Democracy Protest and Resilience Reflections on the Aragalaya Uprising in Sri Lanka

Kalinga Tudor Silva is Professor Emeritus at University of Peradeniya and the research lead in the Hidden Peace Builders Project in Sri Lanka. He holds a BA from the University of Peradeniya and PhD from Monash University, Australia. He headed the Centre for Poverty Analysis from 2010 to 2013, and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies from 2007 to 2008. As a guest editor of the Journal of Caste and Social Exclusion published by the Brandeis University in the US, he contributed to the publication of two Symposia on Caste in Sri Lanka in 2025. He was the chief editor of the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences published by the National Science Foundation from 2015 to 20. His publications include Decolonization, Development and Disease: A Social History of Malaria in Sri Lanka, 2014, Checkpoint, Temple, Church and Mosque: a Collaborative Ethnography of War and Peace, 2015 and Why Reconciliation Matters, 2022.

Ramesh Ramasamy is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He obtained his PhD under the NORHED project on Governance and Policy Studies in South Asia. His research interests are mainly on the quality of government, democracy, corruption, institutional trust, public service delivery, and citizenship rights. He has published articles in journals such as Contemporary South Asia, Asian Journal of Political Science, Policy Studies, Public Organization Review, and Journal of Youth Studies. He has contributed chapters to several edited volumes published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, and Oxford University Press.