By Premakumara de Silva –

Distinguished colleagues, fellow scholars, and honored guests.

When we gather in assemblies like this to debate the “crises of law enforcement” and the delivery of criminal justice, our discourse almost instinctively gravitates toward a very comfortable, highly technocratic vocabulary. We talk about budget deficits. We talk about the need for digitalizing court registries. We audit police infrastructure, mandate human rights workshops, or rewrite colonial-era police manuals.

But as sociologists and anthropologists, we are required to ask a fundamentally uncomfortable question: What if the crisis we are witnessing is not an operational breakdown of the system, but the system working exactly as it was structurally designed to do?

If we view criminal justice merely through a legalistic lens, we remain blind to its deep-seated social realities. To understand why institutional reforms continuously stall, we must shift our gaze from the text of the law to the context of the street. We must examine how institutional power, unwritten bureaucratic subcultures, and historical structural inequalities shape the daily execution of state authority.

Today, I want to ground this critique in the post-colonial landscape of Sri Lanka—a context where the delivery of justice is entirely inseparable from the historical evolution of state power, group conflict, and ideological hegemony. By doing so, I hope to demonstrate that any governance strategy aiming for true reform must move beyond cosmetic adjustments and instead engage in an epistemological shift away from carceral logics.

In my own anthropological inquiries into the nature of governance, I have frequently focused on what Philip Abrams and Timothy Mitchell conceptualized as the “state-effect.” The state is not a coherent, singular monolith. Rather, it is a fragmented, often contradictory entity that must continuously project its authority through performance, space, and daily ritual to maintain the illusion of a unified structure. On the streets of post-colonial Sri Lanka, law enforcement acts as the frontline of this visual performance. The police checkpoint, the arbitrary use of emergency regulations, the heavily visible militarized patrol—these are not merely technical responses to crime or public disorder. They are spatial and visual rituals through which a post-colonial state continually attempts to perform sovereignty over its citizens, particularly during moments of profound political or economic anxiety. When a state misdiagnoses deep-rooted political, ethnic, or socioeconomic crises as mere “law-and-order” infractions, it initiates a highly destructive, self-perpetuating cycle. In a volume I co-authored with Tharindi Udalagama, titled Group Violence Against the State: The Hindsight Story of the Thirty-Year War in Sri Lanka (2014), we tracked the long-term sociological consequences of this exact misdiagnosis. We argued that when the state over-relies on heavy-handed, purely punitive carceral tactics to suppress youth-led insurgencies and ethnic anxieties, it achieves the exact opposite of its intended goal.

Instead of restoring order, a purely carceral response hardens social fractures, alienates generational cohorts, and systematically erodes the very institutional legitimacy required to maintain a peaceful, collaborative social contract. The crisis of law enforcement, therefore, is frequently an artificial byproduct of the state’s own punitive overreach.

The Analytical Bridge & Institutional “Reordering”

But as sociologists, we must push this critique further. We must ask a deeper question: Why does the post-colonial state default to this punitive, exclusionary mode during a crisis? Why does it instinctively choose carceral crackdowns over social repair?

The answer lies in the fact that you cannot separate an institution’s official policy from its underlying, unwritten cultural and ideological logic. Modern bureaucracies possess an internal habitus—a set of deeply ingrained habits, dispositions, and informal codes that heavily resist external legislative changes. To understand how this ideological capture operates within the justice sector, I want to draw a theoretical parallel to my own ethnographic work on a seemingly different terrain.

In my study, Reordering of the Postcolonial Sri Pāda Temple in Sri Lanka (2013), I documented how a historically pluralistic, multi-religious sacred space was systematically “reordered” over decades by state and political actors to project a singular, ethnic majoritarian hegemony.

What I want to suggest to you today is that a remarkably identical structural transformation—a structural homology—occurs within the apparatus of criminal justice. Law enforcement institutions do not operate in an ideological vacuum. When the internal subculture of the police force and the judiciary undergoes an identical majoritarian reordering, institutional neutrality evaporates.

The delivery of justice becomes deeply stratified. The law is weaponized differently depending entirely on an individual’s ethnicity, caste, class, or proximity to political power. What is codified as a neutral system of public safety is experienced by marginalized communities as an institutional mechanism of social control. This explains why minority populations or marginalized youth view the police not as a public service to be trusted, but as an external force to be navigated with caution. True institutional reform cannot occur until we deconstruct this majoritarian reordering of the state apparatus.

The Adversarial Pipeline & The Penal Paradox

Let us ground this cultural critique in the brutal, empirical realities of Sri Lanka’s contemporary penal system. Our criminal justice pipeline is currently caught in a state of severe adversarial gridlock. We see immense judicial delays, cases languishing for years in the Attorney General’s Department, and correctional facilities bursting at the seams.

Yet, when we look closer at the data, we uncover a stunning penal paradox. Empirical records indicate that roughly 90% of convicted prisoners in Sri Lankan jails are serving short-term sentences of under two years.

Let that sink in. Ninety percent. These are not dangerous, violent offenders threatening the fabric of society. Overwhelmingly, these individuals are incarcerated for minor, poverty-driven infractions, substance abuse issues, or the simple inability to pay a court-mandated fine.

From an anthropological viewpoint, the street-level bureaucracy of policing has been transformed into a sorting mechanism that criminalizes socioeconomic precarity. We are using a massively expensive, colonial-era carceral pipeline to manage social problems that should instead be addressed by economic, medical, and social welfare institutions.

This gridlock is not a sign of efficiency; it is an active manufacture of recidivism. By taking individuals who are already economically marginalized, removing them from their social safety nets, and placing them in overcrowded prisons for a few months, the state ensures their further marginalization. This is the crisis of delivery: a system that burns its resources processing minor infractions while failing to deliver genuine safety or resolution to the communities it claims to serve.

Innovative Governance & Polycentric Realities

So, where do innovative governance strategies begin? They cannot begin with the same carceral, top-down logics that created the crisis in the first place. If we merely give a broken, biased bureaucracy better technology or higher budgets, we simply make it more efficient at reproducing inequality.

Innovative governance requires a radical decentralization of power. We must move toward what political economists and sociologists term polycentric governance—a model that breaks the state’s absolute monopoly on public safety and distributes responsibility across a network of overlapping, community-aligned institutions.

In the Sri Lankan context, this means reviving, funding, and formalizing localized, community-based conflict resolution mechanisms—such as our existing Mediation Boards (Samatha Mandala)—that predate or sit outside the colonial adversarial pipeline. We must transition from a punitive model of justice to a restorative framework—one that measures institutional success not by the volume of arrests or the speed of convictions, but by the restoration of social harm and the rebuilding of community trust.

Furthermore, we must demand epistemic justice. This means that when we design governance strategies, the lived experiences of policed populations and marginalized communities must be treated as expert knowledge, carrying equal weight to the theories of legal scholars or bureaucrats. We must structurally de-center the badge, reallocating crisis response duties away from militarized police units and handing them to specialized social, medical, and community-led mediation teams.

CONCLUSION: The Mandate for Public Sociology

In conclusion, my fellow scholars, our mandate as academics is not merely to map these institutional fractures or passively document the failures of the state. We are called to practice a public sociology that aggressively bridges critical theory with radical policy advocacy.

True reform in the delivery of criminal justice in Sri Lanka, or anywhere across the post-colonial world, does not mean building better cages or writing smoother bureaucratic manuals. It requires dismantling the colonial, majoritarian, and class-biased logics deeply embedded within our state institutions. Only by doing so can we hope to reconstruct a democratic framework that ensures accountability, preserves human dignity, and delivers a true, equitable justice for all.

Thank you very much.

*Premakumara de Silva – Department of Sociology, University of Colombo. The Speech deliver in the Plenary Session of the Criminal Justice track under the theme of Criminal Justice Policies and Institutional Reforms: Innovative Governance Strategies for Addressing Crises in Law Enforcement at the 19th International Research Conference of General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU-IRC) was held on 20^th August 2026 at the KDU