This book is a detailed case study of Nepal's post-1990 constitutional experience. It examines the complex relationship between law and politics, and emphasizes the role of cultural identity in making institutional choices relating to the framing and implementation of the Nepali Constitution. The volume also analyses the patterns of legal exclusion that resulted in the growing politicization of identity, the de-legitimization of the 1990 Constitution, and the current demand for state-restructuring based on ethnic federalism and group rights.
The author, tracing the evolution of Nepal from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, analyses the drafting of the 1990 Constitution, the impact of the Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) on demands for constitutional change, the relationship between conflict and demands for recognition, and the role of Nepal's Supreme Court in the articulation of identity politics.

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This chapter offers an account of Nepal's constitutional developments over the years in light of the ‘interaction between indigenous law and transplanted law’. The author reflects upon the modalities of the political transformations that have occurred in Nepal over the past 250 years, with particular reference to the influence of external legal and political concepts. After tracing the constitutional history of Nepal, the author examines the 1990 Constitution and its demise, and what it tells us about political processes in Nepal between 1990 and early 2007, and about democratic politics in the country more generally. It argues that it was a flawed constitution that failed to adequately accommodate the aspirations of the people. The promulgation of the 2007 Interim Constitution has endeavoured to ignite a process of state restructuring and the creation of a ‘New Nepal’. A new document recognizing Nepal's inner plurality, rooted in social hybridity and fostering a civic sense of belonging, with an emphasis on citizenship and rights rather than constitutional arrangements based on a polarized essentialising identity lines, is the need of the hour. The long-term success of the political process currently underway to establish lasting peace in Nepal will depend ultimately upon whether the present constitution-making endeavours achieve consensus and stability.

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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.

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The article analyses Nepal's transition in 2007 from the constitutional definition of the state as a ‘Hindu monarchical kingdom’ to a ‘secular federal republic’, followed by the abolition of the Shah monarchy in 2008. Nepal's institutional change in 2007–2008 invites reflection on the role of Hindu kingship in informing Nepali nationalism in its constitutional formulation. The developments of the Shah monarchy are interpreted as the product of both the institution and the various historical figures that have occupied that institutional place. However, it is argued that the more or less charismatic qualities of individual Shah kings were ‘contained’ within and minimised by the prevailing institutional dimension of the monarchy in defining the Nepali nation. The nationalist legitimacy of the Shah monarchy as Nepal's core political institution rested upon the notion of Hindu kingship, which transcended the single historical personalities of the Shah kings and proved so pervasive that it has shaped the constitutional definition of the nation even in republican Nepal.

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