This commentary explores the nature and the challenges in Geography Higher Education in Sri Lanka. It discusses how geographical thinking is undermined through sub‐disciplinary fragmentation and the hegemonic grip of Anglophone Geography, which allows less space for Sri Lanka’s own Geography. It urges for the need to unpack and release the hegemonic burden, paving way towards a “decolonial praxis” aimed at a Sri Lankanised Geography.

Globalization continues as an inescapable process in many of the third world societies. Both popular and academic accounts focus on a bird's eye view of this process, with a privileged emphasis on the economic aspect. As a result, the geographies of globalization are disregarded, leading to subtle and complex implications especially upon third world postcolonial societies (where globalization is taking a new turn affecting their cultural identity) unnoticed. The author argues that, the attempts within Human Geography to redress this situation, has largely been limited to a theoretical discourse on how to articulate the global-local relations and further points out that most of the empirical studies available on Europe and America simply examine the economic aspects of globalization or urban changes. This study attempts to explain how globalization unfolds differently in different places, unravelling the intricacies of globalization from within Sri Lanka. It points out that besides local globalization, global localization takes place. Each of the four empirical examples used in the article demonstrates a different set of global-local relations. The study concludes that since the global is causally more powerful than the local, the subtle relations between the global and the local may lead to the displacement of local culture on the one hand, while infl icting differential impacts on various social groups.