Category: Interview

Dr. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky was the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights between June 2014 and April 2020. He was previously a sovereign debt expert of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He is currently based at the National Council for Scientific and Technical… Continue reading “Austerity driven economic reforms affect women more than men” – An Interview with Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky

Menaha Kandasamy is the first woman to serve as the President and General Secretary of the Ceylon Plantation Workers’ Union and a Founding Member of the Red Flag Women’s Movement. In this interview with Hasini Lecamwasam from Polity, Menaha talks about her history of activism within the plantation sector, plantation worker’s struggles for fair wages… Continue reading “Women Workers’ Health and Wellbeing Have Never Been a Concern of Plantation Companies” – An Interview with Menaha Kandasamy

Colombo’s Galle Face Green became a symbol of democratic activism in Sri Lanka, for more than 100 days from April to July 2022 with young people in particular from across the country converging there to protest against a president, his family, and their government, whose corruption and short sighted policies were chiefly blamed for the… Continue reading “Galle Face was Important, but Not the Whole Thing” – Dileepa Witharana

University students are not new to political dissent and action, and the current wave of anti-government protests in Sri Lanka have been no exception. They have been actively denouncing many actions of the current government since early on, independently as well as in solidarity with other movements. In this interview, Hasini Lecamwasam from Polity speaks… Continue reading “People are starting to see that we were right”: Interview with University Students by Hasini Lecamwasam

On 4th April 2022, Independence Square was filled with an estimated 8000 people, possibly in one of the biggest political gatherings the square has seen in recent times. Most of them were young people reiterating the call reverberating through a number of smaller protests across Colombo in the month of March—for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to… Continue reading ‘The Act of Protest is a Privilege’: Serika Siriwardhana from Yellow for Democracy interviewed by Treshan Fernando

A Sri Lankan delegation was in Washington DC over  the week of 18 April to try to secure up to $4 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other lenders to help the island nation pay for food and fuel imports as well as  restructure its debt. The last time the IMF provided a… Continue reading Sri Lanka: No agreement with the IMF!
Eric Toussaint interviewed by Sushovan Dhar

According to Eric Toussaint, debt restructuring has always been the result of economic and geopolitical calculation, rarely producing a favourable long-term outcome for the debtors; unless the creditors saw a strategic advantage for themselves in it. Sovereign debt “restructuring”, as it is now called by the IMF, the Paris Club and the big banking corporations, and more recently by the… Continue reading Restructuring, Audit, Suspension and Abolition of the Debt
Éric Toussaint interviewed in 2015 by Maud Bailly for CADTM

The government’s overnight ban on the import of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and weedicides, to make Sri Lanka’s agriculture “100 percent organic”, of 06 May 2021, caught everyone by surprise. No preparation had been made. Local production and supply of organic inputs was nowhere near the level needed for substitution. There had been no prior restoration… Continue reading ‘Ecological Agriculture is a Political Question’

This conversation was part of a panel discussion on Imaginative Geographies: The Place of Sri Lanka in Contemporary Sri Lankan Writing in English, featured at the virtual festival on Imaginative Geographies organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College, London (UCL) on 5 May 2021. The panel was co-hosted by the Department of English,… Continue reading In and Out of Place: A Conversation between Shyam Selvadurai and Neloufer de Mel