Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) South Asian Series. London; New York: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2018. x, 235 pp. (Table, map.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-04792-1.
Author Yvette Selim does an excellent job of capturing the shifting and often contradictory nature of Nepali politics in Transitional Justice in Nepal. The book engages with key theoretical debates taking place among transitional justice (TJ) scholars and experts and offers the first comprehensive assessment of TJ in Nepal. The book combines constructivist grounded theory with firsthand interviews with conflict victims and perpetrators, government officials, journalists, and NGO workers. The result is a detailed analysis of the micro-politics of TJ in Nepal that is victim-centred and attentive to the complex intersections of gender, religion, and local culture.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides an introduction and background to the research on TJ in Nepal. Part 2 explores key debates within the field of TJ, some historical background to Nepal’s decade-long conflict (1996–2006), and the start of transitional justice efforts at the end of the conflict. Part 3 analyzes specific TJ efforts in Nepal, with attention to the actors involved, questions of justice, victimhood, and restitution, and how different sectors of Nepali society, as well as external experts, have responded to post-conflict calls for justice. The book ends with a critical appraisal of what worked and what failed in Nepal and calls for greater attention to local political contexts in order to create relevant and accountable TJ processes.
Drawing on contentious political and resistance studies literature, the book argues that TJ processes are more effective when they stay with the discomfort and uncertainty that emerges from open-ended, victim-centred approaches to defining the search for justice. While the author acknowledges this may mean “that TJ will be caught up with actors, ideas and practices that may be normatively undesirable for some TJ actors,” the case of Nepal clearly shows why “holding steadfastly to an imported mode is also undesirable since many people have little awareness of the TJ process or do not seek key TJ mechanisms” (212). As the author clearly demonstrates, the importation of South African-style truth and reconciliation frameworks into Nepal failed for precisely this reason—they did not reflect the context-specific everyday realities of life in Nepal.
To better differentiate TJ participants, the author develops a four-fold actor typology and an associated action spectrum to explain how they respond to the TJ process. The actor typology consists of TJ experts, TJ brokers, TJ implementers, and victims, and the action spectrum ranges from adoption/compliance to negotiation, contestation, and resistance. The actor typology and action spectrum are used to analyze how different actors support and contest TJ processes to achieve their own agendas, which includes everything from competition between victim groups to capture limited state funds to cases of Maoist insurgents being identified as heroes and martyrs rather than as victims.
The book does an excellent job of showing the contested nature of self-imposed versus externally defined identity as a victim or perpetrator, and asks whether suffering might be a more useful analytic category than harm for understanding questions of justice. As the author notes, “the identification and categorization of victims and perpetrators based on their innocence or the harm they experienced fails to reflect the complex realities in post-conflict Nepal” (175). This point was highlighted when analyzing the government’s Interim Relief Program, set up to compensate victims who had lost family or property during the conflict but which excluded victims of torture or rape on the grounds that they could pursue justice via existing legal mechanisms—a claim quickly called into question in cases where the officials in charge of hearing complaints turn out to be the perpetrators. The case of Nepal also shows that such problems are often worse at a national level since post-conflict political leaders complicit in conflict-related crimes are now overseeing the government charged with investigating their crimes. As the author shows, this led political elites to contest TJ processes by reframing debates about justice to focus on mechanisms that granted political amnesty under the guise of post-conflict peacemaking.
While this attention to local nuance will be welcomed by scholars of Nepal and South Asia, at times the author assumes a greater level of familiarity with local Nepali politics than many TJ scholars likely possess, and this knowledge gap may lead to some important insights being lost in translation. For example, understanding Panchayat politics and the social resistance that produced the 1990s People’s Uprising (Jana Andolan I) and 1996 Maoist insurgency, as well as more recent Indigenous (Janajati) and Madheshi ethnic uprisings in the southern Terai, is needed to fully appreciate the complex socio-political dynamics at play around questions of TJ in Nepal. One other minor issue which stood out was the use of the action spectrum in part 1. While it was clear this was meant to engage with the contentious politics literature, it was not clear that it added any unique insights into the politics or practices of social cooperation or resistance.
While some TJ experts may find Selim’s criticism of top-down, expert-driven international TJ mechanisms exaggerated, the substantial body of empirical evidence and firsthand testimony she marshals seems to justify this critique. Scholars of Nepal and South Asia will benefit from a nuanced analysis of Nepal’s complicated TJ political landscape, while development and conflict experts will find value in the multi-layered analysis of transitional justice on the ground. Finally, the attention to how Hindu and Buddhist philosophical ideas call into question established ideas about victims, rights, and justice is an important intervention into the dominant TJ approaches grounded in secular and Christian normative values and claims.
Chris Crews
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, USA