IntroductionHarmful alcohol use has been found to cause detriment to the consumers and those around them. Research carried out in Sri Lanka has described the socioeconomic consequences to families owing to alcohol consumption. However, the social processes around alcohol use and how it could result in behaviour such as self-harm was unclear. With an outset in daily life stressors in marriages and intimate relationships we explored alcohol use in families with a recent case of self-harm.MethodsQualitative data were collected for 11 months in 2014 and 2015 in the North Central and North Western provinces of Sri Lanka. Narrative life story interviews with 19 individuals who had self-harmed where alcohol was involved and 25 of their relatives were conducted. Ten focus group discussions were carried out in gender and age segregated groups. An inductive content analysis was carried out.ResultsParticipants experienced two types of daily life stressors: non-alcohol-related stressors, such as violence and financial difficulties, and alcohol-related stressors. The alcohol-related stressors aggravated the non-alcohol-related daily life stressors within marriages and intimate relationships, which resulted in conflict between partners and subsequent self-harm. Women were disproportionately influenced by daily life stressors and were challenged in their ability to live up to gendered norms of marriage. Further, women were left responsible for their own and their husband’s inappropriate behaviour. Self-harm appeared to be a possible avenue of expressing distress. Gendered alcohol and marriage norms provided men with acceptable excuses for their behaviour, whether it was alcohol consumption, conflicts or self-harm.ConclusionsThis study found that participants experienced both alcohol-related and non-alcohol-related daily life stressors. These two categories of daily life stressors, gender inequalities and alcohol norms should be considered when planning alcohol and self-harm prevention in this setting. Life situations also reflected larger community and structural issues.

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This article explores the formation of citizenship in Tamil-medium minority schools in Sri Lanka. It is argued that although the new curriculum aims to construct an inclusive notion of national citizenship, the influence of politics on education in reality creates dominant experiences of discrimination and marginalization. I argue, however, that in the more resourceful communities, social networks are effectively put to work to generate an alternative authoritative notion of peripheral citizenship. [citizenship, minorities, education, Sri Lanka] Sri Lanka has for the past three decades been undergoing fast and profound economic, political, social, and cultural transformations caused by globalization and violent conflicts between the government and various political groups. These processes affect the constitution of Sri Lanka as state, nation, and society with implications for how different population groups can imagine and identify themselves and others, and for the rights and duties of different groups. The formation of citizens in response to new challenges and opportunities takes place in many institutional and social settings. Sri Lanka has made huge investments in the construction of schools and training of teachers to make education available and accessible to all children regardless of socioeconomic background and region of residence. Today the net enrollment in primary education is close to 100 percent, and children spend many hours every day in school, attending private tuition classes, and doing homework. This makes the school a fundamental institutional site for the ongoing cultural formation and disciplining of children as citizens. There are several questions regarding education in Sri Lanka: What kinds of citizens are created in the schools? What kinds of skills and knowledge are learned? What kind of social and moral values are taught? What views of diversity and difference are produced in the schools today? This article explores what kinds of citizens the Sri Lankan nation-state has attempted to create through education and how schoolchildren belonging to Sri Lanka's two largest minorities, the Tamils and the Muslims, construct their citizenship in the school environment, where they are concurrently exposed to the often contradictory official discourses of textbooks and the social memories and interests of their communities. Underlying this inquiry is a concern about whether education in Sri Lanka is a positive and constructive force contributing to social development and peace, or whether it is a largely negative and destructive force that fosters growing inequality and social conflicts (Bush and Saltarelli 2000; Davis 2006; Smith and Vaux 2003). My use of the terms citizen and citizenship is inspired by recent anthropological explorations of the subject, which share a critique of state-centered, legal definitions of citizenship as the basis for social analysis. In political science, citizenship is commonly treated as a relationship between the state and the individual, and emphasis is on the

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Present literature on disasters predominantly focuses on warm, accessible and well-populated contexts.However, as human activities in Arctic and Antarctica become more common, cold contexts, and their special characteristics, become more relevant to study. In the present article, we explore in more depth the particular circumstances and characteristics of governing what we call 'cold disasters'. The article is structured in four overall parts. The first part, Cold Context, provides an overview of the specific conditions in a cold context, exemplified by the Arctic, and zooming in on Greenland to provide more specific background for the paper. The second part, Disasters in Cold Contexts, discusses 'cold disasters' in relation to disaster theory, in order to, elucidate how cold disasters challenge existing understandings of disasters, also it provides examples of emergency scenarios, in order to, demonstrate the demanding dynamics of cold contexts. In the third part, Governing Cold Disasters, we discuss the main implications for the governance of 'cold disasters' in the Greenlandic context. Finally, we offer our conclusions.