The discontent has been understood and imagined, and in some ways, organized in terms of an ethnic and class division. But that discontent and polarization has been expressed in terms of ethnic identity. Nationalism has become the dominant ideological response to the socio-economic and spatial polarization that have resulted from the uneven development of neoliberal economics in Sri Lanka.

Critical theorist Kanishka Goonewardena explores the roots of Sri Lanka's deep political crisis - as a domestic power struggle aligns with Chinese state infrastructure ambitions and Western neoliberal reform regime, popular anger surges along ethnic and nationalist lines, an energy the left must redirect upwards, to the feudal structures of the status quo.

Kanishka wrote the article The Crisis in Sri Lanka for Jacobin.