Amid Winds and Waves: Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean - II

Analytical Lenses for a Sri Lankan Perspective

- BY PRor. GAMINI KEERAWELLA

Having traced Sri Lanka’s historical trajectory—from pre-modern maritime exchanges through colonial subjugation and post-independence diplomacy—it becomes necessary to move from description to interpretation. The preceding sections have shown that the island’s experience cannot be reduced to geography alone: its position in the Indian Ocean has provided opportunities, imposed vulnerabilities, and demanded continual strategic adaptation. The question that now arises is how Sri Lanka interprets, manages, and at times redefines these conditions within the shifting architecture of regional and global power.

To approach this question, the following analysis employs four interrelated lenses that together constitute a “Sri Lankan perspective” on international strategy. Each lens illuminates a different dimension of agency in a small island state: the logics of external engagement, the material base of maritime security, the institutional field of regional cooperation, and the domestic sources of policy choice. Taken together, they offer a composite view of how Sri Lanka’s diplomacy translates structural constraint into strategic flexibility.

The first lens, Small-State Strategy, examines the repertoire of behaviours—hedging, balancing, bandwagoning, and omni-enmesh-ment—through which limited-power states navigate asymmetric environments. For Sri Lanka, the cultivation of strategic ambiguity has often served as both shield and instrument: a way of preserving autonomy amid competing external pressures from India, China, and the wider Indo-Pacific order.

The second lens,