This chapter sets out the claim for the Sri Lankan experience with bilingual education and with language policy more generally to be considered an important global case study in these areas. The critical historical overview provided traces the long and deep experience with the formulation of both explicit and implicit language policy on the island throughout its long pre-colonial experience, its experience of three external colonial subjugations and its national post-colonial formation. This is set against thinking about nations and how these formations are understood in Asian and European experience and specifically the role of language within national imagination and post-colonial national struggle. The specific role and tensions between the two main national languages, the Swabhasha, Sinhala and Tamil, are described according to some emblematic thinkers and cultural figures within them especially considering debates pretending the gaining of political independence in February 1948. The chapter also discusses the broad phases of formal language policy, pre- and post-independence, from imposed English to bilingual and trilingual proposals, to Sinhala-only, to the re-admission of Tamil, and towards a restored and now active role for English. Bilingual education is a key focus of attention, and the chapter describes the concrete delivery of language education within these shifting national policy settings, all of which constitute the specific research setting. Finally, the chapter traces the onset and causes of conflict, the deteriorating communal relations and identities the distinctive contribution of language questions to this erosion of social cohesion, and what role Bilingual Education might play, and is claimed to play, in restoring civic order and citizenship based rights including to languages.