RETHINKING THE ARAGALAYA UPRISING WITHIN THE NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATION OF SRI LANKAN DEPENDENT CAPITALISM

Date

2024-10-2

Author

Cassim, Aysha

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In 2022, Sri Lanka experienced its worst economic crisis since its independence which culminated in a mass citizens’ uprising dubbed the Aragalaya (‘Struggle’ in Sinhalese). The Aragalaya, which ousted the incumbent President from power, is hailed as a powerful defiance of citizens against the ruling elite that saw the rise of a unified opposition for the first time in the country’s history. The interpretations of the Aragalaya are complex. While the mainstream scholars are of the opinion that the economic mismanagement and the growing public discontent over corruption and nepotism during the previous Gotabaya Rajapaksa government were the contributing factors that gave birth to the Aragalaya, the alternative framing of the debate posits that Aragalaya is an overall response to a structural breakdown of Sri Lanka’s neoliberal regime of accumulation. In this thesis, I intend to make a further contribution to the alternative interpretations of Aragalaya by putting the economic crisis that led to the uprising into a long-term perspective. Employing an eclectic approach, I conduct a critical historical analysis of Sri Lanka’s post-independent capitalist development in order to situate the Aragalaya in the context of the country’s history since the colonial period. My dissertation is a modest attempt at finding answers to the core question of under what conditions the Sri Lankan economy developed into a catastrophe in 2022 with a series of fiscal and debt crises, ultimately triggering an uprising that stands as a unique social and political phenomenon of the times.

Subject Keywords

Dependent Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Uprising, Debt Crisis, Sri Lanka

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111461

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis