Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) has a deep legacy for creating debate and discussion on the agrarian change in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. SSA carried out one of the groundbreaking research projects in agrarian studies that resulted in an edited volume titled Capital and Peasant Production: Studies in the continuity and discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka, (1985). This seminal work continues to be cited by political economists working on Sri Lanka since the 1980s, and almost four decades on Capital and Peasant Production, the issues that have come to predominate the political economic landscape of the 80s still continue to resonate in the present. Labour, access to land and capital, environmental degradation, problematic development policies and practices, albeit operating with varying intensity still dominates the social structure. Apart from a handful of studies, focus on the underlying causes of agrarian question have, since then received meagre scholarly attention.  

Therefore, with a view to create public engagement on agrarian studies, in 2023, the Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) initiated a regular monthly, seminar-discussion on contemporary agrarian political economy, through mapping an agenda for critical agrarian studies in Sri Lanka in the 21^st century. 

The seminars seek to be critical of the dominant paradigm in agrarian studies – to be found in international financial institutions, development and donor agencies, university faculties and agricultural research institutions, ministries of agriculture, think-tanks – of “the need to subsume everything to the market, to transform labour, natural resources, the means of production, goods and services into commodities, based on taken for granted principles of private property rights, money and competition—in short: capitalism” [Akram-Lodhi et. al. 2022: 2]. 

Fundamental to critical agrarian studies is how “social structures, agrarian institutions and political agency of social classes and groups are constructed, reproduced and transformed across space and over time. It privileges inquiries into how the exploited and the oppressed social classes and groups understand their conditions and try to subvert and change them …” [Borras 2023: 3]. Its objective therefore, is not only to understand the world, but also to transform it. 

The SSA seminars intend to investigate connections between agriculture (subsistence and cash crop cultivation, waged work, commercial/agribusiness and plantation crops, fisheries, animal husbandry, pastoralism); rurality; rural-urban linkages; markets; state; relations of class, gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, region; politics, law and governance; conflict; environment; climate; food systems; energy; water; health; techniques of production; livelihoods; rights, among others [Edelman 2016: 1]. 

The series hopes to be inclusive of diverse formats of knowledge generation, attribution, circulation, exchange and use, ranging from academic papers; field reports; critiques of classic, comparative and state-of-the-art texts; short films; fiction; Q&As with activists and scholars, and more.