Congratulations to GRSJ MA student Upandha Udalagama on their recent article published in The Diplomat, The article is part of her broader thesis examining agricultural policy through a feminist political ecology lens.
“I was in Sri Lanka when this transition unfolded, but it took leaving the country to fully explore its deeper implications. This perspective shift allowed me to connect local experiences to larger structural patterns while still centering the voices of farmers—particularly women and ethnic minorities—who were systematically excluded from decisions that profoundly affected their livelihoods. My research aims to bridge this gap between policy and lived experience.”
The piece explores how in 2021 the Sri Lankan Army became the unlikely vanguard of a supposed green revolution, resulting in a radical redefinition of civil-military relations in farming regions.
“Sri Lanka’s “green revolution” demonstrated how even the most progressive environmental goals, when divorced from farmer autonomy and imposed through hierarchical control, inevitably harvest a crop of inequality, economic devastation, and democratic decay.”
Upandha Udalagama is a fellow at the UBC’s Institute of Asian Research (IAR) as well as a master’s student at GRSJ. Her research investigates how gendered power dynamics and intersecting social identities shape access, control, and decision-making in environmental governance, with a particular focus on water and agricultural systems across South Asia.
You can read the article in it’s entirety by clicking the link below.
