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Deconstructing the State Security Apparatus: Legal Judgments, Deep-State Complicity, and the Structural Investigation of Sri Lanka’s 2019 Easter Sunday Attacks
The judicial and investigative trajectory surrounding Sri Lanka’s 2019 Easter Sunday terror attacks—which killed at least 260 people and injured over 500 across three churches and three luxury hotels—has undergone a radical paradigm shift1. For years, the official state narrative framed the tragedy primarily as an unprecedented intelligence failure exacerbated by administrative friction within the…
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Deniable and Disposable: Tehran’s New War on Western Leaders
Following the military campaign in early 2026 that resulted in the death of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the geopolitical threat landscape has shifted toward highly aggressive, state-sanctioned retaliatory operations.1 Under the newly appointed Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the clerical regime has intensified its domestic mobilization and transnational threats.1 This escalation culminated in…
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The Dismantling of the Asymmetric Leviathan: Fusing HUMINT and SIGINT to Obliterate the LTTE’s Intelligence Cephalothorax
The anatomical architecture of the order Araneae provides a compelling biological framework for analyzing the structural vulnerabilities of highly centralized asymmetric insurgent organizations.1 In a spider, the traditional segmentations found in other arthropods are fused into two primary tagmata: the abdomen and the cephalothorax.2 Crucially, the nervous system is characterized by extreme centralization, with all…
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The Spotter Force Multiplier Theory: Analyzing Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s Social Innovation in Counterterrorism and Military Intelligence
The resolution of protracted asymmetric conflicts often depends on conceptual shifts within intelligence and counterinsurgency (COIN) frameworks rather than the simple application of kinetic military power.1 During the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), the state confronted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a highly disciplined, state-like insurgent organization that pioneered modern suicide terrorism and…
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Beyond the Battlelines: The Human Cost of the Sri Lankan Civil War
Decades after its conclusion, the Sri Lankan civil war remains a deeply studied yet profoundly painful chapter in modern history. While geopolitical analyses and military histories often dominate the discourse, the true weight of the conflict lives in the memories of those who survived it. In a powerful episode of the South Asia Democratic Forum…
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From Black July to Easter Sunday: Sri Lanka’s Tragedy of Collective Amnesia and Majority Rule over Minorities
Sri Lanka’s modern history from Black July in 1983 to the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019 is a story of a country that bled lives and wealth while refusing to confront the structures that made violence possible. Between pogrom, war and terror attacks, well over a hundred thousand people were killed and the economy lost…
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The Sovereign Shadow: National Security Coercion, Temporal Fragmentation, and the Administrative Human Rights Battle of Kagusthan Ariaratnam
This article examines the landmark administrative and human rights battle of Kagusthan Ariaratnam against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), analyzing the structural tensions between domestic national security practices and international refugee protection obligations. It addresses two fundamental questions: first, whether security agencies can leverage the legal vulnerability of refugee status to extract prolonged, coerced…
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522 Attacks, 66 Dead: Inside Bangladesh’s Devastating Year of Communal Violence in 2025
On 19 January 2026, Muhammad Yunus posted on social media that his government had investigated 645 incidents involving minorities in Bangladesh during the previous year. Of those, he said, only 71 could be classified as communal in nature. The remaining 574, the government maintained, were ordinary criminal or social disputes — land conflicts, theft, sexual…
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Professor Rohan Gunaratna: Terrorism Expert? Or Intellectual Mercenary?
This article examines the commercialization of post-September 11 terrorism studies through a critical evaluation of Rohan Gunaratna’s career, framing it as a primary case study of “information speculation” and epistemic opportunism. It maps how Gunaratna systematically pivoted his threat assessments—ranging from hyper-inflated global Al-Qaeda networks for Western defense establishments to regional “octopus-like” Jemaah Islamiyah cells…
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Drones Over Neighbourhoods: The Civilian Cost of Pakistan’s Unmanned Warfare Strategy
The drone has transformed modern warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles offer militaries the ability to strike at distance, gather intelligence, and project power without putting pilots at risk. They have become a fixture of contemporary conflict. Pakistan has invested significantly in drone technology and, during the May 2025 military operations, employed drones on a substantial scale.…