Danushka Medawatte

Medawatte joined SOAS while completing her doctoral degree at University of Kent where she was a Global Challenges Doctoral Scholar. For her doctoral work, she also received support from the Larry Grant PhD Completion Scholarship of University of Kent as well as the Modern Law Review 2025-26 Simon Roberts Scholarship awarded annually to the best applicant in the fields of legal anthropology, legal ethnography, and socio-legal studies. Her doctoral work inquires into the extent to which ethnicity and gender determine war-affected women’s ability to benefit from transitional justice processes backed by international (human rights) law(s).

She adopts an intersectional and postcolonial feminist approach to her work and has published on a range of topics such as transitional justice, enforced disappearances, conflict-related sexual violence, and the practice of international law. Before joining SOAS, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public and International Law of the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo from 2013-2021 where she has taught a range of subjects such as Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, and International Human Rights Law. 

She has also worked as a consultant for several Non-Governmental Organisations through which she has primarily engaged with war affected women in various parts of Sri Lanka for research, advocacy, and policy-development purposes. Having been commissioned by UN Women, from 2019- 2022, Medawatte worked as the National Lead Consultant on Women, Peace, and Security and led a team to successfully drafting Sri Lanka's first National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security which was adopted by the government in 2023. She was also a Co-investigator of ‘The Potentialities and Politics of Transformation’ Project of the Gender, Justice, and Security Hub. Medawatte also serves as a member of the Editorial Board of Feminist Legal Studies.

Articles 

• ‘Conjunctures of Silence: Aphonias in the Prosecution of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka – The Vishvamadu Case’ (co-authored by DS Medawatte, Neloufer de Mel, Sandani Yapa Abeywardena, Ranitha Gnanaraj) (Gender, Justice and Security Hub – London School of Economics 2022) • ‘Conflict Related Sexual Violence: Patriarchy’s Bugle Call’ (2020) XXI Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 671. • ‘Grasping at Straws: Judicial Review of Legislation in Sri Lanka’ (2019) 13(3) Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law 281. • ‘A New Constitution for Sri Lanka: Process, Presage or Hiatus?’ (2018/19) XXVI Bar Association Law Journal of Sri Lanka 35. • ‘Walking on a Tight Rope: Sri Lanka’s Fragile Transitional Justice Process’ (2017) Harvard Human Rights Journal’s Online Symposium on Transitional Justice. • ‘The Vanishing Act: Punishing and Deterring Perpetrators through the Concurrent Application of Diverse Legal Regimes to Enforced Disappearances’ (2017) 29 Florida Journal of International Law 227. • ‘Chasing Tails: Establishing the Right to Truth, Mourning and Compensation’ (2016) 46 (2) California Western International Law Journal 69 (Lead Article) • ‘International Law Developments in Sri Lanka in 2015’ for the Asian Yearbook of International Law (https://brill.com/abstract/book/edcoll/9789004344556/front-7.xml) • ‘Justice in Dire Straits: Unlawful Pretrial Detainees, Family Members and Legal Remedies’ (2015/16) 22 Buffalo Human Rights Law Review 189 Book chapters • ‘Rural women and their access to the law: gendering the promise of post-war justice’ (Neloufer de Mel and Danushka Medawatte in Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer de Mel In the Shadow of Transitional Justice: Cross-national Perspectives on the Transformative Potential of Remembrance (Routledge 2021) 125 • ‘Single Stories, Selective Amnesia and a Stillbirth of Constitutional Reforms: A Story of Sri Lanka’ forthcoming in Hiran W. Jayawardena and Sharya Scharenguivel (Ed), Perspectives on Constitutional Reform in Sri Lanka (International and Comparative Law Society 2021) • ‘Implementation of IHL Obligations with Regard to Missing Persons in Post-Armed Conflict Sri Lanka’ in Seneviratne and Mendis (ed), The Continued Relevance of International Humanitarian Law in Post-Armed Conflict Sri Lanka (ICRC 2019) 31. • ‘Colonialism’ in Derric Shannon (ed) Inequality around the World: Understanding the Rich-Poor Divide from America to Zimbabwe (2025 Bloomsbury Academic) 70-88 – Encyclopedia entries • ‘International Criminal Law’ in Seokwoo Lee (ed), Encyclopedia of Public International Law in Asia (Brill Nijhoff 2021, Volume III on Central and South Asia)

Transitional Justice; Intersectional and postcolonial feminisms; Third World Approaches to International Law; Conflict-related (sexual) violence)