Children and Transitional Justice in Nepal: Entrenched Violence and Marginalized Perspectives

In this dissertation, I argue for an approach to transitional justice that analyzes the diverse and dynamic ways in which people experience armed conflict and its aftermath. I question what actually changes during a state’s “transitional period” and illuminate how transitional justice is utilized, politicized, and manipulated by powerful actors. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the varied experiences of people who endured gross violations of human rights as children, according to international law, and who are now, within that legal framework, adults. I follow the lives of victims of Nepal’s armed conflict as they transition out of what is recognized in international law as a temporary phase known as “childhood” and explore what they recognize as constant and temporal in their own lives as the Nepali state undergoes its own transition, also argued to be a temporary phase, transitional justice. I inquire how diverse identities and patterned inequality are reconstituted through processes of transitional justice and contend the façade of the inclusion serves as a distraction from claims for equitable access to power and resources. A key argument of this dissertation is that the performance of transitional justice in Nepal, including the performance of redressing human rights violations experienced by victims and addressing the needs of the most vulnerable victims (e.g. children), functions to conceal international complicity in as well as the state’s commitment to maintaining structural inequality. Following ten years of armed conflict to ameliorate historically sedimented inequity, state-led transitional justice mechanisms have served to entrench the exclusion of economically, politically, and socially marginalized groups and ensure Nepalis’ continued distrust in the national government. Thus, while addressing structural inequality may be beyond the reach of normative transitional justice mechanisms, the Nepali context demonstrates how processes of transitional justice cannot redress conflict-era gross violations of human rights without redressing inequitable systems of power

Conflict over Transitional Justice in Nepal

A decade after Nepal\u27s internal armed conflict came to an end its victims are still campaigning for redress. Krista Billingsley describes recent demonstrations in Kathmandu and charts the long road toward transitional justice

Critical Conversations about Transitional Justice in Nepal: Building Collaborations for Victim-Centric Practice

This article, and its collaboratively paired article written solely by victim-activists (Bhandari, Chaudhary, and Chaudhary 2018 in this special issue), focus on the families of people who were forcibly disappeared during Nepal\u27s decade-long internal armed conflict and their continued exclusion from processes of transitional justice. In this article, I highlight my continued conversations with victim-activists after I returned to the United States from Nepal and question what kinds of collaborations are possible to facilitate inclusion and social justice for marginalized victims

Intersectionality as Locality: Children and Transitional Justice in Nepal

Transitional justice policy, although predicated on an ideology of transition, often homogenizes victims and fails to respond to victims’ diverse and dynamic needs during the ‘transitional period.’ In this article, based on 14 months of ethnographic research in Nepal, I examine the perceptions and experiences of adults who were children when their fathers were killed or disappeared during the decade-long internal armed conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists and the Nepali government. Through their varied experiences and ongoing transitions, I challenge homogeneous and fixed conceptualizations of ‘children’ and ‘the local’ and argue for greater attention to the intersectional experiences of victims and the redress of entrenched systems of domination and inequality

Evaluating Understandings of State and Federal Pandemic Policies: The Situation of Refugees from the Congo Wars in Tampa, Florida

This article addresses underlying inequities for resettling refugees that have been exposed by COVID-19, including language barriers and access to public health information, food, health care, housing, and employment. It also speaks to theoretical concerns about the role of structural forces in creating increased health risks for vulnerable populations. Fieldwork that began in May 2020 investigated the extent to which refugees in Tampa understand and can operationalize the state and federal pandemic policies that have been put in place in the wake of the spread of COVID-19. The issues include understanding of COVID-19 and how it is transmitted, ability and willingness to practice distancing, access to food assistance, ability to help children with remote learning, and workplace disruptions, including the need to file for unemployment. Our method speaks to community-based approaches to anthropological fieldwork in pandemic situations, while demonstrating that critical language skills and in-depth cultural knowledge are essential for evaluating public health pandemic messaging and helping vulnerable populations

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7