Dhammika HERATH

Dhammika Herath is a Professor in Sociology at the University of Peradeniya (UoP), Sri Lanka. He obtained a Bachelors in Sociology in 2002 from UoP and a PhD in Peace and Development Research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden in 2008. He joined the University of Peradeniya in 2015. Before joining UoP, from October, 2010 to October, 2012 he served as a Research Fellow and Acting Executive Director of the International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo and Kandy, Sri Lanka. Herath also served as an affiliated researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He served as the Social and Resettlement Specialist (consultant) for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank from 2020 to 2022.

Herath teaches conflict resolution, development studies, social safeguards and resettlement and research methods at the university of Peradeniya. Herath has undertaken many research studies development issues, governance and ethnic and religious conflicts in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Macedonia, Israel, India, Palestine, and Rwanda and has published research outcomes resulting from these international collaborative studies in internationally reputed journals. He has also conducted several studies on development issues and development-induced displacement and resettlement in Sri Lanka and India.

In 2022, he won the Prestigious Georg Forster Fellowship for Senior Researchers from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, Germany. Currently, he is based at the South Asian Institute of the Heidelberg University, working on the Humboldt book project on Buddhism in Sri Lanka in the 21st Century: Transformations in Form, Practice and Organization.