This volume of essays comes at a most opportune time, as the Maoist insurgency in Nepal has come to an official and unexpectedly successful end, a success that occurred, broadly speaking, in two historical moments. First, ten years after the February 1996 submission to the prime minister of a forty-point demand by the recently unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, or CPN(M), a demand whose rejection spurred the beginning of the Maoist People's War and a second popular “people's movement” in April 2006, King Gyanendra allowed for free elections and for the redrawing of the national constitution; this process ultimately brought down the 240-year-old Shah dynasty. Second, when these elections finally took place in August 2008, it was the CPN(M) that the people elected to the prime ministership.
It is at this moment that The Maoist Insurgency steps in with the objective to “contextualize and explain the growth of a violent communist rebellion” and to “fill an existing void in academic analyses of the insurgency and connect the Nepali case to a broader literature on rebellions” (p. 4). This first objective is not entirely novel, as Michael Hutt's Himalayan People's War: Nepal's Maoist Rebellion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) covers much of the same structural ground and could be considered as a sort of prelude to the current volume. Though there is virtually no overlap between the authorship of these two edited volumes (Marie Lecomte-Tilouine is the one exception), a diversity of content, themes, and approaches is common to both, with The Maoist Insurgency shading more toward issues of policy, politics, and economics.
This diversity of approaches that Mahendra Lawoti foregrounds in his introductory essay—“We have brought together scholars … from multiple disciplinary backgrounds—anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and conflict experts” (p. 4)—works as both a blessing and a detriment at different points throughout the volume. The historical trajectory and the multiple causes of the insurgency are presented in many of the essays, resulting in the repetition of key narratives: the Maoists' forty-point demand in 1996, Maoist attacks on civil installations and King Gyanendra's resulting declaration of a state of emergency in November 2001, and Gyanendra's “February First” takeover in 2005. The wide appeal of this volume, however, is precisely this variety of approach, as evidenced by its section headings: the authors deal independently with the insurgency's “ethnic,” “military and state,” and “external” dimensions.
The second objective, the connection of the Nepalese situation to “broader literature on rebellions,” provides a component that is largely missing in Hutt's volume (Philippe Ramirez's essay excepted). Several authors here theorize the success of the Maoist insurgency within a larger context of the Naxalite movement in India and the Shining Path in Peru, and this more global context provides an opportunity to reassess the causes and history of this insurgency, especially given its ultimate success. This reassessment can now better account for the relationships of village peasants to landed elites (Madhav Joshi), of a rural insurgency to a state military (Ashok Kumar Mehta and Lawoti), and of the world's interested parties to a troubled Himalayan monarchy (Bushnu Raj Upreti).
Some of the volume's most memorable passages come not from the historical or comparative but from the ethnographic and agent-centered analyses of the daily operations and inner workings of Maoist camps and communities. In her article on the changing identities of students in the Maoist Student Union, Amanda Snellinger observes how “many students claimed that it was when they were underground that they learned about their own capacity to endure suffering and they built their identities around it” (p. 79). Similarly, Monica Mottin's article on the use of cultural performances in Maoist camps provides not only a link to the role of aesthetics in Marxist theory but also signals the importance of “popular culture” and the role of art in revolutionary theory (pp. 53, 62).
It is these ethnographic moments that readers must keep in mind as they proceed through the sometimes dense and social scientific material that follows. For example, Mottin's assertion that the “‘national’ culture” created and displayed through the different costumes, languages, and dancing styles employed in Maoist cultural performances (p. 64) might productively inform Lawoti's essay on the role of ethnicity in the insurgency and the attitudes of Maoists toward indigenous groups (p. 142).
Despite the electoral victory of the CPN(M) and the end of the Nepalese monarchy, all of the aforementioned dimensions of the nation clearly remain in flux. Thus, the future moment of national clarity that Nepalese politicians and citizens refer to as the “new Nepal” remains, in all likelihood, a long and tumultuous way off. It is this future moment, communicated through a number of parallel techniques and methodologies, that stands as a central, if rarely stated, theme throughout The Maoist Insurgency.
