Writing in Foreign Policy, Neil Devotta, professor of international affairs at Wake Forest University, explains that “the roots of the current crisis lie with ethnocracy” which has led a country from meritocracy to kakistocracy – governance by a country’s worst citizens. Quoting a Sri Lankan newspaper, Devotta writes, “drug dealers, fraudsters, murderers, rapists, bootleggers and cattle rustlers’ control politics, and they have bankrupted a country with so much potential”. In explaining the rise of Sri Lanka as an ethnocratic state, he begins with the premiership of Prime Minister S.W.R.D...
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Professor Neil DeVotta warns of “Rajapaksa rule well into the future” and possible anti-Muslim pogroms “in the days ahead unless the international community bands together to protect them”. Calling Sri Lanka’s recently elected prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and president Gotabaya Rajapaksa “Sinhalese Buddhist supremacists”, DeVotta states that under their previous tenure “radical Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists enjoyed free rein to inveigh against minorities, with Muslims especially targeted following the end of the civil war”. Militarisation Referring to...