Date: Wednesday September 11, 2024

Time: 4:00 -5:30 PM

Venue: WDR 1003 | Zoom: 977 0131 4171

Speaker: Bhagya Senaratne, Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asia, Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai

Description

Sri Lanka was a founding member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2014, however, its infrastructure projects are often cited when critiquing the BRI, with large-scale projects, Hambantota Port, and the Colombo Port City, considered as not being viable. This paper contributes to the ongoing global discourse surrounding infrastructure development projects linked to the BRI, focusing on Sri Lanka. Despite the significant impact of these projects, the voice of the Sri Lankan vernacular has remained conspicuously absent from scholarly investigations. Within this context, the study aims to address two central inquiries: Firstly, what narratives and perspectives emerge from the Sri Lankan vernacular regarding BRI-related infrastructure development initiatives? Secondly, how do these vernacular interpretations shape the discourse surrounding BRI projects within Sri Lanka? To address these questions, this paper relies on several primary sources of data, such as over 350 vernacular sources of literature: scholarly articles and media reports. The data was triangulated with interviews with bureaucrats and data from various ministries of the Government of Sri Lanka. Thematically analyzing the content, it provides perspectives from within Sri Lanka towards Chinese infrastructure development projects in their country. This contributes valuable insights to the broader discourse on the BRI and its engagements in Sri Lanka from an economic, political and security perspective.

Bio

Dr. Bhagya Senaratne was the Postdoctoral Fellow of Global Asia at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai from 2022 to 2024. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Strategic Studies, at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka for close to a decade. At Center for Global Asia, Senaratne led the project on ‘BRI and South Asia’, and parallelly ran the CGA BRI Talk Series by conducting high-level interviews with government officials and diplomats. Her research intersects Foreign Policy Analysis, China Studies, Ocean Politics and Strategic Communications. She co-edited Pakistan-Sri Lanka Relations: A Story of Friendship in 2017 and Sri Lanka’s Post-Independence Defence Policy: Past, Present and Future Projections in 2023.