Love as Social Justice: A Radical Approach to Healing Class, Ethnic, and Cultural Divides in Sri Lankan Rural Communities

This paper reimagines love not merely as a romantic notion but as a strategic and actionable force for social justice, particularly within rural Sri Lankan communities. Deep-seated class divisions, ethnic tensions, and cultural disparities continue to shape the lived realities of marginalized populations across the island. In this context, the proposed LUVORA model (Love, Uniformity, Virtue, Openness, Resilience, and Acceptance) provides a novel psychosocial framework for empowering these groups, fostering emotional resilience, and promoting sustainable community development. Through a narrative review of interdisciplinary literature, this paper integrates perspectives from social work, positive psychology, and liberation psychology to examine how love-driven social interventions can dismantle systemic inequality. It also emphasizes the significance of community empowerment as a key sub-theme aligned with the broader goal of building a resilient and just future for all. The discussion is set within Sri Lanka’s post-conflict, post-colonial socio-political landscape, highlighting how emotional and relational healing can be utilized to strengthen the fabric of rural society. Although the LUVORA model is presented conceptually in this paper, it has not yet been tested empirically, which limits the ability to confirm its practical efficacy; future research will address this through pilot implementations.