Jayadeva Uyangoda

Who is Jayadeva Uyangoda?

Jayadeva Uyangoda is a political scientist and constitutional expert in Sri Lanka.

As a leftist student leader and a member of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna movement in the 1970s, he was arrested and imprisoned by the government. After the change of regime he did his doctoral research in the University of Hawaii on Nationalism and State Formation in Bangladesh. He remains one of Sri Lanka's most controversial commentators on ethnic conflict and human rights. He worked with Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvam in drafting the model constitution in 1999.

As of May 2012, Uyangoda is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Colombo and Founder-Director of the Centre for Policy Research and Analysis, Colombo. He is a former Chairman of the Sri Lanka Foundation, Colombo.

He was the Founder Editor and later co-editor of Pravada, an academic journal in English that focuses on Sri Lanka and South Asia. He continues to write prolifically in Sinhala and English.