In April 2022, Sri Lanka erupted in political crisis as millions of its citizens across the social spectrum took to the streets demanding justice, democracy, and systemic change. Ultimately those protests toppled a government for the first time in the country’s history, with the cabinet and Prime Minister resigning in May and the President two months after that.
The roots and reverberations of those upheavals – the 2022 People’s Struggle, or Aragalaya – were the subject of a special feature in spring 2024 in issue 97 of History Workshop Journal. It was a feature that emerged out of complete serendipity, from the coincidental, near-simultaneous submission of three entirely separate articles: Historical Vistas on Sri Lanka’s 2022 People’s Uprising by Samal Hemachandra and Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Go Home Banda’: Sri Lanka, Statue Politics, and the 2022 Protests by Lara Wijesuriya, and Restless Somnambulists: Reflections on Violence, Accountability, and Historical Practice from Sri Lanka by Andi Schubert. While the pieces had very dissimilar arguments, they shared a focus on certain key questions: about historical memory in the face of violence, about the persistence of historical traumas, about the possibilities and limits of scholarly inquiry in struggles for accountability, justice, and change.
A final note. We first tried to convene this conversation right after HWJ 97 came out, but in the end it proved impossible to arrange. Then in November last year Sri Lanka held a new round of elections that had an entirely unexpected result. At that point, Andi Schubert reached out to us all to suggest that we make another try with the roundtable – both to discuss the original articles and to give all the authors a chance to revisit them in light of recent events.