Introduction
In 2006, Maoist insurgents and state representatives signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Nepal's decade-long civil conflict. Brought about through a combination of democratic, communist, ethnic, diplomatic, and other forms of mobilization, the agreement set the stage for the interim constitution of 2007, which refigured the erstwhile Hindu kingdom as the secular Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal. The country's first-ever Constituent Assembly elections were held in 2008, and Gyanendra Shah was deposed, the last monarch in his nearly 240-year-old dynasty. The elections yielded the most inclusive governing body the country had ever seen, but the first Constituent Assembly was nonetheless riven by political difference and dissolved in 2012 without promulgating a new constitution. New elections in 2013 brought a second Constituent Assembly into being. In the wake of two major earthquakes in April and May 2015, this body promulgated a contentious constitution on 20 September 2015, which sparked a new wave of political uncertainty and polarization that continues at the time of publication.
These events signal extraordinary transformation not only on the ground in Nepal, but also in the scholarship that seeks to represent the country's dynamics. Newer fields of inquiry like conflict studies, constitutional law, and political ecology increasingly mingle with the ‘traditional’ domains of anthropology, environmental studies, geography, history, linguistics, political science, and religious studies in producing knowledge about the country. Scholars writing on Nepal are ever more engaged in broader regional and global debates, whether on topics like transitional justice, identity politics, or climate change. This review article seeks to provide an entrée into the burgeoning literatures in these fields and beyond. Never has the research on Nepal's political dynamics been richer, but in its ever-increasing diversity and disciplinary specificity, it is also ever more challenging to come to terms with these literatures as a whole. We argue, however, that such a holistic approach is necessary in order to understand the broader implications of the specific analytical frames that authors deploy to interpret individual elements of transformation.
In this article, we take stock of literature published primarily since 2006, aligning our inquiry with the so-called ‘post-conflict’ era that began with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.Footnote 1 What we can now call the seminal early literature on the Maoist insurgency was published before this date.Footnote 2 We consider the ‘revolution’Footnote 3 itself as one element in a much broader process of political transformation, which with the benefit of greater hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization,Footnote 4 identity-based mobilization,Footnote 5 constitutional nationalism,Footnote 6 international intervention,Footnote 7 territorial restructuring,Footnote 8 migration and the remittance economy,Footnote 9 and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness.Footnote 10 This is in no way an exhaustive list, but the point we wish to make is that existing and emerging literatures on the conflict itself must not be seen as definitive of the period on their own, but rather read in conjunction with other works that demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of processual change. As a collective of five authors with backgrounds in anthropology, development studies, environmental studies, and sociology, we seek in this review to identify and challenge some of the disciplinary divides that have characterized work on Nepal, and to propose avenues for synthetic analysis that may prove productive in the future.
This review article emerged out of a year-long graduate seminar at Yale University in 2013–2014, in which all authors met bi-weekly to review and discuss readings. As is necessary when confronting any vast, multidisciplinary domain of scholarly production, we were compelled to make choices that influenced the shape of the final review. Given the sheer volume of literature produced about Nepal in both Nepali and English, published both in Nepal and elsewhere, it was not feasible to address every publication in this review. We chose to focus our reading around book-length works, either single-authored monographs or multi-authored edited volumes in English.Footnote 11 We complemented these book-length works with additional topical journal articles, but we make no claim to be comprehensive in this regard.Footnote 12 The focus on books may have privileged certain disciplines, such as anthropology, that are more likely to encourage monographic production. The focus on English-language materials of course presents an incomplete view. A complementary review of Nepali sources, as well as new thematically based analyses that bring key works in both linguistic domains together would be very productive. Finally, we cite some policy reports, or ‘grey literature’, since many important contributions to understanding political transformation have been made in such forums, but again we cannot provide a systematic overview of this domain. Therefore this article should be approached as a ‘reading guide’ to scholarly books on Nepal published in English, primarily between 2006 and 2014, complemented by issue-specific discussion of other materials.Footnote 13 Despite these limitations, we hope that this review will be of use to a wide range of readers seeking an entry point into knowledge production in the English-language scholarly domain about the dynamics of political change in Nepal. We also hope that it will demonstrate how the particularities of Nepal's experience may yield insights for global multidisciplinary debates over political transformation.
This review article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. Additional cross-cutting topics that are central to any analysis of Nepal today are migration and remittances, gender, and development. We have sought to demonstrate the interplay of mobility and migration with each of our four key themes as appropriate throughout the article, rather than treating these topics in a separate section. All of the domains of political transformation about which we write are gendered (although some of the relevant literatures address this vector of difference better than others), so we also consider scholarship on gender across all sections rather than calling it out as a separate category. Many of the works we engage with in some way address discourses and/or practices of ‘development’, but we refrain from framing our analysis around that concept precisely because its meaning varies so greatly across disciplines and political frameworks, in a manner to which we cannot do justice here.
The discussion of mobility flags up another important dimension of recent work on Nepal: an increasingly productive cross-border conversation with scholars working elsewhere in the region, which has yielded several volumes of scholarship that cover relevant dynamics in Nepal in conjunction with other countries in the Himalayas, South Asia, and East Asia.Footnote 14 Expanding multidisciplinary interest in the country's political transformation has in many ways brought scholarship on Nepal into closer articulation with that emerging from India, particularly around the theme of Maoist insurgency, while an expanding interest in environmental transformation also highlights the cross-border connections between the resource dynamics of Nepal and its neighbours.
These relatively recent developments may signal a new era of better integration between Nepal-specific research and expertise, and broader regional and global scholarly agendas. This trend is also evident within recent literature that identifies Nepal as a site for imaginaries about globalization. While Liechty shows how urban young Nepalis may consider themselves ‘out here in Kathmandu’,Footnote 15 far from global centres, Hindman's exploration of expatriate lives in the same city demonstrates how it plays different, but equally influential, roles in shaping the subjectivities of those who consider themselves ‘global citizens’.Footnote 16 Fisher's memoir also serves as a history of the Peace Corps in Nepal—a prominent path through which many Americans first arrived in the country.Footnote 17 Our intention in listing these recent works in the introduction to this review article is to demonstrate that Nepal's conflict and nationally specific processes of political transformation are situated within a global context, and have been shaped by the flows of ideas and people in and out of the country, as well as by internal political events themselves.
In terms of scale, the number of Nepalis flowing out of the country is much more significant than the number of non-Nepalis flowing in. We contend here that the emergent scholarly focus on migration and mobility out of NepalFootnote 18 must be understood in conjunction with the literature on its internal political dynamics that we review here, as well as with that on flows of people and ideas into Nepal and its associated role in global imaginaries as described in the previous paragraph. With nearly one third of Nepal's working population abroad,Footnote 19 understanding the social, political, and economic effects of mobility is crucial to understanding Nepal's political transformation. This applies to all forms of mobility: within the country; across regional borders to India and China; and globally to sites like the Gulf states, Malaysia, Korea, and the United States. Ultimately, our focus on political transformation in the wake of conflict fuses an interest in what are often perceived as ‘internal’ political dynamics—the rise and fall of the Maoist movement, the end of the monarchy, the crescendo of identity politics—with a focus on the international engagements of Nepal's people, the financial networks that enable these connections, and the context of high transnational mobility in which such networks have emerged.
Historical background
In many ways, Nepal's ongoing political transformation can be seen as the continuation of processes that began in the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote 20 Drawing on inspiration and support from the Indian independence movement, Nepali democracy activists allied with the exiled king, Tribhuvan Shah, and in 1951 led a successful revolution against the autocratic Rana regime, which had ruled Nepal for the previous century.Footnote 21 Shortly thereafter, King Tribhuvan issued a royal proclamation calling for the election of a Constituent Assembly and the establishment of multi-party democracy. The manoeuvrings of those opposed, as well as inter- and intra-party disputes, led to the postponement of parliamentary elections until 1959, and plans for a Constituent Assembly were scuttled. Instead, a commission appointed by King Mahendra,Footnote 22 Tribhuvan's son, drafted Nepal's first constitution, which he promulgated prior to the parliamentary elections in 1959.
The Nepali Congress (NC), which had led the anti-Rana movement ten years prior, won more than two thirds of the seats in the 1959 elections. The Communist Party of Nepal (CPN), founded by Pushpa Lal Shrestha in 1949, was already an important opposition party, along with other monarchist groups. Despite its majority, the Nepali Congress-led government struggled to secure political stability. Under the pretext of restoring law and order, King Mahendra removed the Nepali Congress government, arrested its leaders, and used his authority under the constitution to employ direct rule in December of 1960. Two years later, Mahendra promulgated a new constitution, which ushered into existence Nepal's ‘panchayat democracy’.Footnote 23
In brief, this ‘panchayat’ (committee) system was a ‘guided’ form of democracy based on a tiered system in which direct elections were held at the village or town level. Representatives at the district and most at the national level were drawn from these village panchayats.Footnote 24 In practice, however, the system operated as an authoritarian government, as the king held supreme power, political parties were banned, and public opposition was tightly controlled.Footnote 25 The national panchayat served only an advisory role.
The panchayat system was promoted by the monarchy as a ‘uniquely Nepalese’ form of governance and ‘served the king of Nepal as a means of legitimating—before other governments as well as his own citizens—the continuing political autonomy of his kingdom and the perpetuation of his pre-eminent role’.Footnote 26 Of particular importance for contemporary political debates in Nepal is the centrality of the state's conception of Nepali national identity. That is, the 1962 constitution codified three principles as normative national ideals: Hinduism, the monarchy, and the Nepali language.Footnote 27 Each of these elements increasingly became a point of contention for opposition forces and they have remained at the centre of debates about how the ‘new Nepal’ should be defined.
The panchayat system was undone by the ‘People's Movement’ (jana andolan) of 1990, which was led by a coalition of political parties—including both the Nepali Congress and various communist parties, especially the centre-left Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) (CPN-UML)—whose central shared demand was the restoration of multi-party democracy. Although demands made by far-left parties to finally elect a Constituent Assembly were ignored, the movement resulted in the promulgation of a new multi-party, democratic constitution. The central features of Nepali national identity, however, were retained: the state continued to be defined as Hindu, though it recognized Nepal's multi-ethnic character; the monarchy remained in place, though within a constitutional framework; and Nepali remained the official language, though the constitution formally recognized Nepal as multilingual.
Although the first People's Movement generated the conditions for the promulgation of a democratic constitution, there was widespread discontent with the 1990 democratic reforms. At the administrative level, the reforms actually led to increased exclusion from representation in the structures of the state for most historically marginalized ethnic, caste, and religious groups, and even led to the decline in representation of some groups that had been relatively well represented during the panchayat era.Footnote 28 The reforms did, however, also open a space for the public expression of dissent and the organization of disaffected communities, both of which had been actively suppressed during the panchayat era.
Thus, the democratic opening in 1990 created space for public critique of the state, and the disjuncture between the ideal and real state was exposed. For example, this opening allowed for the public expression and circulation of the term bahunvad (‘Brahmanocracy’), which encapsulated the critique of the prevailing caste-based order, but also illustrated the void between political economic realities and the egalitarian facade of the panchayat.Footnote 29 These conditions allowed for what Hangen refers to as ‘the rise of ethnic politics in Nepal’,Footnote 30 which comprised a number of social movements and political organizations, including the indigenous nationalities movement and the Madheshi movement in Nepal's southern plains.Footnote 31
The most radical public critique of the 1990 reforms came from the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), a far-left splinter group of the Communist Party of Nepal.Footnote 32 The party formally registered its objections to the state through a 40-point demand delivered by its political front and threatened to launch an armed struggle if the government did not take steps to address the demands. The government did not respond, and on 13 February 1996, Maoists attacked a police post in the mid-western district of Rolpa, initiating the decade-long ‘People's War’. By 2005, the insurgency had effectively reached a stalemate with the state: the government had control of the headquarters of every district, but the Maoists dominated the surrounding rural areas, and neither side was in a position to achieve military victory over the other.
Over the course of their campaign, the Maoists garnered (and coerced) significant support from excluded socio-cultural groups. Maoist demands for agrarian reform, land redistribution, and economic empowerment resonated with ethnic activists, and the Maoists declared support for ethnic agendas of self-determination, as well as the establishment of a secular state. As part of the effort to gain support from marginalized groups, the Maoists established a number of ethnic/caste and regional fronts (the Tamang National Liberation Front, Madheshi Liberation Front, among others), a move that no mainstream political party made.Footnote 33 The fact that the marginalized groups had failed to secure any significant concessions from the state, despite the breadth of their independent movements, made the radical transformation that the Maoists promised all the more appealing to such constituencies.Footnote 34
In the midst of the insurgency, King GyanendraFootnote 35 dissolved parliament in 2002 and seized full power in February 2005 after declaring a state of emergency. To many inside and outside Nepal, this was interpreted as a move to not only reassert the enduring power of the monarchy, but to return the country to its autocratic, panchayat days.Footnote 36 Gyanendra's move backfired, and instead galvanized an alliance between the Maoists and mainstream political parties.
In November 2005, Maoist and party leaders met in Delhi to release a Twelve-Point Agreement, the first of which declared that the ‘autocratic monarchy’ was the primary obstacle to democracy, peace, and prosperity in Nepal. The document went on to call for joint agitation against the monarchy. It also noted that the Maoists agreed to participate in a multi-party democratic system and that elections should be held to form the country's first ever Constituent Assembly—long-awaited since 1951—which would be responsible for drafting a new constitution.
The joint agitation began in earnest on 6 April 2006. After 19 days of protest, King Gyanendra backed down and agreed to restore parliament, which swiftly moved to curtail royal authority. On 18 May, parliament passed a sweeping bill that stripped virtually all of the king's power and dismantled the symbols of royal authority—parliament declared itself sovereign and the king subject to it, eliminated the king's position as supreme commander of the armed forces, and removed the word ‘royal’ from all important public institutions. In addition, the bill declared Nepal a secular state, overriding the 1990 constitution that officially described the state as Hindu.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in November 2006, brought a formal end to the war and paved the way for the Maoists to join the government. The new government promulgated an interim constitution on 15 January 2007, copies of which were promptly burned in protest by Madheshi activists in Kathmandu. The protestors objected to the constitution primarily on the grounds that it omitted any reference to federalism, which was a long-standing demand of both Madheshi and indigenous activists.Footnote 37 The arrest of the activists in Kathmandu led to strikes in the Tarai, which quickly escalated after the killing of a 16-year-old boy, igniting a three-week long movement that came to be known as the Madhesh Uprising. Leaders of the movement agreed to suspend the protests after the prime minister agreed to the demands for federalism. This was parallelled by an agreement with the indigenous umbrella organization, the Nepal Federation for Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN), in which a commitment to electoral proportional representation on the basis of ethnicity was made. Together, these agreements established the conditions for restructuring the Nepali state.Footnote 38 They were followed by two elections, in 2008 and 2013 (discussed in detail in the next section of this article), the spring 2015 earthquakes, and ultimately the promulgation of the new constitution on 20 September 2015. As this article goes to press, Nepal remains in a state of uncertainty, characterized by unrest and polarization over the content of the constitution, and shifting geopolitical relations with both India and China, after a months-long blockade along the border with India in late 2015 to early 2016.
Against this backdrop, we can see that the recent dynamics on which this review focuses are situated within a much longer trajectory of political transformation. Since the 1950s, democratic aspirations have been as much part of the picture as have communist mobilizations, and both have been significantly influenced by the simultaneous pull of ethnic and regional organizations.Footnote 39 In this context, the Maoist insurgency must be understood as one component of a much broader set of political forces. In the ensuing pages, we consider how literature published largely between the formal end of the conflict in 2006 and 2014 has addressed all of these intertwined circumstances to provide the big picture—if in a somewhat disciplinarily compartmentalized manner—of historically situated transformation over time.Footnote 40
Conflict literatures
Whether referred to as an insurgency, a rebellion, a revolution, a movement, a conflict, or a civil war, the decade-long Maoist-led ‘People's War’ dramatically altered the social and political landscape in Nepal. Its outbreak and effects present social scientists with two main empirical puzzles. First, the Maoists launched the war in February 1996—six years after the re-establishment of multi-party democracy and in the wake of a period of economic growth. Second, at the beginning of the war the Maoists were a relatively small group with few resources, little material or ideological support, and were more or less confined to a peripheral rural stronghold. Ten years later, they controlled much of the country outside of urban areas and district headquarters, and in alliance with democratically inclined political parties transformed the 250-year-old Hindu kingdom into the secular Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal and emerged as the most successful party in Nepal's 2008 Constituent Assembly elections.
Several books offer insight into the crucial questions of why and how Nepal's Maoists were able to accomplish all of this. In their volume, Lawoti and Pahari bring together a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and offer a view of the war accessible to non-specialists.Footnote 41 The volume covers the war's causes and outcomes, the Maoists’ recruitment strategies and ideology, revolutionary governance, and the manner in which ethnic politics, the Nepali state, and external actors influenced Maoist tactics and the trajectory of the war. The volumes edited by Shah and Pettigrew, and Lecomte-Tilouine, on the other hand, are grounded in anthropological and historical approaches to understanding the war that range from a history of political violence in Nepal, to intra-elite conflict at the village level, to the emotional appeals of Maoist music.Footnote 42 Lecomte-Tilouine's collection of essays grounds the war in the history of caste and ethnic politics,Footnote 43 and Pettigrew's monograph provides a rich ethnographic account of the everyday experiences of one village during the war, offering a narrative of continuity amid what otherwise appears to be dramatic change.Footnote 44 In addition, both Manandhar and Seddon's edited volume, and J. Adhikari's memoir provide ground-level accounts from various locales that detail how Nepalis in different settings coped with new-found challenges.Footnote 45
The causes of the war and the appeal of the Maoists
The books described above must be read in conjunction with a broader range of articles that seek to identify the causes of Nepal's conflict. These can be roughly divided between quantitative and qualitative approaches. In general, the quantitative approaches focus on the structural, economic, and geographic factors that either fuelled the grievances that facilitated the rise of the Maoists or conditioned the opportunity for insurgency. The qualitative approaches, on the other hand, favour local histories, politics, networks, and the visceral appeal of the Maoists.
The quantitative approaches to understanding the onset and spread of the war come to somewhat contradictory conclusions, though the differences are largely a matter of disagreement over which variables should be considered causal (as opposed to conditioning), and on which variables explanatory weight ought to be placed. A number of studies conclude that the conflict can best be understood as the result of grievances generated by state-sanctioned political and economic marginalization, especially caste-based discrimination that mapped onto ever-widening structural economic inequalities between the landed elite and the landless, exploited masses.Footnote 46 Others, however, insist that there is no robust statistical evidence for the argument that grievances were the wellspring of the conflict, maintaining instead that radical leftist political activism and the opportunities afforded by geography and weak state infrastructure—especially poorly developed road infrastructure—were far stronger predictors of violence.Footnote 47 As Tiwari illustrates, however, the statistical evidence for either side of the debate may be as much a matter of how the dependent variables are constructed in any given model, and the take-away is that a combination of grievances and opportunity set the structural stage for the conflict.Footnote 48
In support of the grievance-based perspective, Joshi offers a compelling solution to the question of why the conflict emerged after the re-establishment of multi-party democracy and during a period of economic growth by illustrating the manner in which these macro-structural changes actually exacerbated existing inequalities—especially in rural areas—by strengthening the hand of landed elites.Footnote 49 That is, Joshi argues that landed elites controlled the votes of the peasants living and working on their land, and political parties and elected officials became dependent on these elites for votes. By way of their influence over these political actors, landed elites gained greater influence over the state. In turn, these elites were able to translate this influence into even greater control over the rural peasantry by capturing the lion's share of the benefits of market liberalization and economic growth.Footnote 50 When the Maoists targeted landowners, they demonstrated the possibility of the kind of structural changes that had hitherto been but empty promises from the state. By disrupting rural economic dependencies, moreover, the Maoists also significantly lowered the cost of joining the insurgency for the rural peasantry.Footnote 51
As P. Adhikari and Samford emphasize, however, the war ought to be considered in two phases in order to distinguish between its outbreak and spread, which are not necessarily explained by the same variables.Footnote 52 During the first phase (1996–2000), the conflict was largely constrained to mid-western districts and produced relatively low levels of physical violence (in terms of deaths, at least), whereas the second phase (2001–2006) was characterized by high levels of violence and spread across the country. The authors argue that both phases can be understood in terms of a combination of grievances and opportunity, but that the particularities are different. According to this account, Maoist organization was the critical causal factor of insurgency at the district level during the first phase, but only when such organization took place in districts that had ‘high levels of economic disempowerment or the presence of a high tribal or Dalit concentration, as well as low levels of road density and low levels of central government development spending’.Footnote 53 The same variables mattered as the war spread during the second phase, but state-sanctioned violence perpetrated by the Royal Nepal Army became far more important in attracting sympathizers to the revolution, whether motivated by promises of protection from the Royal Nepal Army or by providing the opportunity to seek revenge. Thus, the Nepali state looms large in the causal explanation of the war—through its malignant neglect leading up to and during the first phase and through the ire generated by its armed forces during the second phase.Footnote 54
Such quantitative approaches offer theoretical frameworks for sketching an understanding of the conflict and the variations in levels of violence across the country. Although most construct their models based on localized qualitative accounts, they inevitably miss the nuances that qualitative approaches can capture. Perhaps most importantly, they are unable to engage with the collective memories and cultural contexts that conditioned political critique and consciousness during the period.
Shneiderman, for example, challenges the notion that rural support for the Maoists should be understood to have been orchestrated by external political elites. She details how the collective memory of the 1984 Piskar massacre in Sindhupalchok—in which villagers were killed by police forces during an annual jatra (festival)—contributed to a rural political consciousness keenly aware of Nepal's violent history of state formation and oppression.Footnote 55 This accords with other accounts of memories of similar atrocities, such as the ‘Chintang Incident’ of 1979, in which 15 residents suspected of anti-state activities were killed,Footnote 56 and the radicalization of political consciousness in the wake of acts of state repression in areas that emerged as Maoist strongholds.Footnote 57 Taking these historical experiences and memories thereof seriously allows for an understanding of rural support for, or participation in, the Maoist movement ‘as a logical reaction to earlier experiences of state violence and oppression rather than as an anomalous break precipitated by outside forces’.Footnote 58
Furthermore, the fact that the Maoist movement emerged in the wake of the democratic opening in 1990 becomes less theoretically puzzling when considered in light of the fact that the period offered new opportunities for discursive critique of the state and the emergence of new vocabularies of resentment and resistance. As Lecomte-Tilouine notes, the term bahunvad, which began to circulate in the 1980s, allowed for a sustained critique of the prevailing caste-based order, but also illustrated the gap between political-economic realities and the ‘egalitarian facade’ of the panchayat.Footnote 59 This term was subsumed within the notion of samantavad (‘feudalism’) that the Maoists effectively circulated. In the meantime, many rural communities were exposed to the notion of ‘empowerment’ through internationally funded aid programmes during both the panchayat and democratic periods, a shift in consciousness that worked to the Maoists’ advantage when they pointed out the discrepancies between decades of developmentalist promises and the reality of barely improved livelihoods by the mid 1990s.Footnote 60
There are, moreover, important historical antecedents to the Maoist movement. In a survey of the historical record of political violence from the Gorkhali conquests that led to the foundation of the state through the first People's Movement of 1990, Whelpton illustrates that the Maoists inherited a legacy of resistance, rhetoric, and repertoires of action that they were able to leverage in their campaigns.Footnote 61 The clearest ideological parallels can be seen in the failed ‘Jhapeli andolan’ that emerged in the 1960s and was heavily influenced by the Naxalite movement in West Bengal, India, and the clearest rhetorical and tactical parallels can be located in the 1950–1951 democratic movement that established the possibility of multi-party politics in Nepal. Likewise, individual figures, such as Ramraja Prasad Singh—one of Nepal's earliest republicans and the author of a series of bomb blasts in 1985, who later became the Maoists’ (unsuccessful) presidential candidate in 2008—were important exemplars for Maoist insurgents.Footnote 62
It would be remiss to suggest that the emergence and appeal of the Maoist movement can or should be understood as the result of historical inevitabilities or psychological conditions alone. On the contrary, Maoist activists in the mid-western districts of Rolpa, Rukum, and Jajarkot engaged in campaigns to propagate their ideology starting in 1995, a year before the military campaign began.Footnote 63 As the conflict unfolded and escalated, they attracted recruits and gained supporters through a number of means, including indoctrination and political education—which relied upon tactics like forced mass gatherings, the deployment of ‘individual motivators’ who recruited door-to-door, and the kidnapping of groups of school children for the purposes of indoctrination.Footnote 64 Cultural troupes active in all 75 districts of Nepal by the end of the conflict performed skits and songs to communicate the party's ideology and galvanize emotional ties to the movement.Footnote 65 The party also employed the artistic medium of opera to regenerate an affective sense of commitment and unity among its war torn cadres as the conflict moved through its most violent phases.Footnote 66 As Lecomte-Tilouine argues, ‘The Party thus combined the two extremes of the political register: abstract thought and pure emotion, rationality and enchantment.’Footnote 67
The dynamics of the war
The literature detailing the dynamics of the war offers views from two general perspectives: experiences at the village levelFootnote 68 and the organizational cultures and military tactics of both the People's Liberation Army and the Royal Nepal Army.Footnote 69 Taken together, the literature offers insights into the manner in which Maoist efforts to re-organize moral and political cultures were received—and often resisted—at the village level, and how their selective deployment of political violence shaped the trajectory of the war.
As part of their campaign, the Maoists instituted policies at the village level designed to restructure social, cultural, and spatial arrangements. Maoist policies in some areas included prohibitions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, early marriage, polygamy, and social discrimination (especially discrimination against women and Dalits). Perhaps more surprisingly, they went so far as to require the transgression of cultural and religious taboos by forcing inter-caste marriages, prohibiting animal sacrifices and the celebration of religious festivals, and forcing the closure of temples and destruction of shrines.Footnote 70 In some areas, such policies contributed to what Lecomte-Tilouine calls a ‘climate of terror’ which she argues characterized a ‘model village’ in mid-western Nepal. However, terror came in both ‘red’ forms (at the hands of Maoist rebels) and ‘white’ (at the hands of the Royal Nepal Army).Footnote 71 Likewise, we are told that a climate of fear gripped a Tamu (Gurung) village in central Nepal, where villagers often coped with the introduction of these new forms of terror by contextualizing them through indigenous theories about fear and sources of terror.Footnote 72 Some commentators have noted that such approaches do not always fully situate discussions of ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ vis-à-vis local frameworks for political action, creating an incomplete impression that village experiences of the conflict were predominantly affective rather than political.Footnote 73 This picture is productively complemented by other writing that explores political dynamics on local scales—in both rural and urban contexts—and the articulation of those dynamics with regional and national trajectories.Footnote 74
The Maoists’ agenda of moral re-ordering was not simply projected onto village landscapes and social worlds, but was embodied within the movement itself. Gayer, for example, analyses the dynamics of sex and gender in the People's Liberation Army and highlights the manner in which the Maoist leadership promoted love marriages, especially inter-caste marriages, within the party itself.Footnote 75 This strategy, he argues, was designed not only to prevent ‘libidinal withdrawal’ from the movement, but was accompanied by strict expectations that the ‘correct’ order of love, then marriage, then sex would be followed by party cadres as part of a broader strategy to prescribe and control their fighters’ emotions. Ultimately, moreover, such policies ‘should be related to a larger and more controversial project of social engineering, the objective of which was nothing less than the annihilation of the family’.Footnote 76 Such arguments build upon an earlier literature that addressed gendered dimensions of the Maoist movement,Footnote 77 and bridge to more recent work that considers women's role in ‘post-conflict’ governance and peace-building processes.Footnote 78
Whatever the true intent of the Maoist leadership may have been in regards to its cadres, they were remarkably successful in inspiring a high level of commitment to the cause. In seeking to explain why the far larger, professionally trained, and well-equipped Royal Nepal Army was unable to contain an insurgency conducted by the poorly trained and ill-equipped People's Liberation Army, for example, Mehta and Lawoti contrast the ‘ceremonial’ Royal Nepal Army with the ‘motivated’ People's Liberation Army.Footnote 79 Similarly, in his assessment based on an analysis of Maoist videos produced in 2005, Cowan concludes that the People's Liberation Army fighters were highly motivated and had a strong sense of purpose and commitment. Again pointing to the Maoist use of cultural forms to inspire loyalty, he notes that the revolutionary songs that accompany the videos as background music emphasize ‘a strong ideological drive centred on notions of sacrifice, violence, and contempt for death’, which may be indicative of broader morale.Footnote 80
The 2008 elections and looking forward
The war formally came to a close in November 2006 when the Maoists signed a peace agreement with the government of Nepal. One of the most important elements of the agreement was a commitment to hold elections for a Constituent Assembly, which came to pass in April 2008. In defiance of virtually all expectations, the now renamed Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) won 220 of the 601 contested seats—twice the number secured by the Nepali Congress, which won the second largest number of seats.
The most thorough account of the 2008 elections is contained in Nepal Votes for Peace, co-authored by Bhojraj Pokharel, who served as the chief election commissioner, and Shristi Rana.Footnote 81 The book presents a detailed story of the elections and the role of all of the major actors involved—from the political parties contesting seats to international actors seeking to facilitate the process. That the elections were seen as a necessity for securing peace—even if at the expense of some electoral technicalities and international standards—is readily admitted, and it offers a compelling story of how the election was pulled off, seemingly against all odds.
In accounting for the success of the Maoists in the elections, analysts point to a number of factors. Lawoti argues that, historically, Nepalis have tended to vote for the party perceived to be on the winning side after periods of political transformation and that the Maoists benefited from this trend in 2008.Footnote 82 He highlights, however, that a number of indicators support claims that there were some areas where the elections were not contested freely and fairly—such as correlations between the large margins of victory in constituencies where the Maoists won and high levels of violence prior to the elections, at least 51 per cent of which was attributable to Maoist cadres.
Others argue that villagers’ accounts of the elections tell a different story. Ghimire suggests that while some Dalits and impoverished villagers voted for the change promised by the Maoists, others voted for them so that the Maoists would leave their district and go to Kathmandu.Footnote 83 Likewise, Lecomte-Tilouine suggests that villagers voted for the Maoists to minimize conflict in their localities,Footnote 84 while Pettigrew counters the notion that villagers voted for Maoists for their novelty and imagined potential, noting that villagers had co-existed with Maoists for years in most places and the Maoists had been ‘tested’ at the local level throughout the conflict.Footnote 85 Tamang echoes this sentiment, describing how village interactions with Maoists in Kavre district informed voting behaviours, which were collectively deliberated at village council meetings.Footnote 86 Any analysis of electoral trends, however, must keep in mind that ‘all politics are local’, as Holmberg illustrates in his account of the elections from Manegau, Nuwakot district, where considering the elections from a historical perspective reveals that voting behaviour remains best understood as a negotiated process involving kinship ties and long-standing party affiliations.Footnote 87 The latter three articles appear in a booklet entitled Views from the Field: Anthropological Perspectives on the Constituent Assembly Elections, which also includes an introduction by David Gellner.
Moving beyond the conflict and the 2008 elections, Lawoti and Pahari provide an overview of change since the 2007 mainstreaming of the Maoists, noting that the effects of the conflict move in opposite directions at the same time. There was an increase in human rights violations and a disregard for democratic principles during the conflict that established an unhealthy trajectory, but the Maoists advanced ethnic, caste, and gender issues along with a federalist agenda. These efforts instituted structural changes that, in principle at least, could serve to make democratic structures more inclusive in the long-run.Footnote 88
The Constituent Assembly elected in 2008 was dissolved in May 2012, after having failed to produce a constitution despite four extensions to its tenure. Much of the impasse centred on questions of federal demarcation.Footnote 89 Elections for a second Constituent Assembly were held in November 2013.Footnote 90 The Maoists fared poorly, securing only 80 seats. This placed them in a distant third position in terms of party size in the Constituent Assembly, falling behind the Nepali Congress, which won 196 seats, and Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), which won 175. In part, the Maoists suffered from a failure to resolve intra-party disputes. A radical faction led by Mohan Vaidya split from the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist in June 2012 and formed the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M). The Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist not only boycotted the 2013 elections, but also is rumoured to have actively campaigned against the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist.Footnote 91 Nevertheless, the outcome was viewed by many as a shift in the electorate to the political right and away from the radical reforms that drove the Maoist agenda through the conflict period.Footnote 92
One of the most important questions that remains under-researched is the role of migration during the conflict period, and how this affected political mobilization. Two studies address the question of conflict-induced displacement directly through quantitative analysis. Focusing on the southern district of Chitwan, Bohra-Mishra and Massey find that violence produced by the conflict had a curvilinear effect on migration decisions. That is, low levels of violence lowered the probability that an individual would migrate, but the probability of migration rose at higher levels of violence.Footnote 93 In a national-level study, P. Adhikari concludes that high levels of violence were the most significant factor influencing displacement, but that the effects of violence were mitigated in areas where economic opportunity remained viable; where social networks (mothers’ groups, community forest user groups, and small farmer programmes) deterred land confiscation and property damage; and in areas in which there were high levels of Maoist party affiliation.Footnote 94 While this tells us that people may have left their home villages to escape the conflict, it does not tell us what happened to their political aspirations once they arrived elsewhere. Whether settling in the increasingly overcrowded capital of Kathmandu, where their lives might have become intertwined with environmental or other forms of politics,Footnote 95 or further afield in other countries for long-term wage labour, the impact of such mobility on political consciousness remains to be fully investigated.
State formation and transformation
Recent publications focusing on the transformation of Nepal's state and politics after the conclusion of the conflict fall into two broad categories. First, those that measure developments in Nepal against general academic theories and/or normative benchmarks of postwar transition, and second, those that attempt to understand the logics of political practice in Nepal on their own terms.
Peace-building
Einsiedel, Pradhan, and Malone's edited volume Nepal in Transition is a prominent example of the first approach. Aiming ‘to contribute to a wider understanding and public awareness of the upheavals that have marked Nepal's trajectory over the past decade, focusing on the country's critical transition from 2005–2011 and the international role in those developments’,Footnote 96 the volume contains 12 chapters, mostly by journalists, public intellectuals, and practitioners. Analyses of the peace process take up the bulk of the book. Several chapters are mainly concerned with Western and international involvement, focusing on the dynamics around the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) and the UN's Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) in particular. Others focus on the role of India, and to a lesser extent China. These sections are rich in detail and together provide a thorough overview of the international and regional dimension of the peace process, with references to national level Nepali political dynamics, and plenty of interesting background on Indian neighbourhood politics.
While the first-person accounts of Nepal in Transition’s authors constitute a notable improvement upon earlier works that cast Nepal flatly as a ‘failed state’,Footnote 97 as one reviewer noted, the book's most disappointing aspect remains its limited engagement with the Nepali state and politics on its own terms.Footnote 98 There are a number of exceptions. Chalmers’ exploration of the Nepal Army's perspectives and their genesis offers valuable historical depth.Footnote 99 Panday's chapter on failed development provides an impressive overview of developmental dynamics, and points to connections between questions of economy and political culture,Footnote 100 as do parts of Rawski and Sharma's chapter, which situates efforts to promote human rights (and their failure) within more complex analyses of the Nepali state and politics.Footnote 101 A. Adhikari's chapter on the postwar transformation of the Maoists stands out among others in the last two sections for its detailed attention to political ground realities.Footnote 102 But elsewhere, outcomes entirely commensurate with Nepali political logics—which frustrated international projects (as well as those of the Maoists)—are brushed off with shorthand explanations such as a ‘lack of political will’. This shortcoming of the book renders it useful in a different way, bringing into relief the discourses that shape international perspectives on Nepal.
Transitional justice
Justice for wartime crimes constituted a central formal component of Nepal's peace process, and recent years have seen an increased number of publications on transitional justice in Nepal. Some of these are indeed critical of the global transitional justice discourse, but for the most part these belong to the genre of prescriptive policy literature. The only book-length study in this field so far is Sajjad's Transitional Justice in South Asia: A Study of Afghanistan and Nepal.Footnote 103 Here, Sajjad argues that transitional justice as a ‘toolkit’—generally accepted by the international community as a necessary means of addressing extraordinary crimes committed during conflict—ultimately fails to facilitate either transition or secure justice, largely because it relies on established elites as gatekeepers to local communities.
While Transitional Justice in South Asia represents a welcome contribution to the international policy discourse on transitional justice, it adds little to the Nepal-specific literature. That the exclusive mainstream transitional justice focus on civil and political rights and prosecutions often serves conflict victims ill had been noted earlier, by Simon Robins and others. Robins had described a marked disparity between conflict victims’ priorities, which are indeed centred on economic security and certainty about the fate of missing relatives, and the portrayal of these priorities in transitional justice advocacy publications, where prosecutions are highlighted.Footnote 104 Pasipanodya argues further that, since socio-economic inequalities were both drivers and consequences of the conflict, these too should be addressed through a transitional justice mechanism.Footnote 105
Perhaps as a corollary of its policy-oriented nature, with the exception of Robins,Footnote 106 the transitional justice literature reviewed here makes little reference to longstanding debates on the relationship between law and politics in general, and transitional justice and constitutive power in particular.Footnote 107 The role that debates about the law play in the renegotiation of state formation remains an important theme for future exploration.Footnote 108
Constitutionalism
Mara Malagodi's Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion begins to take up this challenge, providing a new cornerstone for research on the relationship between law and politics in Nepal.Footnote 109 Drawing on oral histories, archival research, and case law, Constitutional Nationalism examines both how a particular definition of national identity—focusing on Hinduism, the monarchy, and the Nepali language—became enshrined in the 1990 constitution, and what the legal implications of this institutional choice were over the course of the following decade. Malagodi answers this first question with reference to a process of institutional path dependency, viewing the 1990 constitution-making process as fundamentally continuous with institutional patterns established during the foundation and consolidation of Nepal as a modern nation-state. She then analyses Supreme Court decisions and legislation, finding that the supposedly ‘soft’ constitutional provisions of the preamble were widely used to justify discriminatory legal interpretations. By exploring in detail the processes through which identity-based discrimination takes place in the legal arena, Malagodi contributes important material to the literatures on both the state and identity politics.
Malagodi's book also stands out because, unlike much other literature on identity politics, it does not conclude that liberal individual rights necessarily fail to address forms of group-based discrimination. Rather, she argues that it was the particular view of the nation enshrined in the preamble to the 1990 constitution that allowed a conservative judiciary to interpret individual rights provisions in a discriminatory manner. The implication of her argument is that, with a different framing of nationalism, individual rights provisions could be much more effective. While this perspective leaves unaddressed the question of precisely how great the influence of the legal sphere on broader social and political processes is in Nepal, this is an important point that deserves sustained consideration. Finally, the meticulous analysis of the relationship between law and politics put forward in Constitutional Nationalism exposes two additional blind spots in the transitional justice literature. First, its prescriptive mode ignores questions about the (political) processes through which these prescriptions might be implemented; second, it lacks an analysis of the legal and political context with which the proposed measures would interact if implemented.
Given the central role that the drawn out constitution writing process has played in Nepali politics since the first Constituent Assembly elections in 2008, the lack of sustained academic engagement with it is surprising. An extensive body of policy reports deals with the complex interactions between the peace process (especially the integration of the two armies), short-term political calculations, and substantive differences especially on Nepal's federalization, which bedevilled the first Constituent Assembly between 2008 and 2012.Footnote 110 However, many avenues of analysis remain to be explored in greater depth, with some important entrées indicated by K. Adhikari and Gellner on ethnic dynamics in the collapse of the first Constituent Assembly,Footnote 111 Snellinger on consensus as a political value in the first Constituent Assembly,Footnote 112 and Vollan on the dynamics of electoral quotas.Footnote 113
The state on its own terms
If Einsiedel et al. (with the exception of several chapters), and the transitional justice literature take up one end of the spectrum of writing on the Nepali state, and Malagodi occupies a middle position, then at the other end we find a body of largely anthropological works that view Nepali political practice as fundamentally distinctive. A striking example is Marie Lecomte-Tilouine's collection of essays, Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival, and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal.Footnote 114 Based on a mix of archival sources and ethnographic field research, Lecomte-Tilouine finds fundamental ritual continuities to underlie historical trajectories of Hindu-ethnic relations, as well as the relationship between the contemporary Maoist rebellion and the Shah monarchy. Although not explicitly acknowledged, Lecomte-Tilouine appears to be following established anthropological traditions by asserting that ritual power and ritually established hierarchies appear constitutive of worldly political authority;Footnote 115 in other words, the state is essentially produced through ritual, and so is its contestation.Footnote 116
Hindu Kingship is a sophisticated, nuanced, and important contribution, yet the ritual state perspective that it exemplifies maintains two problematic tendencies: first, its perception of Nepal as a timeless entity in which new cultural content simply comes to fill the given ritual slots; and second, as a corollary of this fundamentally structural approach, its vision of Nepal as a bounded and closed cultural unit. Burghart, examining the congruence between royal body and realm in particular, had already introduced the notion that the efficacy of ritual action, far from being timeless, depended on its interaction with changing political economies,Footnote 117 and in fact, Lecomte-Tilouine elsewhere focuses to a much greater extent on historical change. In the introduction to Revolution in Nepal, for example, she draws attention to the importance of understanding change and ferment during the panchayat era, including longer-term ideological developments within the political left, for analysing contemporary political history. Simultaneously, Lecomte-Tilouine makes several perceptive arguments about Nepal's particular political culture, for example conceptualizing Maoist mobilization as the formation of solidarity networks analogous to, as well as opposed to, those of traditional thulo manchhe (‘big men’), with the resilience of both against state authority as a common feature. This observation raises provocative questions about the scope and nature of the transition Nepal is undergoing.
These questions of continuity and change in local politics have to date been raised most directly by Philippe Ramirez's French-language ethnography of district- and village-level politics in Arghakanchi, which chronicled both the historical continuity of elite lineages, and the extent to which political affiliations were shaped by local, often longstanding conflicts and rivalries.Footnote 118 The kind of political anthropology Ramirez represents was somewhat more prominent in the past, with detailed ethnographic studies of local politics and administration,Footnote 119 but the overtly modernist focus on corruption and personalism that characterized this body of work has since fallen out of fashion.Footnote 120
The point that Nepal's postwar transition may mark less of a transformation than is often assumed is made forcefully by an International Crisis Group report titled Nepal's Political Rites of Passage.Footnote 121 It proposes that political practice is structured on the one hand by strongly institutionalized informal distributive processes, which, in their interdependency with one another as well as formal state structures, assume a high degree of stability, and on the other by pervasive informal rules of conduct. The upshot of this argument is that much of the contentious politics of the post-2006 period, including its violent forms, constituted much less a challenge to the system than attempts at negotiating larger shares of the resources distributed through it.
The Crisis Group report offers an interesting perspective from an unexpected direction, and there are indications that it has had a nuancing impact both on academic and policy analysis since its publication.Footnote 122 Nonetheless, in its attempt to explain resilience and underlying continuities, like the ‘state as ritual authority’ literature from anthropology described above, Rites of Passage may in fact underestimate long-term processes of social and political change. The juxtaposition of distinctive political-economic logics with a distinctive political culture—framed as unwritten rules of the game—ultimately raises more questions than it answers about the relationship between the two.
The turn to history that is evident in Lecomte-Tilouine's introduction and many of the contributions in the volume Revolution in Nepal is not entirely new. In an immediate sense, it follows a number of earlier local political histories exploring the backgrounds of Maoist mobilization.Footnote 123 But a broader historiographical re-engagement with nineteenth- and twentieth-century state formation in Nepal is also underway. Raj offers a historical account of peasant mobilization through an extended life-history interview—minimally edited and sparsely juxtaposed with additional archival material—with Krishnabhakta Caguthi, an octogenarian peasant leader from Bhaktapur, as well as a theory of history as a series of ‘ruptures and repairs’ articulated in an edited volume by that name.Footnote 124 Addressing an altogether different scale, Michael's study of the 1814–1816 Anglo-Gorkha war relies on rich archival material to situate the formation of the Nepalese state within broader colonial dynamics of the subcontinent.Footnote 125 He nuances Burghart's seminal accountFootnote 126 by drawing attention to the fluidity and fragmentation of contemporary political authority. Fujikura's fine, historically informed ethnography of community development draws attention to the crucial importance of international development for post-1950 processes of state formation.Footnote 127 Taken together, this scholarship re-emphasizes the importance of considering processes of state transformation in Nepal —past and present—in their subcontinental and world-historical context.Footnote 128
A different kind of historical engagement emerges from a number of recent re-publications of works from and on two earlier transitions—those of 1950 and 1960. Particularly important among these is a collection of political scientist L.S. Baral's essays on the early panchayat state, published mostly in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 129 Eugene Mihaly offers what is still the most comprehensive account of the first decade of foreign aid in Nepal.Footnote 130 Together with Joshi and Rose's account of political developments in the 1950s,Footnote 131 Mihaly's book also highlights the extent to which an earlier generation of ‘transitologist’ literature on Nepal was concerned with questions of state legitimacy, security, and stability, then in the context of the cold war.
Recent historiographical work, however, also represents an important departure, in the sense that there was previously very limited attention to political economy in the analysis of the Nepali state. We refer particularly to approaches associated with historical and fiscal sociology, which pay close attention to the dynamic interaction between state practices, including the extraction and distribution of resources, and forms of production and class structures.Footnote 132 A focus on the relationship between political and economic processes had been prominent in the work of earlier historians, in particular in Stiller and Regmi's work on land reform, but has been less evident since the 1970s.Footnote 133
Beyond historical works, a small number of recent publications address particular aspects of Nepal's broader political economy. Examples include Mishra's essays on the sociology of Nepal;Footnote 134 Panday's collection of essays on foreign development efforts, which provide an excellent historical overview, and highlight the importance of development aid for financing the Nepali state;Footnote 135 and M. Shakya on changing historical relationships between business elites and the state.Footnote 136 Sugden's articles on land relations in the eastern Tarai fill an important gap in research on changing land relations in a still overwhelmingly agrarian country, even though his neo-Marxist emphasis on semi-feudalism perhaps leads to an over-emphasis on continuities over politically relevant transformations in the rural class structure.Footnote 137 His work in many ways follows earlier Marxist perspectives, which sought causes for Nepal's poverty in a vision of the state stuck at an ‘earlier’ stage of development.Footnote 138
A recent ethnographic application of such Marxian theory can be found in Fitzpatrick's Cardamom and Class.Footnote 139 The author uses historical and ethnographic analysis to describe how changes in production processes have generated certain patterns of economic differentiation in a Limbu village in East Nepal. Fitzpatrick details how the introduction and development of cardamom as a cash crop, the arrival and integration of non-Limbu migrants, and the increased participation of villagers in international circuits of labour migration produced the current landscape of inequality in the village of Mamangkhe. Fitzpatrick's account demonstrates the role of resource distribution and production processes in establishing a class-based identity affiliation that complicates apolitical notions of Limbu-ness and neatly structured economic hierarchies. And finally, like other recent studies of migration and mobility, Fitzpatrick's findings of shifting and agentive mobilities challenge tropes that would place eastern Nepal at globalism's periphery.
Still barely addressed, however, is the elephant in the room: the effect of Nepal's rapidly expanding remittance economy on not only livelihoods and economic organization, but on political processes both at the local and the national level. Remittances from foreign employment have consistently contributed over 15 per cent of Nepal's GDP for over half a decade, reaching 25 per cent in financial year 2012/13. But with the exception of Sapkota's analysis of the impact of remittances on economic competitiveness,Footnote 140 there has been little analysis of what this drastic change in resource flows means for political incentive systems. Likewise, there is seldom analysis that addresses the role of remittances and foreign capital in financing broader social movements taking place in Nepal today, particularly the apparent eruption of identity-based politics in the wake of the civil conflict.Footnote 141
The politics of identity
As a focus on the politics of identity becomes normalized in academic writing about Nepal it is crucial to ask how this subject became so strongly foregrounded in contemporary Nepal studies. A dominant narrative presumes that we owe this academic turn to the deep socio-economic inequalities revealed through the 1996–2006 civil conflict. In a manner that may seem counter-intuitive to outside observers who identify Maoism with ‘class struggle’, it was in fact the Maoists who brought the concerns of what we might call ‘identity-based inequality’ to the fore through their 1996 40-point demand. Indeed, much literature that seeks to unravel the causes of the conflict focuses on identity politics, indicating the wide salience of identity politics as a category of political life by 2006.Footnote 142 Some scholars have reframed the problem of ‘identity politics’ around the concepts of inclusion, exclusion, and citizenship,Footnote 143 while others promote the ‘politics of belonging’ as a broader, more effective rubric for considering the political consequences of social difference.Footnote 144 Another group emphasizes a spatial approach to demography and population indicators as a key methodology for understanding and managing the country's diversity.Footnote 145
Periodizing scholarship on identity
While literature on these themes has burgeoned in recent years, Krishna Bhattachan reveals in his retrospective, ‘Ethnopolitics and Development’, that scholars of Nepal have interrogated the uneven experiences of identity in Nepal, as well as its attachment to privilege and poverty, since at least the 1970s.Footnote 146 Republished in Lawoti and Hangen's edited volume, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nepal, Bhattachan's 1995 contribution describes a period between the 1970s and 1990s (labelled the ‘Conflict Phase’) when scholars of Nepal shifted focus from descriptions of the social worlds of isolated groups towards inquiry into the types of social relations transpiring between groups.Footnote 147 The academic concern with hierarchical, as well as reciprocal, social relationships crossed into popular conversation following the events of the 1990 ‘People's Movement’, to the extent that the very terms of what counts as ‘authentic identity’, and for whom, became open to public debate. The ‘Public Debate Phase’, as Bhattachan characterizes the post-1990 era, remains a relevant designation for current preoccupations with identity-based claims for federalism, reservations (affirmative action), equal opportunity, and access.Footnote 148
After the conflict ended in 2006, studies of identity in Nepal have begun to move beyond debates about the validity of a politics of identity to explore the content and impact of such politics in Nepal today. This transition is itself a reflection of the burgeoning implementation of policies, such as affirmative action, which give empirical traction to the study of a politics of identity.Footnote 149 We could ask if the practice of identity politics is evidence of a change in the general relationship between persons and the state—a switch from governing subjects to managing rights-bearing citizens. As the state shifts toward provisioning basic services, granting citizenship, delivering pensions, and creating policy explicitly upon the merits of identity, there is much to be explored regarding the historical centrality of the definition of ‘person’ to the operation of the Nepal state.Footnote 150 That scholarship has responded to these changes within the art of governance through the study of identity politics is therefore a welcome recognition of the dynamism of political practices within the Nepali state.
Current studies of identity politics are in many ways grounded in the scholarship on ethnicity that emerged after the return of multi-party democracy in the 1990s. Bhattachan's piece on ethnopolitics, for example, was first published in 1995.Footnote 151 Gellner, Pfaff-Czarnecka, and Whelpton's seminal edited volume, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Nepal first appeared in 1997 as Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom.Footnote 152 Both these works helped to frame academic discussions on the relationship between group identity and the Nepali state, and in the case of Bhattachan, the engagement of international development practices with the rise of ethnic consciousness in Nepal.
Identity and conflict
During the early years of the conflict, anthropologists such as de Sales and Lecomte-Tilouine investigated the relationship between ethnic identity and the establishment of Maoist strongholds in rural mid-west Nepal.Footnote 153 Others expanded such inquiries and moved them further east.Footnote 154 M. S. Tamang and Lawoti each contributed to the elaboration of this theme by linking Maoist demands, such as the call for the end of caste-based oppression, to the ethnic activism emergent in the 1990s, although it had yet earlier historical roots.Footnote 155 Much of the pioneering literature written early in the conflict on these topics was published in academic journals, but many have since found a second life as chapters in edited volumes.Footnote 156
Only one ethnographic monograph published during our review period substantively addresses the relationship between ethnic identity and Maoist politicization: Judith Pettigrew's Maoists at the Hearth. As described above in the Conflict literatures section of this review, Pettigrew's ethnography is notable for its analysis of the everyday lifeworlds constructed in a Tamu (Gurung) village of Western Nepal during, before, and after the arrival of the People's Liberation Army and state security forces to the region, and provides both depth and detail to the study of identity in the conflict period. As noted above, a large literature addresses the relationship between gendered dimensions of identity and Maoist mobilization (see footnotes 77 and 78).
The theme of ‘conflict’—although perhaps differently figured—remains at the centre of scholarship on identity published after the 2006 formal end of the war. Several scholars have argued that lasting peace in Nepal will only be possible if the state heeds the demands of ethnic activists for equal representation in government, the civil service, and security forces; implements affirmative action policies; and ensures legal status for customary governance in traditional territories as mandated by the International Labour Organization's Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples, which Nepal signed in 2007.Footnote 157 As such demands began to receive public attention, Hangen's 2007 open access publication, Creating a ‘New Nepal’: The Ethnic Dimension, served as a handbook for understanding the historicity of ethnicity-based social mobilizations and subsequent demands for social change following the second People's Movement.Footnote 158 In The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal: Democracy in the Margins, Hangen further argues that the challenges ethnic activists raised for the state disrupted normalized narratives of ‘social harmony’ between ethnic and caste groups, thereby promoting what Hangen views as a positive process of democratization at the ‘margins’ of the Nepali polity. Such arguments that seek to recuperate the positive elements of processes of ethnicization run the risk of echoing the structural functionalist arguments typical of panchayat and pre-panchayat era Nepal scholarship: by representing ethnic groups as totalized social components in a plurinational Nepal, the conceptual, and consequently the material-territorial, integrity of the Nepali state remains an unchallenged whole.
This tendency, however, may be understood better in light of the project of deconstructing such totalizing narratives that dominated scholarship on ethnicity in Nepal post-1980. The ethnographic monographs of Fisher and Guneratne, for example, applied deconstructivist analyses to the study of ethnicity.Footnote 159 More recent monographs such as those by Hangen and Shneiderman may be understood in part as a response to that earlier analytical turn. While these authors study identity formation practices on a regional and national scale, Leve's 2011 article ‘Identity’ follows Bhattachan by turning to the phenomenon of global neoliberalism to explain the appearance of identity politics in Nepal.Footnote 160 Shneiderman redirects attention to the emergence of identity politics in the mobilities of persons labouring in transnational economies, in her case Thangmi traversing bureaucracies in India, Nepal, and China's Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR).Footnote 161 Mishra and Gurung provide a good overview of the diverse scholarly opinions on the questions of ethnicity and federalization that dogged the constitution writing process, and remain highly relevant in understanding the aftermath of the 2015 constitutional promulgation.Footnote 162
Identity beyond indigeneity
It is perhaps unfortunate that the scholarship on ethnic and indigenous identities has largely eclipsed other forms of identity prevalent and relevant to contemporary Nepali political life. Studies of the gendered dynamics of Nepali politics and statecraft, for example, have not received extensive book-length attention in scholarship published post-2006, although gender is an undoubtedly crucial dimension of social life in Nepal which has been overtly affected by the changing political environment.Footnote 163 The experience of Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) in the post-conflict wave of identity politics has also only begun to be explored in scholarly terms.Footnote 164 These authors have contributed to complicating our understanding of the practice of identity politics—dependent primarily on a politics of recognition vis-à-vis the government of Nepal—among groups reliant on a ‘politics of anonymity’ such as the Dalits who make up 12 per cent of Nepal's population.Footnote 165
Given the prominent role that Madheshi parties played in catalysing the second People's Movement in 2006, it is surprising and somewhat disheartening that scholarly analysis of Madheshi identities remains relatively sparse.Footnote 166 The relationship between emerging forms of Muslim identity mobilizations and Nepal's political transition is one area in which scholars have engaged substantively with the dynamics of identity in the Tarai.Footnote 167 Muslim leaders have been engaged in efforts to mobilize a pan-Nepali Muslim identity and promote the concerns of Nepal's Muslims since at least the middle of the twentieth century, but such efforts tended to be restricted to the sub-national level and focused on issues within and between various Muslim communities in Nepal until the early 2000s.Footnote 168 Since 2005, however, Muslim organizations in Nepal have increasingly mobilized to establish the legitimacy of a pan-Nepali Muslim identity and the national-level political demands associated with such an identity—namely, the recognition and certification of madrasas as legitimate educational institutions, the protection and promotion of the Urdu language, and national-level committees to promote the development of Muslim communities and the protection and management of Islamic institutions and properties.Footnote 169 There are several emergent scholarly accounts of how other religious identities have figured in Nepal's transformation.Footnote 170 The broader question of how Nepal's constitutional shift from Hindu kingdom to secular democratic republic has affected identity formation remains largely unexplored.Footnote 171
Underscoring the present phase of writing on identity and politics in Nepal studies are concerns with how identity becomes represented to the state, and conversely, how the state comes to recognize identity as a basis for claims made on it. Arguably for the nation-state, the most contentious claims are those that impact the control of territory. Mobilizations for federal provinces with boundaries determined by and/or named for ethnic or regional identities derailed the Constituent Assembly in 2012, and this spectre still haunts the constitution as promulgated in September 2015. The allocation of natural resource management to the care of specific identity-based groups remains a prominent unresolved issue. It is through debates over rights to land that identity-based groups receive the most attention from the state, and consequently from scholars studying the state. This observation may help explain why non-territorially based forms of identity—religious, Dalit, and others—are only beginning to be explored in the scholarship on Nepal's political transformation and deserve further study.Footnote 172
The politics of environment and territory
While debate over the role of identity in shaping federal boundaries continues, the Nepali state and other actors have been engaged in diverse forms of territorial restructuring linked to the politics of environment. This section draws connections between recently published work on Nepal that is concerned with environmental conflict and change, shifting regimes of natural resource management, and the intersection of social and environmental problems. Here we concentrate largely on political-environmental change in the context of development projects and natural resource management, while also addressing work on the political economy of agrarian relations that clarifies the relationship between political change and environmental change in important ways.Footnote 173
Territory
Territorial Changes and Territorial Restructuring in the Himalayas, edited by Joëlle Smadja, offers several accounts of how political transitions effect different kinds of territorial restructuring, and vice versa.Footnote 174 This volume also productively expands the political discourse on territory to include environmental change and changing patterns of mobility and migration.
In her introduction, Smadja argues that the solidity of territory as a concept is undermined when political stability unravels, creating space for new kinds of territorial claims and new processes of territorialization which overlap in the same spaces—such as identity politics or the social and spatial claims of development projects. Khanal's contribution defines ‘territory’ as a space of belonging, which is characterized as ‘defensible’ and articulated as a site of a particular activity.Footnote 175 Building on these assertions, several other authors discuss how conceptions of environment, place, and territory are mutually and interdependently changing as political transitions are accompanied by shifting socialities and mobilities.Footnote 176 These contributors foreground changing patterns of mobility, from the evacuation of land during conflict, to the occupancy of urban frontiers, to the social history of foreign employment, which shapes new relationships and tensions between ‘localities’ and broader global networks. Discussing these changes, Smadja revisits the concept of ‘Zomia’Footnote 177 and its attention to jurisdiction, legibility, and resistance as a means to investigate the changing nature of Himalayan territorialities defined by a more engaged periphery that is increasingly enmeshed in global systems of labour and capital.
In a similar vein, Campbell's monograph, Living Between Juniper and Palm, describes how the lived environments and cultural territories of Tamang communities in Rasuwa district contrast with environmental projects that seek to delineate, protect, and benefit from environmental resources at the national and regional scale. A recent addition to the literature on conservation and enclosure in Nepal,Footnote 178 this ethnography describes the ways in which the living landscape of Tamang communities is altered by the enclosure of Langtang National Park, an environmental territory that limits transhumant livelihoods. Projects like Langtang National Park introduce an array of official new subjectivities to this part of Rasuwa, whereas communities living here previously ‘maintained a state of semi-detachment to the state’ that resembles the territorial sovereignty of other communities theorized as Zomian.Footnote 179 Paralleling some of his chapter on the opening of the Kyirong Road in the Smadja volume,Footnote 180 Campbell demonstrates how both development and conservation result in territorial restructuring that affects the lives of rural communities in ways akin to political restructuring.
These observations can be put in conversation with M. S. Tamang's earlier work on an emergent ‘territorial consciousness’ within Tamang communities seeking political recognition,Footnote 181 and B. Sijapati's recent analysis of Madheshi identity politics and territoriality in the Tarai.Footnote 182 The latter describes how ongoing social and political exclusion in an area characterized by dense geographic concentrations of population and resources created a crucible for political transformation. Both Tamang and Madheshi territories may be formally inscribed in the political transition of Nepal through the conversation about the creation of identity-based subnational states—Tamsaling in the former case, and the various iterations of Tarai states in the latter. Collectively, these works demonstrate how new territorialities and identity claims emerge in parallel and in response to new political, geographic, and environmental claims to territory and resources. In both cases, patterns of territorial restructuring initiated by state and non-state actors are changing territorial and identity-based claims to land and resources.Footnote 183
Forest resources
Scholarship on Nepal's forest management practices, particularly the decentralized system of community forestry user groups (CFUGs), is robust, but has often seemed detached from broader political considerations.Footnote 184 Recent works by Ojha, along with Bushley and Khatri, refreshingly analyse contemporary developments in Nepal's forest policy by looking at the institutional architecture of forest governance.Footnote 185 Ojha compares different existing models of forest governance using a framework centred on ‘deliberative politics’ and social equity, while Bushley and Khatri discuss the ways in which forest governance in Nepal is engaged by larger models of climate mitigation and carbon finance, in the context of Nepal's emerging ‘REDD+ readiness’ programmes.Footnote 186 Both grapple with themes of recentralization and the subtle ways in which power continues to shape forest policies despite the acknowledged successes of community forestry in Nepal.
Employing Bourdieu, Ojha offers a historical analysis of the institutions of forest management in Nepal, focusing on the management model and habitus that each produces. Describing the development of feudalistic, techno-bureaucratic, and developmentalist doxa that seek to instrumentalize participatory development and forest users, Ojha details how opportunistic forest policy and techno-bureaucratic habitus have entrenched elite domination over forest resources. These models contrast with the ‘deliberative activism’ (a term Ojha borrows from Habermas) of community forestry, yet they also shape one another.Footnote 187 Unpacking the ‘successes’ of community forestry by highlighting the unevenness of forest governance, this text offers a helpful framework that can be read alongside other texts focused on the micropolitics of resource user groups and the ways that patterns of social exclusion are reproduced.Footnote 188
Importantly, Ojha argues that resource governance failures that reproduce symbolic violence have political outcomes: ‘such a failure of open and active deliberation in governance should be seen as the antecedent condition for the recent (and indeed ongoing) violent Maoist political movement’.Footnote 189 Struggles between dominant and activist habitus that compete to reformulate and justify new forest regulations structure social and political space and ‘correspond with the structural regularities of the national political field’.Footnote 190 Thus, he argues, civil society movements and new deliberative forms of politics are needed to combat patterns of ‘symbolic violence’ and failed governance that continue to trouble Nepal. These theoretical insights, which are further developed by Nightingale and Ojha,Footnote 191 are crucial in understanding how localized strategies of resource governance and community decision making intersect with broader political transformation.
Bushley and Khatri describe how Nepal's initiatives toward participation in ‘REDD+ readiness programmes’ represent both opportunities and risks for the current decentralized model of forest governance. In the context of REDD+ participation, Nepal's forest governance will be shaped by international negotiations on carbon policy as well as ambiguities within existing frameworks and funding mechanisms. REDD+ represents an attempt (and a revision of the earlier programmes) to include forest users and stakeholders and to devise socially sustainable practices, yet the scale of the programme and the formal assemblage of calculative and political processes required, risk social exclusion and dilution of the landmark Forest Act of 1991. Bushley and Khatri argue that ‘the influence of existing institutions, their interaction with the emerging REDD+ architecture, and recent efforts by the government to reassert control over forests through both legal and policy mechanisms, suggest a recentralization of forest governance, and a corresponding loss of local autonomy’.Footnote 192 As global policy engages Nepal, and as Nepal seeks to be accounted for within global programmes of environmental finance, care should be taken to counter problems of socio-structural inequality and elite capture—the dynamics that frequently lead to destabilizing conflict.
Water resources
Though water resource management has long been an important topic in Nepal, a variety of new pressures—debates over hydropower development and rising energy needs, pollution and water quality, the uncertain hydrologic effects of climate change—have increased attention to the topic and fostered a great deal of scholarly and public debate. This section highlights a sampling of recent publications as water issues in Nepal gain greater critical academic attention.
In the current political moment, hydropower development is a central topic within discourse focused on economic growth, energy security, geopolitical relations, and the creation of economically viable administrative territories under a federalist model. The volume of these debates has risen in part due to the increasing intensity of power shortages in Kathmandu. For many years, analyses of hydropower development in Nepal have provided strong critiques focused on the cultures of water resource management,Footnote 193 the production of scientific knowledge (and confusion) about water in Nepal,Footnote 194 and the multiscalar relationships between centres and peripheries that shape hydropower discourse.Footnote 195 Gyawali's 2001 Water in Nepal remains the authoritative monograph on the topic.Footnote 196 More recent work has analysed the relationship between hydropower development and social inequality,Footnote 197 the ways in which global changes in hydropower policy have begun to effect changes in the political process of hydropower development in Nepal,Footnote 198 and the application of larger rights frameworks such as ILO 169 or UNDRIP to the development context of Nepal.Footnote 199 Other significant topics of current research include the effects of climate change and seismic risk on hydropower, the relationship between environmental governance and corporate social responsibility, and the evolution of new modalities of project finance and benefit-sharing.
Discussing the absence of hydropower in the context of the infamous Arun-3 Project, Forbes and Rest both discuss the evolving social space of hydropower development (albeit over a decade apart) and the ways that development subjectivities and positionalities represent potent markers of social difference.Footnote 200 Following the infamous rise and fall of the Arun-3 hydropower project,Footnote 201 both papers use ethnography to call into question constructions of locality and beliefs about development.Footnote 202 Focusing on mobilizations for and against the Arun-3 in the 1990s, Forbes discusses the politics of representation, highlighting the ways that local needs and local voices are defined and delineated on multiple scales.Footnote 203 Years later, Rest contrasts the arc of project planning, non-local protest, and development failure with local ‘desires’ for progress and mobility that Arun residents openly express. Rest's analysis focuses on ‘the desire for and imagination of development’ within local ambitions, where local actors seek to become bikasit, or developed—describing communities who perceive their present situation as lacking.Footnote 204 In both accounts, information flows to local ‘project-affected persons’ of the Arun region are minimal, and hydropower continues to exist in the realm of the local and national imaginary.
Focused on urban water quality and socio-ecological health, Rademacher's Reigning the River analyses debates over the degradation and restoration of urban riverscapes in Kathmandu—the Bagmati and Bishnumati rivers—to demonstrate the interpenetrating nature of environmental and political change. Emphasizing urban ecology and environmental activism, Rademacher hopes to address ‘how urban environmental improvement proceeds when state power is unsteady and volatile’.Footnote 205 As such, this book presents a narrative of riverine identity politics that flows from the dissolution of the monarchy through the first Constituent Assembly elections. Yet Rademacher also argues that environmental problems extend beyond political imbalance to fundamental issues of social inequality and long-term imbalances between consumption and sustainability.
Different groups strategically pull on ‘local’ and ‘global’ framings that are not pre-figured to ‘confer legitimacy to certain constructions of ecological meaning’ and to construct territories of political and social belonging.Footnote 206 The question ‘restoration by whom?’ is offset against the invisible question ‘degradation by whom?’Footnote 207 Chapters focused on the role of the state-development complex in defining environmental problems and the thin relationship between knowledge production and actual interventions are particularly telling. Central to this book is a narrative focused on the ways that Kathmandu residents (limited mostly to Newars, but also landless populations) see the deterioration of the river as a metaphor for other problems, inequities, and instabilities, as well as the way that environmental aspirations and mobilizations interrelate with broader politics. Throughout these narratives, ideas about ecological responsibility are entangled with different ideas of belonging to the riverscape, leading to the construction of competing territoriality claims based on citizenship, heritage, stewardship, and environmental health.
A third major topic of water-related research focuses on the effects of climate change across Nepal's diverse hydrologic regimes. Though current literature remains largely confined to technical grey literatureFootnote 208 or broader descriptions of climactic risk focused on ‘the water towers of Asia’,Footnote 209 a growing number of studies are currently underway regarding the effects of climate on the ‘water-energy-food nexus’Footnote 210 (sustainable groundwater management and irrigation, viability of hydropower), changing patterns of water stress (new flood and drought regimes), and patterns of socio-ecological resilience among climate-stressed communities. Drawing connections between conflict, rapid urbanization, and environmental narratives of development such as ‘climate adaptation’, Nightingale and Rankin discuss the effects of Nepal's political transition, pointing to complex problems of urbanization in Kathmandu and the need to account for issues of social marginalization within climate adaptation programmes.Footnote 211 Reflecting a turn to social dimensions of climate stress, a few policy-oriented publications have focused on the relationships between climate change, water hazards, irrigation, and migration—establishing preliminary findings and frameworks that indicate the need for deeper interdisciplinary engagement with these topics.Footnote 212 Yet studies of this type must be both sufficiently empirical and situated within the broader discourse on adaptation, migration, and the idea of ‘climate refugees’Footnote 213 —as Nepal has long been fertile ground for a range of crisis narratives.
Environmental knowledge and uncertainty
The shape of environmental politics is often heavily determined by regimes of environmental knowledge production—long an important focus of study in the Nepal Himalaya, beginning with the landmark work of Blaikie, Cameron and Seddon, as well as Thomson, Warburton and Hatley in the early 1980s (both have recently been republished).Footnote 214 At that time, a heated debate over the rate and causes of erosion led to a discourse focused on the precarity of the Himalayan environment and socio-ecological relationships. Commonly framed as the ‘Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation (THED)’,Footnote 215 this posited a series of environmental crises that would threaten social and political stability in the region. Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale attempted to unravel the realities and fictions of an ecological crisis constructed by politically motivated claims about resource use—to modify incorrect assumptions about what was ecological fact, what was a scientific ‘finding’, and what was simply a strategic misattribution.Footnote 216 Critiquing the certainty of scientific-expert environmental knowledge, the authors refer to ‘a science of messes’ constituted of overlapping disciplines, claims, and theories of change, each subject to an array of uncertainties.
Several of these themes are productively revisited in Culture and the Environment in the Himalaya, where the authors seek to disaggregate discourse on the ‘Himalayan environment’ by presenting a range of variably ‘cognized environments’.Footnote 217 As editor, Guneratne asserts that environmental planning cannot afford to elide local knowledges, even when they are messy or in disagreement with project aims. He also acknowledges, however, that ‘local’ uses of the environment are changing as localities become more permeable, and in response to changing state narratives that implicate the environment in the construction of new subjectivities. In the same volume, Metz analyses how the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation has both positioned Nepalis as subjects of a Western-dominated environmentalism and also led to hybrid forms of knowledge possessing their own validity.Footnote 218 Though critical of the scientific basis of the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation and the self-justifying ways in which it is cited, Metz questions the valorization of local knowledge for its own sake and reasserts the role of validated scientific inquiry, which he argues has led to helpful critique and correction of ill-advised policies based on the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation. By elaborating the critique of the theory, Metz reframes it as an artefact of a syncretic epistemological process that has been productive on its own terms, and considers how some scientific expertise is needed. Such themes are also addressed by Ahlborg and Nightingale through an analysis of what they call ‘mismatches between scales of knowledge’ in Nepal's forestry sector.Footnote 219
Uncertainty remains central to contemporary questions of environmental change in Nepal, where environmental knowledge regarding the intricate and interrelated questions of Himalayan ecosystems and societies is produced and contested at a variety of scales. Yet when political claims to territories and resources are supported by strategic manipulation of particular kinds of scientific knowledge and frames of certainty, then the changing contours of knowledge production also reconfigure human relationships to territory and the environment. Thus the boundaries and political orientation of environmental questions are shifting both independently and in response to Nepal's ongoing political uncertainties. These entanglements have been clearly in evidence in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes: a seismic event catalysed reconfigurations of political power and created a new arena for considering the relationships between environmental uncertainty and social vulnerability.
Conclusion: the uncertainties of livelihood and well-being
In the face of the political, social, and environmental uncertainties described in the literature considered in this review, everyday life continues for Nepalis across caste, ethnic, class, religious, regional, and gender lines. How do people actually live, today, in the wake of a conflict which itself was shaped by broader, longue durée processes of transformation? How are livelihoods secured, children fed, cultural worlds maintained, economic and political aspirations pursued? How do Nepalis of all persuasions envision and strive for well-being?
One body of literature that we have not addressed substantively above begins to address some of those questions. That is scholarship on public health, an emergent field of inquiry in Nepal which often bridges social and medical sciences. Harper's collection of essays provides a framework for investigating the role of health services and ideologies of well-being during a time of political and social transformation.Footnote 220 This monograph is complemented by several articles focusing specifically on conflict-related mental health issues, which also help to articulate varied Nepali world-views of what constitutes well-being and its lack.Footnote 221
Still other scholarship focuses on women's well-being in relation to migration,Footnote 222 a concern shared by work on sex trafficking that emphasizes the psychosocial dynamics behind Nepali women's experiences.Footnote 223 Cross-border trafficking is also linked to debates over gender, citizenship, and mobility, showing how well-being must be understood as an embodied—and often gendered—quality, which nuances approaches that over-emphasize the quantitative indicators of social progress without attending fully to the often less measurable phenomenological dimensions of successful livelihoods.Footnote 224 In the wake of the 2015 earthquakes and political crisis, new approaches to questions of well-being on all levels, in all parts of Nepal, seem necessary indeed. Engaging in depth with the ‘resilience’ concept, in a manner that critically explores both the opportunities and challenges that it presents in environmental, political, and other contexts seems a key foundational task for future scholarship.Footnote 225
Looking forward, research that considers the multi-dimensional nature of livelihoods and well-being in relation to the political economy of migration, as some scholars have recently begun to doFootnote 226 —yet goes still further to situate such analyses in relation to political, economic, social, and environmental transformation at national, regional, and global scales—will prove productive. This may sound like a lofty goal, and surely no individual researcher can accomplish all of these objectives alone. However, we hope to have demonstrated in this review that a bird's-eye view of scholarship on Nepal since 2006 reveals a rich body of data produced from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Connecting the dots between the literatures on conflict, state transformation, identity politics, environmental change, and many other facets of contemporary Nepali experience will yield a greater understanding of both the multi-dimensional uncertainties that Nepalis face, and the equally multifaceted resources upon which they draw to work towards future aspirations, as individuals and members of various collectivities.
