Teaching Sri Lanka's 2009 UNHRC Geneva Win: The Barcelona Lecture

With the discussion on Sri Lanka and the UNHRC resurfacing this year, the singularity of Geneva 2009 and Sri Lanka's decisive victory has been noted in Parliament by the Leader of the Opposition.

- BY DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

Though no Lankan institution ever asked me to explain that 2009 outcome, it has figured amply in international scholarly literature.

When I served as Ambassador to France, Spain and Portugal, the prestigious Barcelona Institute for International Relations (IBEI), Spain, invited me to deliver a lecture on the topic in May 2012, the third anniversary of the 2009 outcome. I readily agreed, given that Prof Fred Halliday, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE and iconic Marxist scholar had spent the last five years of his life as Research Professor at IBEI.

My lecture was chaired by Prof Robert Kissack, Coordinator of the MA programme, former student of Prof Halliday at the LSE and his successor at IBEI. A discussant was Dr Margarita Petrova, whose specialization is 'The Politics of Norm Creation'. Her doctoral dissertation won the American Political Science Association's Prize for best dissertation in International Relations (2008).

I thought it appropriate to publish the text/transcript of my lecture in a Sri Lankan newspaper because it reconstructs context and conceptual underpinnings of the strategy that succeededexceptionally, as it turns out.

The Barcelona Lecture, May 24th 2012

I am especially glad to be here because I knew that one of my intellectual heroes from my early teens, Prof. Fred Halliday, spent many years here and was very fond of this place. I am gratified that Prof Robert Kissack who invited me and is chairing this lecture was a protégé and colleague of his.