Pri's blog

  The Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) was 50 last year. It was a cause  for celebration and spawned, among other things, the Festival of Ideas where BCIS created  an open space for engagement with a wide range of new stakeholders. It was also the year  that we applied for and successfully secured institutional accreditation with the Ministry of  Higher Education and acquired degree awarding status. In 2025, one year into the next half  century of our existence, we are working on creating opportunities for our students, our  lecturers, our staff, our governing body members and our public constituencies, to become  familiar with new, challenging trends in the global conversations around international  relations. We are aiming to strengthen our capacity to re-examine some of the well-worn  concepts of international relations theory, engage with global south perspectives and  alternatives, decolonise our epistemolo...

  It’s been 70 years since the Bandung Conference brought leaders of Asian and African countries together in a collective effort to forefront anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles. Twenty-nine Asian and African countries attended and the 1955 conference symbolised a  ‘new spirit of solidarity of the Third World’ . The conference underscored two principles of Third World politics – decolonisation and development – and led to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and an alternative conversation on how the world should be ordered including a proposal for a New International Economic Order (NIEO).  It was a time when Sri Lanka punched significantly above her weight – Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike was an acknowledged leader of NAM, Dr Gamani Corea pushed for more favourable trade terms for the global south from his position as the Secretary of UNCTAD, and Ambassador Shirley Amerasinghe pushed against international competition to acquire the resources of the sea b...

My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...

  A recent article in the Daily Mirror r eported on a press conference organised by the Women's Policy Action Network (WPAN) of the Advocata Institute, on the vexed topic of Women's Labour Force Participation. It really sounds like a broken record So here are a few random points that I can't help but put down First point - one that is repeatedly made but which economists, especially the neo-liberal kind, repeatedly ignore.  Contributing to economic growth should not be the reason for increasing women's labour force participation. Women (like men) have a right to work and have rights at work, and policymakers have an obligation to respect and protect these rights. The ILO sums up these rights as "decent work" - "i t involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for all, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their conce...

Last evening, that is on Sunday, June 9 th , the Lakmahal Feminist Book Club met at the Lakmahal Community Library to discuss V V Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night.   There has been much said and written about the book and ‘Sugi’ as the author is to people she knows well has given many interviews in Sri Lanka and overseas and has had many things written about the book.  You can find links to some of these reviews and interviews at the end of this post.  The discussion at the book club was led by Neloufer de Mel, who has just retired from her position as Chair Professor of English at the Colombo University,  was a former Chairperson of the Gratiaen Trust and who is known for her a feminist scholarship.  She takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on literary, cultural, gender and performance studies to examine Sri Lankan socio-political, cultural and literary life.  The participants were quite diverse – age, gender and ethnicity wise. The shared pe...

  I have been watching the Perahera, year after year as a child.  It was the highlight of the August holidays when we went to see our grandparents in Kandy.  Anglophile, Christian and Central Bankers, my family used to secure seats at the Hatton National Bank where us kids watched the perahera from the balcony with wondrous eyes while the adults made it a social event with buffet,  alcohol and the company of the others.  Coloniality at its best. For us it was the spectacle, the dancers, the drummers, the fire lanterns, the smell, the noise, the colour.. and the elephants, always the elephants…Later I watched the Perahera as a Peradeniya undergraduate sitting with batchmates on the street, a very different view.  The embarrassing coloniality was shed, and it was all about being part of the crowd, belonging….Not till anthropological and historical curiosity got the better of me  many years later did I know anything about the significance of the Perahera ...