Karl Polanyi in Sri Lanka: Odious Debt and Corrupted Capitalism

Kanchana N. Ruwanpura

Journal of Economic Issues, 2025, vol. 59, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: Sri Lanka, a small island nation on the tip of the Indian Ocean, witnessed two unprecedented moments in 2022. On the one hand, it defaulted for the first time in its post-colonial history of seventy-four years. On the other, it witnessed exceptional mass mobilization, especially from March to July 2022. These public protests continuously underlined the betrayal of public trust and corruption. Ironically, these were also public pronouncements made by the sitting head of the Sri Lankan government when he was in the opposition in 2013. However, the call for odious debt has fallen by the wayside within the country since. In this article, I focus on the role of think tanks in enabling risky forays into financial markets, which also facilitated indebtedness (like elsewhere globally) and, thus, potentially odious debt. They illustrate what a dis-embedded economy, à la Polanyi, looks like in a twenty-first-century global South context.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2025.2455293

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