Optimised or compromised? United Kingdom support to reforming security sector governance in post-war Nepal

UK policies embrace the ideas of security–development nexus, but most scholarship on its engagement builds upon African cases. This paper examines the drivers, nature and implications of UK involvement with an Asian country, Nepal. The UK’s position as the largest bilateral contributor and major peace and security donor among at least 21 others makes examination of its Nepal involvement imperative. This paper uses the grounded theory method and interpretivist analytical approach to create interactions between published and field information. Although the UK’s persistent engagement and programme-based approach helped peacefully manage transition, this paper contends, institutional changes have been shallow and winning confidence remains strenuous.     

元代以来西藏与尼泊尔边境管理及边界划分

中国和尼泊尔是友好邻邦，历史上及新中国建立后，双方对边界的管理本着友好和协商一致的原则进行，保持了边界的安宁。本文从中国传统的治边思想以及历代王朝对边疆地区的经略的分析，说明藏尼边境管理及其边界的划定促进了祖国统一、民族安定和各民族的交流融合。西藏与尼泊尔边境管理与边界划定堪称典范，在经济全球化的今天，中尼双方正在实践和行使好国家领土的主权，实现中尼双方经济双赢和人民安居乐业。     

Why Federalism Does Not Always Take Shape: the Cases of Italy and Nepal

Federalism has been discussed as a potential system of governance in many countries, but in some it has failed to take shape. This has been the case in Nepal and, to a certain extent, in Italy. In fact, in Italy the federal option was rejected at the time of Risorgimento, and constitutional reforms in the 2000s never transformed the country into a federation as desired by political actors such as the Northern League despite some decentralization. In Nepal, the 2007 interim constitution specified that the country would be federal, but the first Constituent Assembly elected to write a new constitution was unable to produce a federal map acceptable to the major political parties and the second is wrestling with the same issue. In both cases, federal structuring was attacked by political actors who argued that it could promote disunity, undermine solidarity, and possibly lead to disintegration. This article argues that the idea of federalism held by prominent political actors as promoting division and conflict played strongly against its implementation.     

Examining Nepalese Forestry Governance from Gender Perspectives

This article examines Nepalese forestry governance from gender perspectives. We argue that gendered institutional norms and values are associated with forest-governing institutions, such as forest bureaucracies, shaping the nature, and extent of women’s involvement in decision-making processes in the Nepalese forest bureaucracy. Studies on Nepalese forestry reveal that substantial progress has been made in forming policies and initiating activities for including women in forestry governance of Nepal; however despite this, gendered dynamics create difficulties for women to enter and progress in the forestry profession, thereby creating gendered employment territories through institutional, legislative, normative, and infrastructural measures.     

How Can Weak Insurgent Groups Grow? Insights From Nepal

How can insurgent groups that are militarily far weaker than the state survive and grow? Influential accounts drawing on Kalyvas' “control-collaboration” model argue that limited state reach can make this possible by allowing rebel groups to carve out pockets of control where they can elicit collaboration. I suggest that this account is inadequate. Even states with limited reach are likely to transfer sufficient forces to rebel-affected areas to establish at least partial control. Weak rebels therefore often face the challenge of building capacity without local control to begin with. I identify two broad factors that can make this feasible: first, strong pre-existing rebel networks, which facilitate collaboration through solidarity, norms of reciprocity, and social incentives; and second, counterinsurgency policies and practices that fail to exploit the opportunities that control offers for incentivizing collaboration and shaping political preferences. These arguments are grounded in a fieldwork-based case study of insurgency processes in a hamlet of Rolpa, Nepal.     

Empowering peace: service provision and state legitimacy in Nepal’s peace-building process

There is growing demand for an understanding of peace beyond the absence of violence. As such research focuses increasingly on the issue of state legitimacy as a tool to assess and understand peace processes. In this paper the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is studied to assess whether the provision of services like electricity to rural communities of war-torn countries through state actors contributes to the consolidation of the post-war political system. The qualitative analysis of two localities in post-war Nepal highlights that service provision in the form of electricity through micro-hydropower yields tremendously positive socio-economic effects for rural communities. However, socio-economic development in combination with interactions among villagers has strengthened local autonomy through emphasising alternative local governance structures. This highlights that the relationship between service provision and state legitimacy is more complex than previous research anticipates. The absence of a positive effect on state legitimacy raises the question of whether in its current case-specific form service provision is conducive to the broader peace-building efforts in post-war Nepal, because it stresses the divide between state and society.     

An Empirical Approach to Post-conflict Legitimacy: Victims' Needs and the Everyday

Abstract

An empirical study has been made of victims of conflict in Timor-Leste and Nepal seeking a qualitative understanding of local post-conflict priorities. It allows an appreciation to emerge of how the conflict-affected conceive of legitimacy and quality of governance, with victims emphasizing basic needs, an addressing of issues of marginalization and the incorporation of indigenous understandings of the meaning of peace. The data in this study motivate a victim-centred discussion of both the limitations of liberal approaches to peace and the implications for the legitimacy of post-conflict governance of prioritizing the everyday needs of the conflict-affected, in contrast to universal and institutionally rooted liberal values.     

The impact of orthodox terrorism discourses on the liberal peace: internalisation,resistance, or hybridisation?

This article examines the relationship between orthodox terrorism discourses and liberal peacebuilding, particularly where states are being reconstituted after a conflict. Drawing upon fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Palestine, Kashmir, Nepal, and Northern Ireland, our findings suggest that conflicts in which orthodox terrorism theory is deployed to explain violence are those in which there is little interest (by all parties) in dealing with root causes or achieving mutual compromise. This is so even though the liberal peace is commonly a claimed aspiration for most parties, apart from the most radical of non-state actors or authoritarian of states. They effectively reify both terrorism and state securitisation. The aspired to internalisation of the liberal peace framework has instead been supplanted by the politics of state securitisation and violent resistance. Liberal peacebuilding has become a nominal exercise in constructing virtually liberal states in which the security and integrity of core groups are partially maintained by orthodox terrorism praxis. To counter these dynamics, critical positions need to engage with agendas beyond liberal or cosmopolitan frameworks.     

The evolution of industrial relations in Nepal: a biological evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

A great deal of literature focuses on exogenous forces transforming industrial relations in liberal and neoliberal contexts. Further, most scholars claim that the transformation occupies a similar trajectory of convergence across the globe. However, very little is known about the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal. Therefore, this paper considers the labor movement of 1947, the royal coup d’état of 1960, the ban on the trade unions, and the alliance of the trade unions with the political parties and political economy as endogenous drivers in explaining the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal. Thus the objective of the paper is to investigate the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal through an evolutionary perspective. This analysis shows that the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal is a ‘punctuated’ (discontinuous or revolutionary) one compared with a traditional, incremental model, which employs the construct of the institutionalization of industrial relations, using a standard, union-based paradigm of employment relations against the growing nonstandard employment model of more flexibility and irregular work that is growing in the West and Asia. Further, the theoretical contributions are put into perspective in the context of the broader industrial relations backdrop.     

Re-inventing the commons: community forestry as accumulation without dispossession in Nepal

The commercial appropriation of the commons by displacing communities has been a historical feature of development. In recent years, however, this paradigm has shifted toward re-inventing the commons by creating new relations of production for both the market and subsistence. Such shifts in managing the commons are producing new forms of commoning instead of enclosure and dispossession. Through the analysis of community forestry programs in Nepal, this paper demonstrates that community-based development has been effective in mobilizing the collective potential of local communities and dynamics of commonly held forest ecosystems for the expansion of highly profitable commercial endeavors. Community forestry can be understood neither as an enclosure exclusively for commodity production nor as the extension of entirely subsistence economic activities. In Nepal, community forestry has become a form of accumulation without dispossession where communities’ ownership over the common forestlands is ensured but market apparatuses for commercialization are also institutionalized simultaneously. This paper argues that while transforming the commons and communities as part and parcel of capital accumulation, community forestry generates possibilities for both commercial and subsistence modes of production, reproducing the conditions for accumulation without dispossession.