Nepal's War on Human Rights: A summit higher than Everest

Nepal has witnessed serious human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, detentions, "disappearances", extra judicial executions, abductions and torture carried out by both the Royal Nepalese Army and the Maoist rebels in the 10 years of the "peoples war". Women and children have borne the brunt of the conflict. Massive displacement has led to adverse social and psychological consequences. While the reasons for the conflict are mainly indigenous and rooted in the social and economic in-equities, remedies for health inequities must come not only from the health sector but also from broad social policies and adopting a participatory and conflict-sensitive approach to development. Meanwhile the international community needs to use its leverage to urge both sides to accept a human rights accord and honor international human rights and humanitarian laws, while investigating allegations of abuse and prosecute those responsible

Toward Strategic Cohesion : A Reply to King’s Criticism of the Call for a Broader View of Cohesion

In October 2018, Armed Forces & Society published a special issue that called for a theoretical and methodological broadening of the study of cohesion. In a response, King accuses me of ignoring his 2013 book The Combat Soldier, which he feels had already made this call redundant. This answer explains why this is not the case. The Combat Soldier ticks the three boxes of modern, Western, and state military that have dominated the study of cohesion. The resulting narrow vantage point affirms problematic assumptions of Western concepts as absolutes with universal validity with little room for other models of sociopolitical interaction. This becomes especially problematic when King defines cohesion as tactical-level combat performance, the be-all and end-all of what makes, and decides, war. The answer concludes with an appeal for truly interdisciplinary future studies of war that a broader understanding of cohesion, among other things, depends on