Being Nepali : NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati

"Rooted in a documentary tradition, Kakshapati’s work has focused on representing social and political transformations in Nepal. As Nepal’s newly passed constitution comes into effect, and the country continues to shape a new future, Kakshapati’s work captures new demarcations and identities that emerge in the nation-building process. Using the gallery space as an open site of experimentation and creation, Kakshapati will further develop her ‘Being Nepali’ series through inviting diverse diasporic communities into the space, combining new images with selections from the Nepal Picture Library." -- Publisher's website

Eyes wide shut?: persistent conflict and liberal peace interventions in Nepal and Sri Lanka

The decisive, albeit different, endings of armed conflict in Sri Lanka and Nepal and subsequent post-war developments challenge key assumptions about conflict that have informed post-Cold War international efforts to produce peace in such conflict zones. International intervention—including in Sri Lanka and Nepal—characterises armed conflict as sustained by specific political economies that can only be stably resolved by establishing liberal democracy and market economics. This paper examines liberal peace engagement in Sri Lanka and Nepal to challenge a crucial assumption of the persistent conflict thesis, namely the separation between political contestation and armed conflict. It argues that the divergent post-conflict outcomes of continuing ethnic polarisation in Sri Lanka and constitutional reform in Nepal reveal strong continuities in the dynamics of pre-war, war and post-war politics. This continuity challenges the presumed separation of politics and violence that drove international engagement to produce liberal peace and suggests that such engagement, far from encouraging reform, may have (inadvertently) sustained conflict in both cases