Peace durability and sustainability in Nepal

As armed conflicts continue to disrupt “peace” in human societies, it has become crucial to explore frameworks and strategies aimed at addressing the roots of ongoing violence and to explore sustainable peace. This thesis broadly aims to engage with this investigation by offering theoretical contributions to the peacebuilding discourse and practice. Employing primarily critical perspectives both as the main theoretical underpinning and also as a methodological approach, this research examines the peace process in Nepal to generate insights on sustainable peace within the peacebuilding discourse. The small Himalayan republic, squeezed between the two most populous countries in the world, presents a puzzling case to peace scholars. It is perplexing how overt large-scale political violence has completely stopped in Nepal as part of its peace process after a decade of complex armed conflict from 1996 to 2006. Interestingly, this is despite the persistence of fundamental problems such as poverty and inequality—factors which were used to justify the armed war earlier. In a global context marked by difficulties in ending violence once started, as evinced by a number of cases such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan (despite significant international investment), the case of Nepal is exceptional because over the years the main Maoist armed groups have continued to adhere to the commitment to ending violence. This unusual accomplishment, in one of the startlingly diverse countries in South Asia, has raised a few important questions: Does negative peace (ending of overt violence) create the space to move towards positive peace (ending of structural/cultural violence)? Or, has Nepal’s durable negative peace become a framework to perpetuate the interests of elites at global, regional, and national levels? Is durable peace, as in the case of Nepal, also sustainable peace? What if durability of a peace process has come at the cost of legitimizing or perpetuating injustice towards the most disadvantaged sections of the population? This research engages with these questions, tracing Nepal’s journey from one of the oldest Hindu kingdoms in the world to one of the youngest secular republics. The main goal of this research is to provide insights on sustainable peace by engaging with Nepal’s passage from war towards peace. Overall, this research argues that there is a need to break the cycle of war and peace by replacing it with sustainable peace and that it is a possible pursuit.