As a young man, fighting what he saw as the broken institutions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Danny Sriskandarajah had a T-shirt bearing the slogan “International Mother Fuckers”. These days, from a distance, he can come off as an establishment figure, but don’t be fooled by his equanimous nature and cheerful sartorial style. He is a political radical, forged in the fire of childhood exile from Sri Lanka and his family’s fight from their new home in Australia for the persecuted Tamils left behind.
Sriskandarajah, 48, is the head of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a thinktank founded 40 years ago to fight neoliberalism. Before starting that role in January, he was the chief executive of Oxfam, which he took over in 2019, after the heinous scandal about staff paying for sex with earthquake survivors in Haiti, some of whom may have been children. Sriskandarajah didn’t go for that job because he was a safe pair of hands who could make trouble go away, but rather because he saw that “the sexual misconduct, the safeguarding failures and the abuse of power were symptomatic of a wider challenge in the development sector … it has ended up feeling neocolonial”.
