The Government’s decision to arbitrarily deport Pakistani refugee-asylum seekers is unacceptable and wrong. Local stress Asylum seekers usually leave their home countries due to fear or deprivation, or both. The Pakistanis on…
Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Brief The Centre for Policy Alternatives, the institutional anchor of , released today a report co-authored by Shilpa Samaratunge and I on hate speech online, looking at Facebook…
Photo courtesy ‘Her discourse, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectivized’, universalized; she involves her story in history’. – Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, 1986.…
Photo by AFP/LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI via On the 19th of July 2014, my cook hands me a police form to fill. It is one of those usual forms that we were inundated with…
Photo by La Shawn Pagan via NYC Views and News They had to postpone the funeral by a couple of days. The children wanted to pay their last respects. Flights had to…
Photo by Reuters, courtesy International Business Times In recent decades, many researchers, education specialists and policy advocates have paid increasing attention to the issue of gender bias in science. While several successful…
Photo by Thyagi Ruwanpathirana It is unlikely that there is anyone living who remembers the anti -Muslim riots of 1915. In any case, apart from the fact that most of the victims…
Two weeks have passed since violence broke out in Aluthgama and Beruwala on the 15th June- a day that will go down in the history books of Sri Lanka as nothing short…
Photo courtesy There are scarier things, worse things, than Black July ’83. Aluthgama signaled the possibility of such things. The sequence of events, the lethal violence, the horror of Aluthgama were reminiscent…
Photo courtesy There is a limit to tolerance, and this is it. In its short history as an independent republic, Sri Lanka has seen more bloodshed than seems fair. Many of our…
Image from YouTube video Dr Dayan Jayatilleka’s book, , now in its second revised edition of 2014, is one of the few book-length attempts by a Sri Lankan scholar to make sense…
Image courtesy Wikipedia Caste is observed by the overwhelming majority of Sinhalese and Tamils but the subject remains virtually taboo in public discussions. If it is mentioned in public, it is often…
[Photo credit: The Empire Youth Annual, 1952] “For centuries the Sinhalese and the Tamils have lived together in peace and amity. We have been governed by their kings and they by ours…
Photo by Dushiyanthini Kanagasabapathipillai 2009 When Sidath’s mum wore her wedding sari, she would tell her children, ‘the lotus would fully open.’ The large lotus was noticeable because its bright red sequins,…
Photo by Anushka Wijesinha, 2011, via IPS Since the end of war in May 2009, the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government has sought to forge a new overarching Sri Lanka identity…
