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The British government and the British monarchy must apologise for its colonisation of Sri Lanka, for their decisive role in raising ethnic tensions that eventually led to a long civil war, and continuing politics of ethno-national antagonism
“A nation which colonizes, a civilization which justifies colonisation, and therefore force, is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.” – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955
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In the United Kingdom, public debates on the legacy of the British Empire often involve confrontations between those who believe that Britain should not apologise for the atrocities committed during the Empire, and those who believe that Britain should apologise. As Dr. Shashi Tharoor notes, the British system of primary and secondary education is marked by a high level of historical amnesia on colonial history.1 Efforts to whitewash the British Empire as a force for good continue to be extremely popular.
Present-day British foreign policy assumes a ‘brush the past under the carpet’ approach, presenting the UK as a benevolent world power that promotes gender equality, equal marriage and LGBTQI+ rights. At the same time, crucial archival records that concern the Colonial Office [subsequently the Foreign and Commonwealth Office] continue to remain classified and inaccessible to the public.2
In Sri Lanka, unlike the Portuguese (1505-1658) and Dutch (1658-1796) who were, respectively, the first and second Western colonial occupiers, the British succeeded in conquering the entire island, and the British had colonially occupied Ceylon longer than any other power, from 1796 to 1948 (Wickramasinghe 2010, 41). Unlike India, Sri Lanka gained Dominion Status within the Commonwealth [which is largely interpreted as ‘independence’] in a relatively peaceful manner. However, this peaceful transition, in many ways, soon turned out to be the calm before the storm. It is not only the successive Sinhalese nationalist governments who are to be blamed for the ethnic conflict. Most significantly, the British were largely responsible for sowing the seeds of lasting ethno-national contention.
The necessity of an apology: Current discourses on decolonisation
The politics of reparations for past atrocities form a priority area in managing relations between oppressors and the oppressed. Colonisation is a phenomenon based on a logic of exploitation, of looting, of claiming other people’s lands, bodies, waterways and natural resources as one’s own. Today, calls for reparations and official apologies for colonial atrocities can be observed in many countries. In the Parliament of Aotearoa, Te Pati Maori’s Rawiri Waititi MP, in his maiden speech, strongly emphasised the importance of the Crown apologising for the colonisation of Aotearoa, the Crown’s continuing disrespect of Te Tiriti O Waitangi, and the continuing forms of systemic discrimination that are a direct consequence of colonisation.
One of the most prominent cases where a government leader demanded reparations against its former colonial occupier was the case of Haiti against its former colonial occupier, France. Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 2003 demanded that France pay Haiti over $ 21 billion which is equivalent to over 90 million Francs of today’s money which Haiti had been forced to pay Paris after achieving freedom from colonial subjugation by France thus becoming the hemisphere’s first independent black nation (Edmund Rice Centre, 2010).
Aristide’s demand against France for reparations is widely speculated to have played a role in France’s decision to support the coup on 29 February 2004 to oust him from power. Regarding the reasons behind the 2004 coup which ousted Aristide from power, chairperson of the Haiti-Jamaica Exchange Committee Myrtha Desulme, asserted, “I believe that (the call for reparations) could have something to do with it, because they (France) were definitely not happy about it, and made some very hostile comments… (But) I believe that he did have grounds for that demand, because that is what started the downfall of Haiti” (Miller, 2004). On the issue of reparations for Haiti, academic and dissident Noam Chomsky asserted, “The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilised, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore, we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.’ Then you will see the beginnings of civilization” (Barsamian and Chomsky 2005, 164).
In the sphere of global governance, what Stephanie Wolf describes as a ‘redress and reparation movement’ is fast becoming an essential element of national as well as international policy formulation. Reparation politics are on the forefront of discussions on large-scale atrocities in the West, such as the Holocaust. In the territory of Turtle Island that we know as Canada, a much-needed discourse on reparations, apologies and redress is taking shape, albeit at a relatively slow pace. The Indigenous communities of these territories faced [and in many aspects, continue to face] high levels of violence, torture, murder, deprivation and systemic discrimination. Apologies, compensation and reparations for atrocities such as the system of ‘Indian Residential Schools‘, to give but one example, are very much an ongoing process.
2022 marks the 74th anniversary of Sri Lanka securing Dominion Status within the Commonwealth. Ceylon was the first Crown Colony outside the ‘Old Commonwealth’ [white settler-colonial places such as Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand] to obtain Dominion Status. The paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the socio-political life of post-1948 Sri Lanka are such that we refer to the day on which we were given Dominion Status [with the British monarch continuing to be our head of state] as our ‘Independence Day’.
In terms of national sovereignty, it would be more justifiable to consider 22 May, the day on which the Constitution of the First Republic was promulgated in 1972, as Sri Lanka’s ‘Independence Day’, if not ‘National Day’. The 1972 Constitution, however, marked the most poignant expression of ethnic outbidding that came to being as the primary consequence of the British-induced constitution-making and institution-building experiment in Sri Lanka.
It was a truly majoritarian constitution that shamelessly shunned minority rights. Not even the namesake minority safeguard in the Soulbury Constitution, namely its Section 29, was spared. In this sense, 22 May 1972 marks the ultimate entrenchment of ‘divide and rule’ tactics on our colonised soil and mindsets. Having that day as National Day would give us more food for thought annually, on the importance of national unity, reconciliation and building solidarities across the diverse mosaic that is the Sri Lankan people.
Most importantly, discussions on ‘independence’, ‘national sovereignty’, and ‘self-government’ in Sri Lanka are totally devoid of any focus whatsoever on the adverse effects of colonialism. We seldom collectively reflect upon the fact that the impact of colonial rule is continuously felt to the present-day and beyond. The consequences of three centuries of Western colonisation, especially the 150 years of British colonisation, are very much of ‘contemporary’ relevance. Colonial mindsets, colonial hangovers, colonially induced stereotypes wield an extremely powerful influence in all aspects of public life as well as in the personal spheres of many of our fellow citizens.
In this article, we contend that the British government and the British monarchy must apologise for its colonisation of Sri Lanka, for their decisive role in raising ethnic tensions that eventually led to a long civil war, and continuing politics of ethno-national antagonism. The apology should be made, preferably, by the British monarch or by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister or the monarch, in their apology to the people of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, must explicitly mention the role that they played as colonisers in provoking ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka.
Most notably, Britain must apologise for its disregard towards minority leaders of Sri Lanka, whose repeated pleas for adequate minority safeguards were largely ignored in British constitutional experiments.
If the British, in their apology, take responsibility for their role in aggravating ethnic tensions, it can provide a much-needed starting point towards inter-ethnic reconciliation in Sri Lanka. It will be helpful in publicly coming to terms with the fact that Britain’s colonial policies were significantly responsible for setting up the institutions which paved the way for ethnic outbidding in the post-independence era.
By way of reparations, Britain could, for example, provide funding directed towards building new homes for Sri Lankans at the lower echelons of the social ladder [especially of ethnic minority communities] displaced by the 30-year war, while providing assistance to the Government of Sri Lanka in restoring infrastructure in the war-affected north and east. However, the reality is that no financial payment is sufficient as reparations for the misery and bloodshed caused by the persistent effects of Britain’s colonial policies in Sri Lanka.
The fact that colonisation in any shape or form is deeply problematic, that it is a process of control and repression, does not require any reiteration here. As we shall highlight below, the evolution of constitutionalism and governance in Sri Lanka is directly intertwined with the oppressive legacy of British colonisation. We cannot talk about constitution-making, law making, or even the ‘mace’ in the Parliament of Sri Lanka without referring to Britain and British rule of the island.
Over the years, Sri Lankans as a people have somewhat failed to adequately take stock of the destructive legacy of colonisation, and what it did to the socio-political fabric of the land. Instead, Sri Lankans of all ethnicities and faith traditions, especially those of the socioeconomic and political elite, have been perpetuating colonial structures of oppression that the British introduced, in some cases overtly and in many others covertly, in the guise of conforming to practices of democratic governance.
In the section that follows, we shall engage in a very brief discussion of some aspects of the constitutional and political decision-making-related errors made by the British in the early decades of the last century, which have had a lasting adverse impact on ethno-national politics in Sri Lanka. This discussion is by no means extensive, nor does it encompass a fully comprehensive discussion of constitutionalism, which would be beyond the remit of this article.
This article also does not touch upon the multitude of socio-economic, culturally genocidal and highly exploitative aspects of colonisation that imperatively call for an apology. Instead, the objective here is to provide an überblick of the deeply problematic nature of Eurocentric constitutional experimentation on a non-Western socio-political and cultural context. This salient reality alone warrants an abject and unambiguous apology from the colonising power.
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The colonisation of language
The Colebrook-Cameron Commission from 1829 to 1832 was a committee sent by the British government to examine its colonial government in Ceylon. The commission, with initial goals towards undertaking economic reforms throughout Ceylon, also instituted plans of language reform which proved to have detrimental effects in post-independent Ceylon. The Commission recommended that English become the medium of instruction at secondary and tertiary levels. The British viewed the English language as superior over the indigenous languages of Tamil and Sinhala (Herath 2015, 249).
To ensure the value of the English language remained high, the British felt it was best to restrict the education of the language to a small segment of the society despite widespread interest among the general population to learn the language (Herath 2015, 250). As asserted by distinguished Sri Lankan historian, K.M. De Silva within his book, A History of Sri Lanka, the British-led government’s desire to pursue education in English was for the pure interest of training a small segment of native Sri Lankans to work within the lower sectors of the colonial administration (De Silva 1981).
According to English professor and Sri Lankan Trotskyist politician Doric de Souza, “On the eve of the Dominion Status, only 6% of the population was reported in the census as literate in English, although the test for this literacy was almost elementary” and it was a segment of that 6% of the population which were utilised to work in the lower rungs of the British Ceylon colonial administration (Fernando, Gunesekera and Parakrama 2010, 31).
The introduction of English by the British, with the colonialist’s desire for the language to only be learned by a small segment of the population who would be indentured servants of the colonial administration, created an economic and social disparity within the island that exists to this day. English was regarded then, and now, as a requirement in order to achieve social and economic mobility. English, as described by K.M. De Silva, was “the hallmark of elite status” (De Silva 1981, 332). Owing in part also to the education system implemented by American missionaries, the minority Tamils had more access to the English language than the majority Sinhalese population and thus disproportionately gained more positions within the colonial administration, consequently fostering social and economic resentment among the Sinhalese (Herath 2015, 250).
Upon independence, in order to overthrow British dominance, Sinhalese nationalists felt the need to do away with English as the national language. The Official Language Act of 1956, commonly known as the Sinhala Only Act, sought to make Sinhala the only official language in post-independent Ceylon. The Sinhala Only Act was implemented by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1956 (DeVotta 2010, 119).
The Act was a direct repudiation of the British colonial imposition of the English language. Within the Act, however, the Sinhalese refused to recognise Tamil as an official language. As the Sinhalese learned from the British, language can be used as a tool of oppression. Making Sinhala the only official language of the country immediately dispossessed Tamil speakers from government positions, administrative services, legal services, and other privileged positions within society if they did not understand the Sinhala language.
As noted by Michael Brown and Sumit Ganguly, in their book, Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, “In 1956, 30 percent of the Ceylon administrative service, 50 percent of the clerical service, 60 percent of engineers and doctors, and 40 percent of the armed forces were Tamil. By 1970 those numbers had plummeted to 5 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, and 1 percent, respectively” (Ganguly and Brown 2003, 129). It is thus worth understanding, in addition to repudiating the British, the Sinhala Only Act was designed to subjugate the minority Tamils as retaliation, in the eyes of Sinhalese nationalists, for holding disproportionately favourable positions within British Ceylon.
Shortly after the Sinhala Only Act was passed in 1956, there was an ethnic pogrom in 1958 against the minority Tamil community at the hands of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalists, killing anywhere from an estimated 150 to 1,000 Tamils. This was the first of many ethnic pogroms against minority Tamils that would occur in independent Sri Lanka—the root causes of which can be traced back to the British.
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Constitutional blunders: A continuing quagmire
After the Colebrook-Cameron reforms of 1833, the British transferred political power to Sri Lanka [then Ceylon] in two main stages: in 1931 via the Donoughmore Commission and in 1948 via the Soulbury Commission which was announced in 1944 (Wickramasinghe 2010, 41). These two stages of Western constitutional reform were central to setting up the framework for ethno-nationally motivated discrimination against minority communities by successive Sinhala-Buddhist-dominated governments.
A system of ‘communal representation’ was in place from 1915 to 1931, with a certain number of seats assigned to English-speaking elite Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Burghers, etc. In 1931, the Donoughmore reforms abolished communal representation. This strengthened the hands of the political class of the majority Sinhalese community. The Donoughmore Commission created Executive Committees, where the local population had a considerable role in administration (except in reserved prerogatives such as finance and defence).
The Commission extended the franchise and allowed elections based on universal suffrage. Upon abolishing communal representation in executive councils, the Donoughmore Commission turned out to be a failure with respect to the fact that it did not suggest any alternative such as a workable form of federalism to contain communalism and ensure adequate political representation of the minority communities.
The Donoughmore Saga
The Donoughmore Report was, by and large, exemplary of the way in which the British acted throughout all of its colonies. They imposed policies with a blatant disregard to genuinely incorporate the views of local stakeholders. The report’s condemnation of communal representation on the one hand, and avoidance of adequately addressing the concerns of minority groups on the other, happened to be crucial in bringing repressed ethno-national tensions to the surface.
The Donoughmore dispensation created a situation in which divisive and toxic ethnonational concerns became the primary preoccupation of local leaders. Many Sinhalese politicians, for example, were upset that franchise had been extended to plantation workers of South Indian descent [Indian Tamils who migrated to Sri Lanka as indentured labourers under British rule] almost on the same terms as the indigenous population.
Sinhalese politicians were concerned that an extension of franchise to Indian plantation workers would increase the influence of the European planters, the employers and profiteers of indentured Indian labour. Furthermore, Sinhalese politicians feared that the Indians would henceforth undermine Sinhalese interests in plantation districts where the Indians were by then dominant in terms of demographics. In post-1948 Sri Lanka, Sinhalese politicians took action based on these fears and prejudices, by enacting the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 which made Indian plantation workers stateless (Wickramasinghe 2010, 48).
In sum, this Act created two types of citizenship: citizenship by descent and citizenship by registration. In both cases, substantive documentary evidence was required from applicants. However, most Indian Tamil workers were illiterate and very few actually had documentary proof. This requirement of documentary evidence, such as registration of birth, is indicative of how the anglicised Sri Lankan elite had come to consider features of European social organisation as the status quo. Over 700,000 Indian Tamils were thus rejected citizenship, making them stateless. It is worth noting, after Ceylon’s independence in 1948, it was the Indian Plantation Tamils, not the Sri Lankan Tamils, who were the second largest population in the country after the Sinhalese. The Indian Plantation Tamils, for instance, in the 1953 census reportedly consisted of 12% of the population, while the Sri Lankan Tamils consisted of only 10%.3 So, the Ceylon Citizenship Act, triggered by the ethno nationalism of the Sinhalese as a result of Britain’s imposition of the Donoughmore commission, had dispossessed the second largest population in the country from being citizens. Subsequently, in 1964, as a result of an agreement between India and Sri Lanka, about 525,000 Indian Tamils living in Sri Lanka were repatriated back to India.4
Minority leaders such as Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, on behalf of Tamils, and T.B. Jayah, on behalf of Muslims, made pleas to the British that the Donoughmore Commission is unacceptable to the interests of their respective communities. The implementation of the Donoughmore reforms effectively removed the “weightage for the minorities to compensate for the numerical superiority of the Sinhalese” and left the nation devoid of any adequate checks and balances to prevent discriminatory majoritarian policies from being enacted by Sinhalese-majority governments (De Silva 1981, 427).
In 1931, Tamil politicians in the North boycotted the first elections under the new system of universal suffrage. Commenting on the implications of the Donoughmore reforms, British academic Jonathan Spencer asserted that “the distribution of population, and the constituency-based system of representation, resulted in two political zones: a zone of permanent opposition in the North, where Tamil parties dominated, and a zone of competition in the south, where (mostly Sinhala) politicians fought for the votes that would get them close to government. The fault lines established in the electoral politics of the 1930s became the disputed borderlands in the civil war 50 years later” (Spencer).
Although the Donoughmore constitution did introduce welfare provisions, a rarity for an exploitative British colony, these provisions are unimpressive considering a backdrop in which adequate political representation among the pluralistic communities was not established in any reasonable measure.
On a par with regional and global developments of the day, Sri Lankan leaders involved in campaigns for self-government began calling for enhanced constitutional provisions by the early/mid 1940s. Subsequently, the British concocted the Soulbury Commission in 1944. The Soulbury Commission Report introduced a model of Westminster-style bicameral government. Once again, the minority protections it offered were far from adequate.
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Soulbury Sequence: Deeper into the abyss of ethnic outbidding
The Soulbury Report contained a clause which later became Section 29 (2) in the 1946 Constitution, prohibiting any legislation “infringing on religious freedom or discrimination against persons of any community or religion.” It also stipulated that a two-thirds majority was required for any changes in the constitution or any piece of legislation aimed at discriminating against a racial or religious minority.
Nevertheless, these minority safeguards were inadequate, in that they did not, in any reasonable measure, correspond to the demands put forth by the Ceylon Tamil and Ceylon Indian leadership. In February of 1944, for example, GG Ponnambalam of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, voiced a proposal before the Soulbury commissioners that called for balanced representation known as “fifty-fifty” which advocated for an equal proportion of seats between the majority and minority communities.
Despite such pleas, the British ruled that minority communities already constituted “a large and powerful enough block” to counter any extremist legislation. The Soulbury Report ensured that the Governor-General would exercise his discretion on any bill that evoked serious opposition by any racial or religious community and that, in his opinion, was likely to involve oppression or serious injustice to any such community.
In 1971, the Sri Lankan Government implemented what was known as the Standardization Act which disproportionately targeted Tamils’ admission to universities by requiring that Tamils score higher in entrance exams than their Sinhalese counterparts. Section 29 of the British-engineered Soulbury Commission was futile to prevent this discriminatory legislation from being implemented. Professor Ratnajeevan Hoole, in a letter to the Washington Times, recounted how he, as a Tamil minority, was affected by the government’s orchestrated policies of discrimination in regards to education: “I took the common Advanced Level exam in 1969 and was admitted to the engineering faculty. The Government then redid the admissions after adding some 28 marks to the four-subject aggregate of Sinhalese students. I lost my seat. They effectively claimed that the son of a Sinhalese minister in an elite Colombo school was disadvantaged vis-a-vis a Tamil tea-plucker’s son”.5
The reason why the Sinhalese nationalist government pursued the discriminatory Standardization Act was to retaliate against the Tamil minority for their overrepresentation in universities and the civil sector under British rule. Under British rule, Professor Neil DeVotta reports that “the Tamil population held 33% of civil service jobs, 40% of judicial service jobs and 31% of university students, figures that are much higher than their representative share” (De Votta, 2004).
Campaigns for self-rule in Sri Lanka, if not anticolonial struggles, were very different from such struggles across the Palk Straits. Unlike India, Sri Lanka lacked a cohesive mass-based national movement. Instead, mobilisation for self-rule took place in the form of what has been described as “fragmentary associations”. Subsequently, ‘most political parties [like the United National Party] were formed in anticipation of the 1947 elections.’ In fact, as asserted by constitutionalist Sir Ivor Jennings himself, “the constitution which Sri Lanka had until 1947 was designed to suit a legislature without parties and therefore actively discouraged them.”
The British were confident that a political system drafted to conform to Western interests, a system that, according to them, “worked well for centuries in Britain’’ can be applied to Sri Lanka’s pluralistic society, and that loyal, anglicised Sinhala elites can be trusted to protect minority rights. Speaking of the Soulbury Constitution, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (who eventually deployed ethno-national politics to make his way to Premiership in 1956), echoed these sentiments, asserting: “There was no fight for that freedom which involved a fight for principles, policies and programs which could not be carried out unless that freedom was obtained. No. It just came overnight. We just woke up one day and were told, you are a dominion now.”
Persistent blunders: The reason for the call for a formal apology
In 1948, Sri Lanka gained Dominion status, which was hitherto the exclusive reserve of Old Commonwealth possessions such as Canada and Australia. The Dominion State had to bear the brunt of problematic British policies implemented prior to 1948. The model in place was one that was easily conducive to triggering ethno-national tensions. Very soon, politicians from all ethno-national backgrounds came to terms with a reality that applies to Sri Lankan politics to this very day – that arousing ethno-national antagonisms among the masses is a sure strategy to access and reinforce political power.
The entire political saga of the Dominion State, of the Republic of Sri Lanka and of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, has been marked by this inclination to steer, rather than contain, ethnonational tensions. The roots of this political culture of spewing division among the masses lie in the constitutional experiments and fatal political miscalculations of the British. The consequences and ramifications of these problematic policies continue to be felt to this very day, and they will shape the political landscape of Sri Lanka for many more decades to come.
Hence the present call for a formal apology from the British Crown and the British Government, to the Government and the people of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. It is a first step in developing a discourse on reparations, and in recognising the sheer magnitude of colonial atrocities and their present-day ramifications, both of which are some seven decades overdue.
Late is indeed better than never.
Footnotes
1Britons suffer ‘historical amnesia’ over atrocities of their former empire, says author. Independent, 5 March 2017: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/shashi-tharoor-britain-india-suffer-historical-amnesia-over-atrocities-of-their-former-empire-says-author-a7612086.html
2Foreign Office hoarding 1 million historic files in secret archive. The Guardian, 18 October 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-office-historic-files-secret-archive
3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sri_Lanka
4https://archive.ceylontoday.lk/print-more/51162
5https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-times-daily/20080223/281827164461882
Works cited list
Barsamian, David, and Noam Chomsky. 2005. Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World. New York: Metropolitan Books.
DeVotta, Neil. “Politics and governance in post-independence Sri Lanka.” Edited by Paul R Brass. Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics (Routledge), 2010.
De Votta, Neil. Blowback: Ethnolinguistic nationalism, Institutional Decay and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford University Press, 2004.
De Silva, K M. A History of Sri Lanka. London: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Edmund Rice Centre. 2010. Haiti: fed on dependency, starved of independence. May. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/erc/pages/107/attachments/original/1460606501/ERC_JustComment_13.3_Haiti_referenced.pdf?1460606501
Fernando, Siromi, Manique Gunesekera, and Arjuna Parakrama. 2010. English in Sri Lanka: Ceylon English, Lankan English, Sri Lankan English. Colombo: Aitken Spence Printing.
Ganguly, Sumit, and Michael E Brown. Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia. Boston: The MIT Press, 2003.
Herath, Sreemali. 2015. “Language policy, ethnic tensions and linguistic rights.” Language Policy 14.
Miller, Dionne Jackson. 2004. Inter Press Service. March 12. Accessed December 15, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20081202065348/http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=22828.
Spencer, Jonathan. “The Culture, Politics and Economics of Peace in Sri Lanka.” LSE/DESTIN Seminar Series, 28 January 2004.
Wickramasinghe, Nira. 2010. “Sri Lanka’s independence: Shadows over a colonial graft.” Edited by Paul R Brass. Routledge Handbook of South Asian Politics.
(Pitasanna Shanmugathas is a graduate of the Master of Global Affairs program at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Pitasanna has worked in multiple organisations advocating for peace and disarmament. Since 2013, Pitasanna has been the director of a human-rights based social media group, Stop Human Rights Violations in Sri Lanka (SHRVIS), which works to spread information about the past and ongoing human rights abuses of both state and non-state actors in the war-torn nation. In addition, SHRVIS works to promote a federal solution to address the grievances of the minority communities within the nation.)
(Chamindra Weerawardhana is a writer, political and international affairs analyst, academic and educator. She is also a human rights activist with a strong intersectional feminist focus. Her discipline is international politics, with an interest in the politics of deeply divided places, intersectional feminist international relations and the politics of intersectional justice. A Sri Lankan national, Chamindra has held teaching and research positions in several countries including France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She has also engaged in political organising in Northern Ireland and globally. Chamindra is the author of ‘Decolonising Peacebuilding: Managing Conflict from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka and Beyond’.)
