UoP Staff Publications

Permanent URI for this community

https://ir.lib.pdn.ac.lk/handle/20.500.14444/60

Browse

Browsing UoP Staff Publications by Subject "Authoritarianism"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    An eager embrace: emergency rule and authoritarianism in republican Sri Lanka
    (Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2015) Udagama, Deepika
    Much of Sri Lanka’s post-independence period has seen governance under states of emergency. The invocation of the Public Security Ordinance (PSO)1 by successive governments was a common feature of political life and, indeed, an integral aspect of the political culture of the republic. Several generations of Sri Lankans have grown up and have been socialised into political and public life in an environment fashioned by states of exception replete with attendant symbols and imagery. Images of police with automatic weapons, military check-points, barbed wire, lengthy periods of detention (often administrative detention) mainly of the political ‘other’, the trauma of political violence and the ever- present sense of fear became the ‘normal’. The state of exception has become the norm in Sri Lanka from the 1970s onwards. The permanency of the state of exception was further consolidated when the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, No. 48 of 1979 (PTA) was converted into a permanent law in 1982.2 Although not an emergency regulation, the PTA conferred extraordinary powers on the executive branch (e.g. powers of arrest and detention) to deal with what it recognised as acts of terrorism. That in combination with the ever-present emergency powers, which were sanctioned by the Constitution, provided a formidable legal framework to entrench the state of exception. The omnipotence of the executive presidency created by the second republican constitution (1978) amplified the potency of those exceptional powers. Sri Lanka had become the quintessential ‘National Security State’, the vestiges of which have not been shaken off even five