Four years ago, Colombo was the world’s cautionary tale. A sovereign default, fuel queues that stretched for kilometres, a presidential palace occupied by its own citizens. This week, the same city is hosting trade unionists, party cadre, scholars, and ministers from across Asia, from Nepal...

Two days after the United States and Israel launched attacks that killed Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and hundreds of others—including more than 160 children in a strike on a girls’ school—a United States submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean...

Ninety years ago, on 18 December 1935, a handful of young people came together to establish the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Leslie Goonewardena, General Secretary of the LSSP from 1935 to 1977, later wrote that the party was founded...

Sundays at Paramasivam Pushpalatha’s home used to be a much livelier affair. It was her only day off from the factory and so she would pack seven days of domesticity into one. Her husband, Govindasamy Sivakumar, would sometimes take walks to avoid the hustle and...

Sri Lanka has undergone one of the sharpest and fastest episodes of austerity in history, driven by a massive retrenchment in public investment and the suppression of real wages, according to a World Bank report. ...

“Don’t worry, I will control the situation”, former president Ranil Wickremesinghe told reporters and supporters as he arrived at court in a van stuffed full of lawyers and legal aides on 22 August. Hours later, local news was flooded with photographs of Wickremesinghe in...

Since Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected in September 2024, he has made four state visits. First to India, then to China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Vietnam. This itinerary says a lot about the state of the international economy and debt-saddled...

Seventy years ago, representatives of twenty-nine countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, for the Asian-African Conference. Among them was Sir John Kotelawala, the Prime Minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was one of the five sponsor countries of the Bandung Conference alongside Burma (now Myanmar),...

In 1964, during the second summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Cairo, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) Sirimavo Bandaranaike proposed that the Indian Ocean be turned into a ‘zone of peace’ that was free of military bases and nuclear weapons. In...

On Thursday, 3 April, Sri Lankans woke up to the alarming news that the United States, the country’s single largest export destination, would be applying 44% tariffs. These tariffs will hit Sri Lanka just months after it officially exited sovereign default status in December 2024. ...