Republic of Amnesia: Protest, Memory, and the Sri Lankan State

Republic of Amnesia traces the rise and fall of Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (‘The Struggle’), the youth-led protest movement that forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country in 2022. The film follows a group of young activists navigating protest, arrest, and the demands of political change, using the movement as a lens to examine memory, the limits of protest, and the persistence of state power and impunity.

Kannan Arunasalam is a filmmaker and artist working across documentary film, installation, and sound. His work focuses on Sri Lanka, exploring memory, resistance, and the afterlives of conflict and colonialism through long-term research and collaboration with communities whose histories have been marginalised or erased.marginalised or erased.

Jonathan Spencer has carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s, concentrating at first on rural change and local politics, but writing more recently on ethnic conflict, political violence and political non-violence. His current research looks at the history of dissent in Sri Lanka, and at the politics of access to the grid for poor communities in cities in Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan

Rajesh Venugopal is Associate Professor at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He researches the politics of development and ethnic conflict, particularly with reference to South Asia. He has written on ethnocracy, neoliberalism, natural disasters, mass panics, and political sensitivity in development projects. He is the author of 'Nationalism, Development, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka’ (CUP 2018).

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Host or Publisher SOAS South Asia Institute