Despite its title, this edited volume is only tangentially about globalisation. Instead, it focuses on historical, contemporary and emerging challenges to Sri Lanka’s social cohesion. The collected chapters do a depressingly good job of portraying the fissures and rifts in Sri Lankan society, a topic that has generated countless volumes in the past two decades. Of interest but often overwhelmed by factual details are the individual author’s tentative suggestions for creating a new social order and the roles of global forces in this endeavour