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.
Lost hopes of freedom
On the 73rd independence anniversary, Victor Ivan traces the country back to 1815 and the Colebrooke reforms to ask how a state that began ahead of Asia ended at the bottom of it.
Structural reforms key to recreating the State and the social system
COVID as an index of state failure. Victor Ivan reads the handling of the pandemic, the soldiers placed over the civil service and the growing dependence on China as symptoms of one structural collapse.
Alas, Sri Lanka!
Victor Ivan recounts taking the collapse of the state to the Speaker, to the Auditor General and finally to the Supreme Court with 62 signatures behind him, and being met each time with silence.
What if everyone fails?
With every institution of the state failed, Victor Ivan asks who is left. He measures Champika Ranawaka against the standard and finds an educated man who is still, in his judgment, a tribal leader.
Perfecting the failure
Gotabaya is failing, Victor Ivan writes, but so is the state he inherited. The column ends on the case of Shani Abeysekera and what happens to a country when its courts stop administering justice.
End of an era
The state the British handed over in 1948 has finished collapsing, Victor Ivan writes. Elections now decide not only who governs but who gets to plunder — and the era that began at independence ends in 2020.
Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Seventy-two years in four phases, each worse than the last. Victor Ivan totals the debt against government revenue and argues the country has passed from the frying pan into the fire.
Puzzles of Sri Lanka
The citizenship case is dismissed and the celebrations begin. Victor Ivan sets the moment against the longer puzzle of a country that has never managed to build a nation out of its own people.
Ours is a failed state
Victor Ivan measures the failure of the state by what has happened to rural life — the collapse of peasant agriculture, the plunder of land, and a school system that sorts children by their parents’ means.