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Home > Guest Speaker: Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka
On 31 March, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka was invited at Sciences Po by the Paris School of International Affairs ( PSIA ) and the South Asia Programme .
The Prime Minister engaged in a conversation with Christophe Jaffrelot, Scientific Director of the South Asia Programme and Research Director at the Center for International Studies ( CERI ), before responding to questions from the audience.
Dr. Harini Amarasuriya was sworn in as the 17th Prime Minister of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka on 18 November 2024 . She is also the Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education .
Dr. Harini Amarasuriya's multifaceted career spans academia, social activism and grassroots politics, with a focus on youth issues , human rights and social development. For the past decade, she worked as a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University of Sri Lanka. As a researcher, she has published treatises on elite politics, dissent, social justice, discrimination and youth, female-headed families, and child labour. In 2016, she was also a member of the People’s Representative Committee on Constitutional Reforms of Sri Lanka.
In 2011, she wrote her PhD thesis on child protection in Sri Lanka and received PhDs in Social Anthropology and International Health and Development from the University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University (both in Scotland). She has also sat on several boards related to community health, women's research, and legal advocacy.
An overview of the political situation in Sri Lanka by Eric P. Meyer , Emeritus professor at Inalco, Paris, author of Sri Lanka, Biography of an Island, between local and global , Colombo, Viator, 2006. This is a shortened version of the article, available on the South Asia Programme website .
The overwhelming success of the National Peoples Power (NPP) in the Sri Lankan legislative elections of 14 November 2024 (more than two thirds of seats, 61.5% of the vote) confirmed the popularity of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake , elected on 21 September with 42.3% of the vote (55.9% after counting the preferential votes that serve as a second round), and of the team he put in place headed by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya. This success contrasts with the 3 to 4% of the vote obtained by Dissanayake in 2019 and by his party in 2020.
Beyond a simple rejection of discredited outgoing parliamentarians, how can such a meteoric rise be explained? And how was the democratic process not derailed in Sri Lanka, in spite of the succession of shocks which affected the country since independence – insurgencies of 1971 and 1987-1989, separatist war from the early 1980s to 2009, economic and political crisis of the early 2020s?
Cover image caption: Christophe Jaffrelot and Dr Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, 31 March 2025. (credits: Louis Roquebert / Sciences Po)
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