Perfecting the failure
Anarchy, bankruptcy, a misread geopolitics and a Geneva resolution. Victor Ivan reads the failure of the state as something now being completed rather than merely risked.
2015, a dilemma; 2020, a flummox
Victor Ivan reads the Gotabaya government as the logical product of the good-governance years that preceded it — the narrowed agenda, the black money, the commissions that never worked.
Anarchy, dictatorship and the Constitution
Everyone is watching the 20th Amendment; Victor Ivan is watching the whirlwind behind it, which he expects to destroy both the remaining democracy and the dictatorial ambitions at once.
What may happen?
The winner has the cake and it is not edible. Victor Ivan describes a government that has taken enormous power at exactly the moment power stops being worth having.
Power and the pandemic
If Gotabaya Rajapaksa wanted the power to govern, Victor Ivan argues, he contested the wrong office — and the gap between the image built for him and the powers he actually holds is now deepening the crisis.
Added to the pandemic, a constitutional crisis
Parliament dissolved, an election impossible, and the president’s spending power expiring on 30 April. Victor Ivan sets out the constitutional deadlock the pandemic created, alongside the communal poison it released.
Parliamentary Election and anarchy
Behind the carnival of a parliamentary election, Victor Ivan sees anarchy: soldiers doing police work, a constitution honoured informally, and a central bank robbed with no one held to account.
Anarchy and the Judiciary
The new government wants the corruption cases withdrawn and the courts will not oblige. Victor Ivan reads the resulting cold war as the one place in the state where something is still being defended.
What is happening?
The patient needs surgery and the doctors are discussing the election. Victor Ivan sets out what the next president will and will not be able to do, and why the contest itself is in crisis.
Anarchy and the collapse of the State
The Executive and the Legislature have disintegrated; the Judiciary may yet find its orders ignored. Victor Ivan reads the state as a machine whose faults were visible, and whose remaining life could have been predicted, long ago.