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Beginning with the Jaffna Youth Congress and its anti-colonial politics in the 1920s, Sri Lanka has been transformed by youth struggles, including the recent uprising in 2022; where youth from all communities – the Muslim and Hill Country Tamil minorities joined en masse with the Sinhala majority – chased away an authoritarian president. Many youth movements emerged during crisis times, and some were defeated by brutal counter revolutions. The LSSP, the first left party in the country, was forged with youth activism during the Great Depression and the malaria epidemic in the mid-1930s. The anti-caste youth politics from the 1920s to the 1940s in Jaffna, culminated in the battles to defeat untouchability in the late 1960s. On the other hand, faced with a militarized state, the vibrant and varied Tamil militancy of the 1970s came to a cataclysmic end three decades later, and the JVP insurrections in 1971 and late 1980s were brutally crushed, questioning the strategy of protracted armed struggles. The Great Hartal of 1953 can be compared to the 2022 uprising—for economic crises culminating in unprecedented regime change. At the current conjuncture, Ahilan Kadirgamar considers the category of youth movements during Sri Lanka’s long twentieth century, to think about social and economic alternatives amidst an unravelling global order.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a Master of Arts in Economics from the New School for Social Research. He is a fortnightly columnist in Daily Mirror and is an editorial board member of the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences. His research interests include agrarian change, co-operatives and economic alternatives, and he regularly writes on the political economy of Sri Lanka in fora such as The Hindu and the Economic and Political Weekly in India. He is currently Honorary Chair of the Northern Co-operative Development Bank and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs).