Sri Lanka was heading towards a political and economic crisis long before protestors in the capital of Colombo took to the streets and stormed the President’s House in early July, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and resign. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, a major contributor to the national economy, basically evaporated overnight. The war in Ukraine and Western sanctions on Russia, moreover, have triggered spiraling prices for essential resources and commodities that Sri Lankans depend on through imports. But the unfolding crisis in Sri Lanka was also manufactured by government mismanagement, corruption, and the consolidation of power in the decade following the end of the civil war in 2009, which embroiled the country in a perpetual state of emergency and violence for nearly 30 years. In part two of a TRNN’s special series on Sri Lanka’s crisis, Dr. Mythri Jegathesan examines the country’s 30-year civil war, and its lingering consequences in today’s crisis.

Dr. Mythri Jegathesan is a professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka.

Post-Production: Adam Coley

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

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Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.