This book probes features of internal migration in Sri Lanka and some of the social and political consequences of these population shifts. It examines the aspects of societal upheavals related to internal migration: unbalanced sex ratios, rising rates of suicide, and increased ethnic conflict. .

This book explores how population mobility varies among the countries of Asia. While much attention has been given to international migration, movement within countries is numerically much more significant. Coupling innovative methods developed in the global IMAGE project with the contextual knowledge of experts on 15 Asian countries, the book measures and explains how people across Asia differ in the probability of changing residence, the ages at which they move, and the impact of these migrations on the distribution of human settlement within each country. It demonstrates how stage of economic development, coupled with historical events, local contingencies, cultural norms, political frameworks, and the physical environment shape human migration. By using rigorous statistics in a robust comparative framework, this book provides a clear understanding of contemporary migration in Asia for students and academics, and a valuable resource for policy-makers and planners in Asia and beyond.

This book demonstrates how cumulatively causal processes at structural, institutional and agency levels have forged a precariously remittance-dependent economy in Sri Lanka.

This book critically discusses the multi-dimensional contemporary issues within the ambit of the driving forces, mechanisms, vulnerability, and opportunities of the intra-region human movement in South Asia. It covers different dimensions of cross-border migration within South Asia as well as internal migration particularly in India, reflecting upon both voluntary and forced movements. It traces the trajectory and past trends in migration in the South Asian countries. It evaluates the vulnerability of refugees and stateless vis-à-vis state policies. Issues regarding Rohingya refugees from Myanmar to Bangladesh, Nepalese immigration to India, the crisis around Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, Afghan returnee refugees from Pakistan and Iran, resettlement of Bhutanese refugees are explored in the chapters. It also analyzes the impact on wage inequality due to emigration, the crucial role of social capital in migration decisions, and socio-economic vulnerabilities of women migrants in India. This book provides a clear understanding of international and internal migration in South Asia for students and academics, and a valuable resource for policy-makers and planners in development studies, regional development, and South Asian studies.

This book brings together a collection of essays that discuss alternative development and its relevance for local/global processes of marginalization and change in the Global South. Alternative development questions who the producers of development knowledges and practices are, and aims at decentring development and geographical knowledge from the Anglo-American centre and the Global North. It involves resistance to dominant political-economic processes in order to further the possibilities for non-exploitative and just forms of development. By discussing how to unravel marginalization and voice change through alternative methods, actors and concepts, the book provides useful guidance on understanding the relationship between theory and practice. The main strength of the book is that it calls for a central role for alternative development in the current development discourse, most notably related to justice, rights, globalization, forced migration, conflict and climate change. The book provides new ways of engaging with alternative development thinking and making development alternatives relevant.

International migration, the movement of people across international boundaries to improve economic opportunity, has enormous implications for growth and welfare in both origin and destination countries. An important benefit to developing countries is the receipt of remittances or transfers from income earned by overseas emigrants. Official data show that development countries' remittance receipts totaled 160 billion in 2004, more than twice the size of official aid. This year's edition of Global Economic Prospects focuses on remittances and migration. The bulk of the book covers remittances.

Why people kill themselves remains an enduring and unanswered question. With a focus on Sri Lanka, a country that for several decades has reported ‘epidemic’ levels of suicidal behaviour, this book develops a unique perspective linking the causes and meanings of suicidal practices to social processes across moments, lifetimes and history. Extending anthropological approaches to practice, learning and agency, anthropologist Tom Widger draws from long-term fieldwork in a Sinhala Buddhist community to develop an ethnographic theory of suicide that foregrounds local knowledge and sets out a charter for prevention. The book highlights the motives of children and adults becoming suicidal and how certain gender, age, class relationships and violence are prone to give rise to suicidal responses. By linking these experiences to emotional states, it develops an ethnopsychiatric model of suicide rooted in social practice. Widger then goes on to examine how suicides are resolved at village and national levels, tracing the roots of interventions to the politics of colonial and post-colonial social welfare and health regimes. Exploring local accounts of suicide as both ‘evidence’ for the suicide epidemic and as an ‘ethos’ of suicidality shaping subjective worlds, Suicide in Sri Lanka shows how anthropological analysis can offer theoretical as well as policy insights. With the inclusion of straightforward summaries and implications for prevention at the end of each chapter, this book has relevance for specialists and non-specialists alike. It represents an important new contribution to South Asian Studies, Social Anthropology and Medical Anthropology, as well as to cross-cultural Suicidology.

Against the backdrop of social, economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka today, this volume investigates the possibilities of building a new, Sri Lankan, model of organizing society. The book is divided into four parts. Part One looks at societal reorganization. Part Two focuses on the rift generated by ethnicity, while the third part draws lessons from the struggle of NGOs and other groups to build a better society in Sri Lanka. Finally, Part Four highlights the larger problems faced by the state. Linking the changes in individual and family experiences to political, economic and societal changes, the book calls for the need for non-violent, participatory and collective action frameworks to address the problems in this troubled society.

Each year, millions of people are internally displaced and resettled in the wake of wars and floods or to make way for large-scale development projects, and this number is increasing. Humanitarian and development specialists continue to struggle with designing and executing effective protection strategies and durable solutions. Relocation Failures explains how internal displacement and efforts to engineer resettlement are conceived and practiced by policy makers and practitioners. The author argues that policies for internally displaced peoples are weak and diluted by narrow interpretations of state sovereignty and collective action dilemmas, and in the case of Sri Lanka, unintentionally intensified ethnic segregation and ultimately war. This unique new book considers the origins and parameters of internal displacement and resettlement policy and practice and proposes an explanation for why it often fails. In highlighting the ways that development assistance can exacerbate smoldering conflicts, the volume provides an important caution to the aid community.

In this study a social and cultural anthropologist and a specialist in the study of religion pool their talents to examine recent changes in popular religion in Sri Lanka. As the Sinhalas themselves perceive it, Buddhism proper has always shared the religious arena with a spirit religion. While Buddhism concerns salvation, the spirit religion focuses on worldly welfare. Buddhism Transformed describes and analyzes the changes that have profoundly altered the character of Sinhala religion in both areas.