Nepal: Peace-Building in Post-Conflict Societies

Dev Raj Dahal, Head FES-Nepal

Introduction

Peace building as a practical area involves a set of goals, policies and strategies which aim to prevent the occurrence of violent conflict, minimizes the risks of structural and direct violence and seeks to maintain a modicum of order for all the stakeholders to peacefully participate in the nations' productive life. Peace building in Nepal is needed to separate war from politics and identify key issue areas and produce suggestions on how to improve these efforts in future. Following the signing of Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), there is a shift from linear to non-linear and systemic understanding of multi-polar and multi layered conflicts in Nepal waged by incumbent political parties, movement-oriented social actors and armed non-state actors acting on their own image. The self-image of each actor leaves no room from learning from the other as politics is often played on a friend-foe lens. It flooded the entire social, ethnic, cultural and political fields as politics is freed from the rule of law. As a result, sovereignty has failed to outlaw violence. Systemic thinking requires an understanding of the properties of the conflict system, changing context, relationships of drivers, actors and stakeholders of conflict, their power, self-image, perception of power and behavioral processes.

The conflict system in Nepal is characterized by a lack of boundary between the conflict system and its environment. Many mini-conflict actors are related to macro actors—the SPA and CPN (Maoist) for support. Unresolved grievances of various actors have set the cycle and counter-cycle of violence. The management of one-type of conflict has become a source of zero-sum outcome for the other. This denotes that Nepal's conflict system is open-ended, opened to various scales, spaces and boundaries including geopolitical. An open conflict system maintains itself in a state away from equilibrium because its system of action and reaction is motivated by conflicting tendency of actors' goals and means and environmental stimuli. This demonstrates that Nepal's conflicts are moving towards complexity breaking down of existing systemic balance and concurrently transition to a new state of imbalance. The tendency of monopolizing power by few political elites is a threat to peace building because it makes the heterogeneous actors non-stakeholders of conflict resolution. Transformation of political parties and democratization of civil society from personalized to mass-based is a key to capture the synergy of state-society ties and sustaining the resilience of the political system.   

Rather than just focusing on the creation of numerous ineffective commissions alone or distributing state patronage, peace building stresses on rebuilding the state because the ending the state of nature and establishing democracy, development and peace can be fostered only within it's boundaries. Conceptual approach to identify the numerous key sequences for a just social contract and actions is required during transition phase in order to establish a stable and durable political community. The Nepali state has lost its monopoly on power due to its erosion on its capacity for governance, growth of competitive violence, birth of a neo-patrimonial culture and erosion of policy sovereignty. Restoration of the reasons of state and core state functions is central to protect human rights. But, politics must resolve two deadlocks: between the tendency of SPA to system maintenance and revolutionary polarization for its deconstruction of CPN (Maoist) and between the primacy of order of the former revolutionary change of the latter.    

Approaches to Peace 

The systemic approach to peace bridges the works of various disciplinary sciences by offering an integrative peace-building frame. One can classify peace building into five major clusters: national security and pacification of all non-state armed groups, democracy building through smooth political transition on the way to electoral legitimacy, expansion of the space of development through joint development projects, reconciliation of divided societies through productive engagements in social, economic and political processes, rehabilitation of conflict residues and building a shared future. Within these clusters, one can cover various other issues of inclusion, restructuring and transformation underlined in CPA, such as Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reforms (SSR), protection of human rights, institutional reform, power sharing, CA elections, economic rehabilitation of conflict victims and the poor, and establishing a mechanism for transitional justice.

The need to design peace-building strategies according to the complex realities of the conflict situation involves: First, identification of strategies to promote activities in a sequence of priority.  Second, these activities should be coordinated and integrated to reinforce each other in a virtuous cycle.  Third, activities should take place at various tracks, such as the geopolitical, national, district, and community levels. Finally, the strategy should contain short, medium, and long-term time frames for achieving the goals of peace building. This kind of general planning needs to happen early in the intervention to ensure an effective and coordinated strategy aimed at peace building, rather than a short-term focus on ending the occurrence of violence. In many cases, the focus on holding elections as a measure of success fails to address the root causes of conflict and expose the state to another cycle of vicious conflict. The CPA, Local Peace Councils and strengthening people's civic institutions, rather than class, ethnic, caste and religion-based ones, should work in tandem to resolve conflict through the bonding of cross-cutting social capital.

Social learning of actors of conflict is a must to understand the successes and failures of various policies and changing nature of context, issues, rules and actors. It helps to explain the challenges to peace-building and many ways in which various national and international actors are engaged to overcome these challenges, draw attention to the policies that do not succeed and examine non-violent alternatives. Similarly, the role of civil society and various political parties in promoting security should be critically examined to see whether they contribute to human security or anti-state discourse that fosters lawless frontiers to penalize the weak and women. Integration of multi-track feedback including the role of women is central to change the structures, behavior and beliefs of actors.

Peace-keeping in Nepal has captured the attention of the United Nations in monitoring of arms and armed forces, human rights and peace and electoral support.  Other international actors' diplomatic role has been no less salient. But, for any peace-building activity to be successful those in national leadership positions and the society at large must have to play a creative role for constructive change and invest the most time, energy and resources into ensuring changes to transform the root causes of conflict. The burden of conflict resolution, therefore, lies with the domestic stakeholders. But, they are often ill-equipped to handle it. Support of international stakeholders for their capacity building is absolutely essential to build the economic base of peace. The growing crisis of governability in Nepal, however, indicates that free-riding and impunity of various actors continues to act as spoilers of peace. This crisis can be resolved by changing the power relations from monopoly and control to reconciliation and coexistence.  

Conclusion

Peace building is more than signing peace accord. The sincere implementation of CPA's provisions help one to understand which policies work best under various changing conditions. The next step is to analyze which policies are realistic and effective, why, and when. Then policy makers must know how they should be implemented on the ground. Knowledge about the context gives confidence in understanding a framework condition for improving the knowledge of who, what, when, where, and why of successful peace-building efforts in Nepal are needed. Finally, erecting an edifice of implementing policies on this social learning is central to plan contextually. Peace building in post-conflict societies requires extensive discussion of the various aspects of the peace-building process, rules and institutions and the critical challenges to addressing them. Without this one cannot define which policies work and under which conditions. Four strategies are crucial to a systemic peace building in Nepal:

A movement toward a balance of interests of politically significant groups rather than monopoly of power and resources by a few organized interest groups of society is crucial to maintaining political stability. International community should act as a balancer, take side of weak and create their stake in peace.

Optimization of interests of all actors rather than maximization of a few powerful can contribute to the notion of citizen equality as equal claimants of rights and connection of citizenship to nationality. Because combined value generated by all is more powerful to prevent the collapse of state and enable it to perform basic state functions on governance. To achieve peace the powerful actors should not destroy the less powerful but should provide incentives for cooptation into the established order.

Formulation of a mechanism to foster overlapping interests of all for the invention of a common ground than absolutization or instrumentalization of interests against each other.

Acquisition, use and transfer of power must follow democratic principles so that opponents hold trust on the rules of the game and pin a hope on the possibility to return to power non-violently. Sustainable peace-building requires peace workers, peace education and a culture of peace. Mode of resolving conflict of interests by sheer physical power gives birth to a culture of violence. True power of a leader consists in empowering followers to act in the institutional interest of society and the state.

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