Sunday, September 29, 2013

Global Economic Crisis To Dispossession In Jaffna: Neoliberalism And The Search For Alternatives

By Ahilan Kadirgamar -September 29, 2013

Social Science Study Circle 19 September 2013

Ahilan Kadirgamar

In response to an article I wrote last month in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) on the second wave of neoliberalism in Sri

Lanka,Muttukrishna Sarvananthan and Kumar David have offered disparate critiques from diverging positions. While Sarvananthan claims that government policy is insufficiently neoliberal (EPW, 21st September 2013), David takes the view that neoliberalism is more or less redundant (Sunday Island, 15th September 2013). In the meantime, several interesting questions about neoliberalism were raised in a discussion organized by the Social Science Study Circle in Jaffna last week. In this article, I try to explain the theory of neoliberalism in order to bring more clarity to these debates.

There has been considerable discussion and work on neoliberalism in many parts of the world, particularly in relation to the economic crises of recent times. However, there has been little work and little debate on neoliberalism in Sri Lanka. In a previous article, I advanced the argument that a second wave of neoliberalism was fast transforming the post-war economy in Sri Lanka. These economic changes, I argued, were shaped by policies prioritised in the second term of the Rajapaksa regime and the fall out of the global economic crisis with capital flowing to “emerging markets.” While I historically located my argument in the neoliberal character of the Sri Lankan economy over the last three decades, I argued that the acceleration of neoliberal policies in recent years in the context of post-war stability and an authoritarian regime was rapidly reshaping class relations in Sri Lanka. Read More

Indian University Offers Students Lessons On Love

September 29, 2013

Now, a prestigious Indian university is offering students a chance to learn the answer.

The sociology department at Presidency University in Kolkata will offer the course “Love” as an elective to first-year students, particularly those who are studying more technical subjects such as maths and physics, said Souvik Mondal, an assistant professor of sociology at the university.