changes in Sri Lanka in its sociopolitical and economic domains are so severe that the normalcy that prevailed during the war is being disturbed. Before and during the war the majority community defined the Sri Lankan conflict not as an ethnic conflict but […]
Photograph by Tehani Ariyaratne, from 30 Years Ago To complement the launch of 30 Years Ago and focus on some of the issues the project is anchored to and inspired by, four panel discussions were on the 24th and 25th of August at Park Street Mews, Warehouse D in Colombo. The inaugural session featured Deshamanya Bradman Weerakoon and Dr. […]
Photo courtesy ABC The governments of Sri Lanka and Australia have recently reached an agreement over how to define the flow of undocumented migrants between these two countries. Both governments seem to agree on the benefits of using the category of “economic migrant” to refer to the thousands of young people who board small vessels to […]
Photograph courtesy UN Sri Lanka At the invitation of the Sri Lankan Government, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited Sri Lanka at the end of August in what was, in her words, “the longest official visit I have ever made to a single country”. Groundviews requested Selvaraj Rajasegar, a colleague at the […]