This book provides a broad picture of Sri Lanka’s on-going political and economic crisis as the culmination of several centuries of colonial and neo-colonial developments. The book presents the Sri Lankan crisis as an exemplification of a broader global existential crisis facing more and more debt trapped countries, especially in the post-colonial Global South. The book’s in-depth case study raises important questions pertaining to sovereignty and political and economic democracy in Sri Lanka and the world at large.
The book also explores the emergence of the crisis in the context of the accelerating geopolitical conflict between China and the USA in the Indian Ocean. It ponders if the debt crisis, economic collapse and political destabilization in Sri Lanka were intentionally precipitated to the advantage of the Quadrilateral Alliance (USA, India, Australia and Japan).
Moving beyond geopolitical rivalry, the book juxtaposes Sri Lanka’s political-economic crisis with the broader ecological crisis of climate change and sea-level rise.
The book concludes with a consideration of the ethical dilemmas behind the debt and survival crisis in Sri Lanka and across the world. It points out a range of social movements and initiatives in Sri Lanka and the Global South which subscribe to collective and ecological alternatives and a Middle Path of sustainability and social justice.
- Timely and well-researched
- A global perspective on the Sri Lankan crisis
- Offers ecological and collective alternatives as crisis resolution
Yazar hakkında
Asoka Bandarage has taught at Yale University, Brandeis University, Macalester College, Georgetown University, European Peace University and Mount Holyoke College, MA where she received tenure. She was the Chair of the Women’s Studies Program at Mount Holyoke. Prof. Bandarage is the author of Colonialism in Sri Lanka (Mouton, 1983/Vimukti 2020), Women, Population and Global Crisis (Zed, 1997), The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka: Terrorism, Ethnicity, Political Economy (Routledge, 2010) and other publications. She serves on boards including Critical Asian Studies, Interfaith Moral Action on Climate. Bandarage is a co-founder of the Committee on Women, Population and Health, guest editor of Political Environments and the Woman of Power magazines. She has presented hundreds of lectures and media interviews (including CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, Bloomberg News), organized many conferences and seminars and received numerous fellowships for her work. www.bandarage.com