NEW BOOK - Laksiri Jayasuriya's 'Taking Social Development Seriously: The Experience of Sri Lanka' [23.09.2010]
Taking Social Development Seriously: The Experience of Sri Lanka
AASRN member, Emeritus Professor, Laksiri Jayasuriya
The University of Western Australia
School of Social and Cultural Studies
Laksiri Jayasuriya’s work documents the shift from a country with a unique social welfare structure to one marked by warfare.
A former president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, has praised the new book:
“Professor Jayasuriya has combined great analytical skills with deep scholarship and has brought home to us the particular circumstances of his country’s development as a colony to its current independence”.
“This is a fascinating history of an island country,” Mr Wolfensohn continues. “This work is valuable for its analysis of Sri Lanka but is unique in the way it takes a scholarly view of the experiences of (Professor Jayasuriya’s) own country to provide us with an overview of global social development in the last two centuries, while outlining the challenges which face us in the decades ahead. This is indeed a remarkable work.”
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in UWA’s Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy, Professor Jayasuriya graduated from the University of Sydney in 1954 and obtained his PhD from the University of London’s School of Economics and Political Science.
In his new book, published by Sage, he identifies three phases of development of social policy in Sri Lanka – early, late and post-colonial state. And he argues that social development in the country has been reframed by a combination of neo-liberalism and a protracted civil war.