Chulani's current work explores the ongoing struggle for truth and justice waged by Tamil family members of the forcibly disappeared, the vast majority of them women, in post-war Sri Lanka, deep-seated impunity for such violence, and the state's response to the struggle shaped by Sinhala Buddhist ethno-nationalism and transnational human rights norms. Going on the premise that impunity is not merely a legal but an extra-legal phenomenon or inaction, Chulani is keen to understand the extra-legal moorings /stakes of the struggle and the discursive and material labour invested in erasing disappearances from history and memory. Moreover, she traces the modes, sites and scales of the women's struggle that is challenging this erasure.
Kodikara, Chulani. 2024. Disappearances, Dissident Memory and Magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s Struggle for Justice. Memory Studies. (forthcoming).
In this contribution to a forthcoming special issue on memory, activism and the arts in Asia and the Pacific, Chulani explores how Sandya Ekneligoda, the wife of journalist Prageeth Ekneigoda who was disappeared in 2010, invokes Kali, the Hindu mother goddess of death and destruction in the public sphere, to demand punishment for those responsible for her husband's disappearance. She argues that these ritual invocations shift the aesthetics and affective register of the disappearance protest from grief and mourning to rage and vengeance, taps into memory differently, and intervenes in the postwar memoryscape from a different agentive location. Moreover, she contends that Sandya's increasing reliance on cursing as a form of protest must be apprehended as a response to continued impunity, which decentres the victims and survivors in favour of insistently centering and remembering the perpetrators.
Kodikara, Chulani. 2023. “The Office on Missing Persons in Sri Lanka: Why Truth Is a Radical Proposition.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 17(1): 157-172.
When the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) law was passed in 2016, it was vilified by some and welcomed by others This article captures these divergent responses to the OMP, while making the case that in a context such as Sri Lanka, truth is not a second best option to judicial accountability but an equally difficult demand to fulfil, entangled with national identity.
De Mel, Neloufer and Chulani Kodikara. 2018. “The Limits of ‘Doing’ Justice: Compensation as Reparation in Post-war Sri Lanka.” In Contesting Justice in South Asia, edited by Deepak Mehta and Rahul Roy, 39-73. London, New Delhi: Sage/ Yoda Press.
This book chapter explores questions relating to sovereign practices, survivors expectations, and the gap between justice and the law in post-war Sri Lanka through an analysis of the architecture and proceduralism associated with awarding compensation to families of the forcibly disappeared, provided the disappeared are registered as dead.