People S War And Aftermath Nepal

This book is a study of how and why Nepal after a 10 year long armed insurgency, regicide and fundamental political change sought to find a way to achieve peace and security. The chosen pathway to peace and reconciliation in Nepal after the decade of war and destruction is examined. It has faced delay, frustration and neglect after its protracted implementation. Politics has determined whatever peace process will be achieved in Nepal.

Masculinity associated with armed groups tends to be built on assumptions of violence and insecurity. Rethinking Masculinities: Ideology, Identity and Change in the People’s War in Nepal and Its Aftermath, however, examines other ways in which the experience of participation in an armed group may impact on notions of masculinity held by low-ranking male combatants, both during conflict and in its aftermath. Using the case of Nepal, this book explores how men of the People’s Liberation Army experienced and engaged with an ideology espoused by the leadership that was more gender-positive than what existed in broader Nepali society. Focusing on masculinity change across four different time frames: (1) pre-conflict, (2) conflict time, (3) the cantonment period, and (4) post-conflict – Heidi Riley’s analysis pays close attention to changes in attitudes towards gender specific roles and conduct, as well as perceptions of gender hierarchies. Building on feminist and masculinities literature, Rethinking Masculinities also makes a vital contribution to broader peace and conflict scholarship on insurgency, rebel recruitment, and demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR). The book exposes how masculinity change is not straightforward but influenced by both past and present, which leads to contradiction and continuity in a post-conflict context.

Includes full text of key documents by the rebels and government.

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal lasted from 1996 to 2006, and at the pinnacle of their armed success the Maoists controlled much of the countryside. Maoists at the Hearth, which is based on ethnographic research that commenced more than a decade before the escalation of the civil war in 2001, explores the daily life in a hill village in central Nepal, during the "People's War." From the everyday routines before the arrival of the Maoists in the late 1990s through the insurgency and its aftermath, this book examines the changing social relationships among fellow villagers and parties to the conflict. War is not an interruption that suspends social processes. Life in the village focused as usual on social challenges, interpersonal relationships, and essential duties such as managing agricultural work, running households, and organizing development projects. But as Judith Pettigrew shows, social life, cultural practices, and routine activities are reshaped in uncertain and dangerous circumstances. The book considers how these activities were conducted under dramatically transformed conditions and discusses the challenges (and, sometimes, opportunities) that the villagers confronted. By considering local spatial arrangements and their adaptation, Pettigrew explores people's reactions when they lost control of the personal, public, and sacred spaces of the village. A central consideration of Maoists at the Hearth is an exploration of how local social tensions were realized and renegotiated as people supported (and sometimes betrayed) each other and of how villager-Maoist relationships (and to a lesser extent villager-army relationships), which drew on a range of culturally patterned preexisting relationships, were reforged, transformed, or renegotiated in the context of the conflict and its aftermath.

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.

By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) transformed Nepali society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, and how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, and reconfiguring the ways that people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'.