Research
My research interests sits at the intersection of Comparative Politics, International Political Economy (IPE), Critical Security Studies, and Development Studies. I investigate how post-war security architectures, infrastructure projects, and post-crisis financial interventions reconfigure local governance, civil-military relationships, and economic livelihoods in post-conflict and postcolonial societies. My secondary interest lie in LGBTQ+ organizing. Majority of my research focuses on Sri Lanka. My scholarship has been supported by the Taft Research Center, the Niehoff Center, and the International Association for Feminist Economics. Please read about my dissertation project, forthcoming book project.
Military deployed on July 09, 2022 at Dutch Hospital Area in Colombo, following the call for country-wide protests in Sri Lanka (2022)
KKS Beach, Kankesanthurai (Jaffna), remains under the control of the Military, with hotels, resorts, fishing farms, and agricultural lands spread across the northern shore (2026).
Dissertation Project
Temples, Tanks, and Tourism: Militarism and Development in Post-War Sri Lanka
My project investigates how post-conflict infrastructure expansion and commercial development function as instruments of elasticated securitization. I show how post-conflict development operates through a logic of elasticated securitization. Rather than demobilizing following military victory (since the end of the war in 2009), the state repurposes infrastructure projects, constructing religious monuments, agricultural reservoirs, and commercial resorts, to transform occupied space, regulate local labor, and entrench military authority within civil administration. My research shows that while this commercialized militarism suppresses local economic independence, war-affected communities and informal labor groups continuously develop subtle, everyday forms of spatial, gendered, and economic resistance. This project draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork and over 170 semi-structured interviews conducted across Sri Lanka with workers within the militarized tourism industry, families affected by post-war internal displacement, and ethnography from within Military institutions and occupied lands. Further, I also conducted elite interviews with 40 military officers, including two former army commanders and defense secretaries, former and current Ministers, Members of parliament, and two former Presidents of Sri Lanka.
LGBTQ+ Gama (tent) at the 2022 Aragalaya protests (2022)
Forthcoming Book Project
People’s Struggle, New Solidarities and the Search for Development in Sri Lanka
(Under Contract with Routledge, Expected Spring/Summer 2028)
This monograph examines how LGBTQ+ organizations, informal workers, and marginalized communities navigated the catastrophic 2022 Sri Lankan economic crisis. The project begins at the 2022 encampment protests called the Aragalaya and traces how various groups facing severe precarity mobilized to demand systemic economic relief, contest IMF-mandated austerity, and build new forms of cross-identity political solidarity. This project plays with the duality of precarity and possibilities, examining how economic crises raptures everyday economic and political experiences, leading to grassroots, inter-ethnic, and inter-community mobilization and coalition building.
The book is based on ethnography conducted within the encampment protests of 2022 and over 100 interviews with activists, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs. This book project was funded by the International Association For Feminist Economics and the Taft Research Center (University of Cincinnati). The manuscript is finished and is under review, with expected publication in Spring 2028. I have delivered conference presentations on this book project at the South Asia Conference in Madison (2023), the International Studies Association Annual Conference (2025), and the Sri Lanka Roundtable (2026) and invited talks at the University of Glasgow (2025) and the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka (2026).