Hope, Disappointment, and Resistance in Post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka

In Spring 2022, an unprecedented protest movement – Aragalaya/Porattam (“Struggle” in Sinhala and Tamil) – against authoritarianism, corruption, immiseration, and impunity swept Sri Lanka and toppled the President and Prime Minister. Sarah Kabir’s poem (2024) captures the political hopes for “system change” that helped unite all these groups: “If I was President/The first thing that I would do/Is to change the status quo.” The interim President quickly reimposed the status quo but those hopes dramatically reasserted themselves two years later when a left populist alliance, National People’s Power, swept the Presidency and Parliament in the 2024 elections. The Aragalaya’s delayed success partly inspired the so-called “Gen-Z revolutions” in Bangladesh and Nepal in 2024 and 2025. This paper looks at how Sri Lankans remember, narrate, and imagine the Aragalaya’s hopes for system change. This helps address the relative lack of research on hope after mass protests – perhaps because disappointment seems so dominant. Mrovlje (2024) argues that disappointment can be “politically transformative” when it leads resisters to “reconfigure their horizon of hope” – from abstract, utopian hope to concrete, practical, and persistent hope. While Mrovlje was focused on the failed Egyptian revolution, it is important to explore how hope, disappointment, and resistance play out in the wake of more successful mass protest movements.