Download or read book Sri Lanka s Development Since Independence written by W. D. Lakshman and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social, political, economic and constitutional developments are considered as well as the evolution of science and arts in the development process. This is in accordance with the Sri Lankan tradition of seeing the world as a connected whole."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Sri Lanka Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy written by Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the historical events of post-independence Sri Lanka, S. J. Tambiah analyzes the causes of the violent conflict between the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and the minority Tamils. He demonstrates that the crisis is primarily a result of recent societal stresses—educational expansions, linguistic policy, unemployment, uneven income distribution, population movements, contemporary uses of the past as religious and national ideology, and trends toward authoritarianism—rather than age-old racial and religious differences. "In this concise, informative, lucidly written book, scrupulously documented and well indexed, [Tambiah] trains his dispassionate anthropologist's eye on the tangled roots of an urgent, present-day problem in the passionate hope that enlightenment, understanding, and a generous spirit of compromise may yet be able to prevail."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor "An incredibly rich and balanced analysis of the crisis. It is exemplary in highlighting the general complexities of ethnic crises in long-lived societies carrying a burden of historical memories."—Amita Shastri, Journal of Asian Studies "Tambiah makes an eloquent case for pluralist democracy in a country abundantly endowed with excuses to abandon such an approach to politics."—Donald L. Horowitz, New Republic "An excellent and thought-provoking book, for anyone who cares about Sri Lanka."—Paul Sieghart, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book The History of Sri Lanka written by Patrick Peebles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-08-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sri Lanka—an island nation located in the Indian Ocean— has a population of approximately 19 million. Despite its diminuative size, however, Sri Lanka has a long and complex history. The diversity of its people has led to ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that continue to exist. Peebles describes the experiences of the country, from its earliest settlers, to civil war, to its current state, allowing readers to better understand this often misunderstood country. With an emphasis on the 20th century, chapters discuss the economy, religion, culture, and government of Sri Lanka. A timeline outlines key events in Sri Lankan history, as well as biographies of notable people, and a bibliographic essay.
Download or read book Education in Ceylon Before and After Independence 1939 1968 written by J. E. Jayasuriya and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sri Lanka in the Modern Age written by Nira Wickramasinghe and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-03-31 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s civil war has left Sri Lanka in an almost permanent state of crisis; conventional histories of the country by liberal and Marxist scholars in the last two decades have thus tended to focus on the state’s failure to accommodate the needs and demands of the minorities. The entire history of the twentieth century has been tied to this one key issue. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age offers a fresh perspective based on new research. Above all, the author has written a history of the peoples of Sri Lanka rather than a history of the nation-state.
Download or read book This Divided Island written by Samanth Subramanian and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samanth Subramanian has written about politics, culture, and history for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Now, Subramanian takes on a complex topic that touched millions of lives in This Divided Island. In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to an end the civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere, leaving few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he tells the story of Sri Lanka today. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.
Download or read book The Sri Lanka Reader written by John Holt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 791 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-four images and more than ninety classic and contemporary texts introduce Sri Lankas recorded history of more than two and a half millennia.
Download or read book Sri Lanka Human Rights and the United Nations written by Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the engagement between the United Nations’ human rights machinery and the respective governments since Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) joined the United Nations. Sri Lanka has a long and rich history of engagement with international human rights instruments. However, despite its active membership in the UN, the country’s post-colonial trials and tribulations are emblematic of the limited influence the international organisation has exerted on this country in the Global South. Assessing the impact of this international engagement on the country’s human rights infrastructure and situation, the book outlines Sri Lanka’s colonial and post-colonial development. It then considers the development of a domestic human rights infrastructure in the country. It also examines and analyzes Sri Lanka’s engagement with the UN’s treaty-based and charter-based human rights bodies, before offering conclusions concerning the impact of said engagement. The book offers an innovative approach to gauging the impact of international human rights engagement, while also taking into account the colonial and post-colonial imperatives that have partly dictated governmental behaviour. By doing so, the book seeks to combine and analyse international human rights law, post-colonial critique, studies on biopower, and critical approaches to international law. It will be a useful resource not only for scholars of international law, but also for practitioners and activists working in this area.
Download or read book Noontide Toll written by Romesh Gunesekera and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In postwar Sri Lanka, a hired driver observes his passengers—tourists, soldiers, businessmen, and others—in these linked stories by a “master storyteller” (The New York Times). Vasantha retired early, bought himself a van, and now works as a driver for hire. As he drives through Sri Lanka, carrying aid workers, entrepreneurs, and visiting families; meeting lonely soldiers and eager hoteliers, he engages them with self-deprecating wit and folksy wisdom—while revealing to us their uncertain lives with piercing insight. On his journey from the army camps in northern Jaffna to the moonlit ramparts of Galle, in the south, Vasantha slowly discovers the depth of his country’s troubles—as well as his own—while catching a glimmer of the promise the future might hold. From the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Reef comes a collection of “gracefully crafted road stories” that draws a potent portrait of postwar Sri Lanka and the ghosts of civil war (TheGuardian). Praise for Romesh Gunesekera “Monkfish Moon strikes the reader like a hammer blow. . . . Gunesekera’s subtly erotic prose animates Sri Lanka’s natural luxuriance, veined with menace.” —Voice Literary Supplement
Download or read book The Seasons of Trouble written by Rohini Mohan and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything. Rohini Mohan’s searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family. Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way – and almost his life – in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment. The Seasons of Trouble is a startling, brutal, yet beautifully written debut from a prize-winning journalist. It is a classic piece of reportage, five years in the making, and a trenchant, compassionate examination of the corrosive effect of conflict on a people.
Download or read book A History of Sri Lanka written by K M de Silva and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sri Lanka is an ancient civilization, shaped and thrust into the modern globalizing world by its colonial experience. With its own unique problems, many of them historical legacies, it is a nation trying to maintain a democratic, pluralistic state structure while struggling to come to terms with separatist aspirations. This is a complex story, and there is perhaps no better person to present it in reasoned, scholarly terms than K.M. de Silva, Sri Lanka’s most distinguished and prolific historian. A History of Sri Lanka, first published in 1981, has established itself as the standard work on the subject. This fully revised edition, in light of the most recent research, brings the story right up to the early years of the twenty-first century. The book provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of Sri Lanka’s development—from a classical Buddhist society and irrigation economy, to its emergence as a tropical colony producing some of the world’s most important cash crops, such as cinnamon, tea, rubber and coconut, and finally as an Asian democracy. It is a study of the political vicissitudes of Sri Lanka’s ancient civilization and the successive phases of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule. The unfortunate consequences of becoming a centre of ethnic tension and Sri Lanka’s long-standing relationship with India are also discussed. Exhaustively researched and analytical, this book is an invaluable reference source for students of ancient, colonial and post-colonial societies, ethnic conflict and democratic transitions, as well as for all those who simply want to get a feel of the rich and varied texture of Sri Lanka’s long history.
Download or read book The Cage written by Gordon Weiss and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Cage is a tightly written and clear-eyed narrative about one of the most disturbing human dramas of recent years. . . . A riveting, cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked political power in a country at war. A must-read." —Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Fall of Baghdad In the closing days of the thirty-year Sri Lankan civil war, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, according to United Nations estimates, as government forces hemmed in the last remaining Tamil Tiger rebels on a tiny sand spit, dubbed "The Cage." Gordon Weiss, a journalist and UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka during the final years of the war, pulls back the curtain of government misinformation to tell the full story for the first time. Tracing the role of foreign influence as it converged with a history of radical Buddhism and ethnic conflict, The Cage is a harrowing portrait of an island paradise torn apart by war and the root causes and catastrophic consequences of a revolutionary uprising caught in the crossfire of international power jockeying. Gordon Weiss has lived in New York and worked in numerous conflict and natural disaster zones including the Congo, Uganda, Darfur, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Haiti. Employed by the United Nations for over two decades, he continues to consult on war, extremism, peace building, and human rights.
Download or read book Dressing the Colonised Body written by Nira Wickramasinghe and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Book Explores Popular, Political And Symbolic Meanings Assigned To Dress In A Variety Of Colonial Contexts In Sri Lanka; Thus It Focuses On The Politics Of Nationalism And Identity Under Late Colonialism. Proceeding From The Understanding That Self-Representation Is At Its Peak At The Moment Of Political Independence, The Author Examines The Lineages That Exist Between That Moment In Sri Lanka And The Colonial Past, As Also The Meaning Of The Commemorations That Took Place On Independence Day.
Download or read book Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism written by A. Jeyaratnam Wilson and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The militarisation of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka began in the 1970s when attempts to reconcile by peaceful means the Tamils' claim for basic individual and collective rights with the Sinhalese need to allay their chronic sense of insecurity finally failed. Since then the struggle has intensified, erupting successively in the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983, and the army's assault on Jaffna in 1995. The mainly Hindu Sri Lankan Tamils have always been separated by language, religion, and history from the Buddhist Sinhalese although the minority community in the island vastly outnumbers the Sinhalese when the 40 million Tamils in South India are taken into account. The author's analysis is informed by first-hand knowledge and personal contact with many of the actors involved.
Download or read book Sri Lanka in the Modern Age written by Nira Wickramasinghe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the ethnic relations and politics in post 1978 Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Buddhism Betrayed written by Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-07-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to answer the question of how the Buddhist monks in today's Sri Lanka—given Buddhism's traditionally nonviolent philosophy—are able to participate in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils.
