The South Asian Studies Council presents
Radhika Coomaraswamy, former Under Secretary General of the United Nations and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict:
“Unclenching The Fist: Legacies of the Past and Nervous Hopes for the Future.”
The lecture will begin with the Speaker situating herself in the Sri Lankan political and social landscape. It will go onto discuss the three main social movements in post independent Sri Lanka and their trajectories of violence: Sinhala Buddhism, Tamil Nationalism and mobilization by radical left parties. It will draw on her work as a human rights activist in the early years of the civil war and her work on the Youth Commission after the 1989 insurrection. It will reflect on the legacy of the war in the form of a post conflict dictatorship, the aragalaya mobilization and the victory of the National People’s Power at the last election. Finally, it will try to assess the reality on the ground and the nearly insurmountable challenges faced by the government, opposition parties and civil society.
Radhika Coomaraswamy was the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. She also served on the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar and the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia. She was the lead author of the Global Study—the fifteen-year review of Security Council resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security.
At the regional level, Coomaraswamy was a founding member of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development and is the chairperson of South Asians for Human Rights. Nationally, she has been a member of the Sri Lankan Constitutional Council and the chairperson of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission. She was also the executive director of one of Sri Lanka’s premier think tanks, The International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo.
Coomaraswamy has been a Global Professor at New York University School of Law and has taught at New College, Oxford University in their summer residency program on international human rights law. In 2013, she delivered the Grotius Lecture of the American Society of International Law. In 2016, she delivered the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan.