This text arose from my experiences during a writers’ residency in Sri Lanka in the build-up to the January 2015 election, in which Maithripala Sirisena usurped the long-standing president Mahinda Rajapaksa. It tracks notions of democracy and justice as put forth by a range of public figures commenting in the international news media, as Tamils and other activists campaigned for an independent probe into war crimes that occurred during the final stages of the civil conflict that ended in 2009. Returning to Sydney, I continued to monitor commentary regarding the tacit agreement between Australian and Sri Lankan governments that produced the ‘AusLankan’ asylum seeking subject and found myself amongst grass roots ‘people-to-people’ networks that were challenging these powers.
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, July 2016.
