Dr. Pradeep Peiris is Senior Lecturer of the Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2014 under the NUFU/ NOMA fellowship scheme of the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently a Fellow in the research consortium “Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies, led by the Universities of Basel, Zurich and Edinburgh, with collaborators from Europa, Asia, Africa and North America. His current teaching and research engagements focus on Democracy and Democratization, Protest and Resistance Politics, Urban and Rural Politics, Political Theory, the Philosophy of Science and Quantitative and Qualitative Methods for Political Science.

Recent Books and Book Chapters

• Catch-All Parties and Party-Voter Nexus in Sri Lanka (Springer Nature, Singapore, 2022)
• Is the Cure Worse than the Disease? Reflections on COVID Governance in Sri Lanka (Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2021)
• Shifting Tides: A Trend Analysis of Public Opinion on Reconciliation Sri Lanka (Centre for Policy Alternative, 2024)
• Sri Lanka’s Bipolar Multiparty System: Democratizing the Selection of Rulers, Not their Rule (in Rethinking Parties in Democratizing Asia, Routledge New York 2023)

Associational Life 

2014 -224: Treasurer, Social Scientists’ Association, Sri Lanka

2024 to present: Secretary, Social Scientists’ Association, Sri Lanka

2024 to present: South Asian Regional Director, OSUN project, Central European University, Budapest

2006 – present: Country Representative, State of Democracy in South Asia survey

Civil Society Representative : National Steering Committee of the “Strengthening Transformation, Reconciliation, and Inclusive Democratic Engagement (STRIDE) Programme – Ministry of Public Administration and Provincial Councils and Local Government and European Union