Sri Lanka has been considered to be South Asia's outsider in terms of the circumstances of poverty and deprivation. In 2011, it was ranked 92 in the UN Human Development, which is a higher rating than any other country in South Asia, and therefore grouped in the high human development category. This is the result because the island's life expectancy is 76 years, 10 years of schooling and 13 expected years of expected schooling. Sri Lanka has a population of 20 million and 52 of which are women. The largest ethnic communities are the Sinhalese, who are mostly Buddhist. The Tamils historically settled in the Northern and Eastern provinces as well as the descendants of South Indian immigrants who are mainly Hindi. A minority of Sinhalese and Tamils are Christians. .
Sri Lanka adopted the Gaullist presidential model in 1978 that has centralized power in the Executive and diminished the checks and balances function of Parliament and the Judiciary and the separation of powers between the branches of the state. These authoritarian reforms are inter-linked with neo-liberal economic reforms in the same period and the outcome was to set Sri Lanka on a path of "socio-political decay".
The assassination of the prime minister in 1958 was the biggest politic trauma beginning the anti-Tamil riots. The war raged between Tamil separatists and the State between 1983 and 2009. Sri Lanka's multi-party political system with regular elections and periodic changes of the government had continued in downfall. The institutions and norms of the liberal democracy have been continuously evacuated and co-existed with politics of patronage and violence with the political system. .
The descent of the Third World Democracy has been preceding rapid beginning in 1971 onwards with Sri Lanka and the political and economic turmoil being griped by violence. Sri Lanka's birth in 1948 was accompanied by rendering stateless and disenfranchising the majority of Indian-origin Tamils.