Nepal In The Nineties

The historic events that took place in Nepal in the spring of 1990 have yet to be forgotton. A broad-based democracy movement succeeded in removing the 28-year-old Panchayat system after a campaign that lasted only six weeks. Five months later a new constitution was promulgated and, just over a year after the ending of the agitation, the Nepali Congress party secured a majority in the general election. This study contains eight essays by Western academics that reflect on the changes that occurred in the kingdom as the decade began and on the circumstances that produced these changes. As the events of 1990 pass into history, this book looks back in an attempt to understand them, and to draw lessons for the future of Nepal.

PART TWO: EXTERNAL ACTORS

This volume covers the language situation in Nepal, Taiwan and Sweden explaining the minority language situation, the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation - including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages, especially English. The authors have had long-term involvement in the language planning context.

This volume covers the language situation in Japan, Nepal and Taiwan, as well as the modernisation of Chinese Characters in China, explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation -- including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion, and the roles of non-indigenous languages. Two of the authors are indigenous and the other two have been participants in the language planning context.

Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal is an accessible contemporary political economic analysis of social change in Nepal. It considers whether and how Nepal's political economy might have been transformed since the 1950s while situating these changes in Nepal's modern history and its location in the global economic system. It assembles and builds on the scholarship on Nepal from a multidisciplinary and synoptic perspective. Focusing on local discourses, experiences and expectations of transformations, it draws our attention to how powerful historical processes are experienced and negotiated in Nepal and assess how these may, at the same time, produce ideas of equality, human rights and citizenship while also generating new forms of precarity.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork among Muslims in contemporary Nepal, this book examines the local and global factors shaping an emerging Islamic revival in a Hindu majority region of South Asia. It traces the ways that Nepal’s Muslims have become active participants in the larger global movement of Sunni revivalism, and Nepal’s own local politics of representation in the context of political transition to democracy and secularism.

This book presents an overview of the democracy movement and the history of education in Nepal. It shows how schools became the battleground for the state and the Maoists as well as captures emerging trends in the field, challenges for the state and negotiations with political commitments. It looks at the factors that contributed to the conflict, and studies the politics of the region alongside gender and identity dynamics. One of the first studies on the subject, the book highlights how conflict and education are intrinsically linked in Nepal. It illustrates how schools became the centre of attention between warring groups and how they were used for political meetings and recruitment of fighters during the political transitions in a contested terrain in South Asia. It brings to the fore incidents of abduction and killing of teachers and students, and the use of children as porters for arms and ammunitions. Drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources and qualitative analyses, the book provides the key to a complex web of relationships among the stakeholders during conflict and also models of education in post-conflict situations. This book will interest scholars and researchers in education, politics, peace and conflict studies, sociology, development studies, social work, strategic and security studies, contemporary history, international relations, and Nepal and South Asian studies.

This volume analyzes the context, dynamics and key players shaping Nepal's ongoing peace process.