Formal but Local Transitional Justice: Memorialization of the Missing by Local Government in Nepal

Abstract

This article explores how the families of the disappeared in Nepal, in the absence of any substantive state-led transitional justice process, have mobilized to created victim groups to drive local political and social engagements with violations of the decade long internal conflict. Victims’ groups have informally memorialized their missing relatives and ultimately successfully advocated with local government to advance local memorialization through official processes. Victim-led memory practices have had an impact on local government policy, and these serve to enhance the role of victim groups as agents of social change. Using case studies from two local authorities as examples, we seek to highlight how localized memory practices empower and mobilize victims, advancing their role as political and social actors in processes of social change and blurring the conceptual division between state and community-led process. This article seeks to challenge the longstanding conflation of ‘local’ and ‘informal’ (meaning initiated and led by non-state actors) to describe the transitional justice process, by showing how when led by local authorities, this process can both empower victims and challenge impunity at the federal level.

1. Introduction

In all processes to address legacies of mass violence there is a tension between enabling the agency of victims and mobilizing the state to address its obligations. Ultimately, both are necessary to ensure a comprehensive, state sanctioned approach that empowers the victims of violations and affected communities. In many contexts, however, impunity is politically institutionalized, and, as a result, the state fails to initiate process of any substance. This remains the case in Nepal, some eighteen years after the end of a decade long insurgency that devastated parts of the country and left 17,800 dead (ReliefWeb 2012) and up to 3,288 missing (Human Rights Watch 2024).

This article explores how the families of the disappeared¹ in Nepal, in the absence of any substantive state-led process, have mobilized to created victim groups to both influence and create local political and social processes. Victims’ groups have informally memorialized their missing relatives and ultimately successfully advocated with local government to advance local memorialization through official, but local, processes. We consider the concept of memory as a frame for action that can support victim agency and mobilization, even where the state at the federal level is unwilling to act to address legacies of past human rights violations in general and disappearances in particular.

The ‘local’ has long been seen in transitional justice as a way to challenge the limitations of a normatively framed and globally prescribed approach that can fail to resonate with the needs of victims and affected communities. Local approaches, understood as non-formal and implemented independent of the state, have been conceptualized as giving agency to engage with legacies of past violence on the terms of those most impacted by them (Lundy and McGovern 2008). The literature on local approaches to transitional justice emphasizes however process driven by empowered actors at a local level, such as traditional leaders and NGOs (for example Sharp 2017): there is only a modest literature on victims’ organizations, mostly emphasizing their role as advocates, lobbying for state action at the national level (for example Iversen 2024; Weis 2017), and emphasizing a traditional, liberal view of how transitional justice drives social change. Here we note that victims’ organizations can articulate victim agency not only as advocates, but in instantiating processes at the community level that can positively affect both families of the missing and their communities. In such roles they can actively transform victims from marginalized and passive objects of violations to actors driving social change. An example of such social change is the highly innovative engagement with local government as a transitional justice actor described here. Local authorities in Nepal are working with organized victims to mobilize memory to both engage with the individual and collective legacies of violence and build futures that address the root causes of conflict. This has included explicit reparative action addressing the individual impact of having a missing relative and local government engagement with the social and political exclusion of indigenous groups, which drove disappearances during the conflict, representing a transformative justice approach (Gready and Robins 2014).

This article seeks to contribute in several ways. First, we see victim mobilization itself as an informal transitional justice mechanism, both articulating victim participation and agency, and enabling victims and communities to collectively engender social change that addresses both impacts and root causes of past violence. Such approaches construct local meanings that address the individual and collective legacies of enforced disappearance and represent both a complement to, and a catalyst for, formal transitional justice process. Second, we show that local government can be an actor that can deliver formal transitional justice process even in a state where the central authorities are committed to impunity and amnesia, enhancing the agency of victims and affected communities and addressing local needs. As state action, local government process brings formal recognition that victims demand and puts pressure on the federal authorities to act.

We challenge the longstanding conflation of ‘local’ and ‘informal’ (meaning initiated and led by non-state actors, for example Kochanski 2020) to describe transitional justice process not led by national governments, and we blur the conceptual division between state and community-led process. The article highlights a formal—but local—approach to legacies of violence through an engagement with local government that enables official acknowledgement by an arm of the state that can enable both support to victims and a transformative agenda in local governance that recognizes the historic marginalization that drove conflict and seeks to address it.

1.1 Methodological approach

This article is authored by two scholar-activists who have been involved in work with families of the missing in Nepal since the time of the conflict. One author is the son of a victim of disappearance and has been a leading advocate for Nepalese victims since the end of the conflict. One of the case studies discussed is in his home district, where he has led both the work of the victims’ group and their engagement with the municipality. The second author was working in western Nepal with an international organization at the time the conflict ended and played a role in initiating the formation of the Family Association in Bardiya district. He has continued to work with and support families of the missing and their organizations.

As such, much of the methodology underlying this study has taken the form of an extended ethnographic engagement with victims and their organizations over almost two decades, and—more recently—with local government. The data discussed here are derived both from this long experience and from a set of semi-structured interviews made with concerned stakeholders with the explicit aim of investigating local authority action around memorialization. These were made with victims’ representatives, local government officials and local political leaders.

2. Transitional justice and the local

While transitional justice was originally conceived as a set of state-led national mechanisms, the importance of local and informal approaches to legacies of human rights violations has been increasingly acknowledged (for example Sharp 2014). Informal process can be characterized by its reliance on non-state, community-based mechanisms to address grievances and promote healing (Quinn 2005), in contrast to legally mandated formal process. This approach often emerges spontaneously at the grassroots level, involving customary dispute resolution methods that have their origins in traditional governance, dialogues at the community level, and civil society-led processes. Informal transitional justice often emphasizes restorative rather than retributive measures, and seeks to repair relationships and rebuild social cohesion. Beyond the potential for truth-telling about their fate and whereabouts, informal process has not been seen as highly relevant around the issue of missing persons, not least in engaging with the disappeared (that constitute most of the missing in Nepal), where the state was the perpetrator.

Local process is seen as unfolding in ways that give communities greater agency over its goals and modalities and it enhances popular and victim participation (Lundy and McGovern 2008). The overlap between the local and formal has been process whose form is nationally mandated, but is locally implemented, often with a reference to traditional practices. Examples include both Timor-Leste’s Community Reconciliation Program process (Larke 2009) and the gacaca process in Rwanda (Kirkby 2006). These examples show how it is often difficult for formal local process to enable local agency because of centrally-imposed constraints on its form and approach. Indeed, both these examples have been claimed to be instrumentalizations of traditional local process to serve national political agendas.

Much transitional justice process, precisely because it is mandated from national capitals, is challenged to address local and particular needs. Where a state commitment to impunity precludes any significant formal process, as in Nepal, local truth-telling and memorialization can attempt to represent forgotten victims and their stories, challenging narratives produced by state-led institutions and building their own narratives in informal spaces. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, for example, began their movement with commemoration of the disappeared (Agosin 1987), seeing memory as a foundation for political resistance and ultimately accountability, and many other victim movements across the world have followed their lead. It is argued here that the role of memory actions led by local victims and their representatives can be important in addressing the legacies of past violations through empowering victims at a local level—and potentially beyond—and ensuring their political agency. Such empowerment not only enables an engagement with acts of violence but can also provide a platform for an addressing of socio-economic rights violations such as marginalization and exclusion, which often drive internal armed conflict (Robins 2014) and were a key cause of Nepal’s insurgency.

There is little literature on local government as a driver of transitional justice process, but it has the potential to instantiate process that is both truly locally driven—in the sense that victims and affected communities are close to its design and implementation—but that is formal, in the sense of being sanctioned and implemented by an arm of the state. In a federal state, such as Nepal following the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the insurgency, such process has the potential to challenge both the narratives of and constraints on truth and justice at central level (ICTJ 2018). There is, however, surprisingly limited global experience of transitional justice process led by local government. The few relevant examples of transitional justice being implemented by lower levels of a federal system include that of the United States, where a number of mechanisms—including both truth and reparation processes—have been carried out at state level (Gawerc 2024), and a number of truth commissions established by state governments in Brazil (Instituto de Estudos da Religião 2013).

A particular benefit of local process is that it can allow truths to be told that are of great importance to affected communities but that are invisible at a national level. This is particularly true for families of the missing. In the absence of knowledge of the fate of the missing or a gravesite to represent them, memorialization is an integral element of living with ambiguity. The lens of ambiguous loss (Boss 2004), as an approach to understanding the impact of having a missing relative, centres the reconstruction of meaning and identity as integral to living well with ambiguity (Boss 2006). Memory emerges in multiple social ecologies, from the individual, family and community to the nation state. In particular, memorialization as a social process can create meanings and reconstruct identities and, when performed locally, can collectively reconfigure the social space in which survivors live. For communities whose existence has traditionally barely been acknowledged by the state—true for most rural communities in Nepal—the construction of memory is not only an engagement with the past but a promise for the future, in the sense that it represents a statement that affirms that existence. More than this, in a society seeking explicitly to build a ‘new Nepal’, memorialization—particularly when it comes with official sanction—represents an element of the renegotiation of citizenship and inclusion that the end of the conflict and the peace agreement promised.

3. Nepal’s stalled transitional justice process and the victims’ movement

In Nepal, the armed conflict (1996–2006)—an insurgency triggered by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN-M)—was largely fought on both sides by the poorest and most marginal communities in the country even as the leadership of both sides in the conflict was drawn from elite strata. The roots of the conflict lay in the extreme inequality and systematic exclusion of Nepalis by caste, race, gender, geography and class (Bhandari and Robins 2018). As a result of the Maoist rebels’ effective mobilization of the indigenous and the rural poor, it was these communities that were most likely to become the conflict’s victims, including of widespread disappearances perpetrated by state forces. One impact of this was to further disempower the least empowered communities in the nation. The decade-long conflict brought enormous pain and suffering for many people. The Nepalese Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) has published a list of more than 2,500 people allegedly disappeared during the armed conflict (OnlineKhabar 2020), largely disappeared by state forces but including some taken by Maoist rebels. Families of those missing have never received satisfactory answers from authorities and, as a result, live with ambiguity and continue to demand truth, dignity and justice in the face of a state committed to impunity.

During the political transition, the Nepalese government and the CPN-M committed, through a series of agreements, to implementing various transitional justice mechanisms. Foremost among them was the commitment to establish a commission to investigate the disappeared. The CIEDP was established in 2015 but has failed to investigate cases and deliver justice to victims and their families. This reflects a consensus across the political class, encompassing those who led the war on both sides—both the erstwhile state and Maoist rebels, now in government—who share an agenda of seeking to deflect any effort at accountability for violations of the conflict. As a result, there is a widespread perception that the CIEDP, as well as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) created alongside it, were created to fail: receiving almost no resources or political support, they have never become operational. This represents an effort at the political instrumentalization of transitional justice, seeking to satisfy demands from the international community while not challenging high level impunity. Eighteen years after the formal end of the conflict, discussions among victims’ organizations have shifted focus from the long-frustrated advocacy for an acceptable truth-seeking process to identifying and implementing alternative and localized transitional justice mechanisms that are more concrete in addressing the needs of victims.

3.1 Victims’ movements and memory of the missing in Nepal

One response of families of the missing to the neglect of their demands for truth and justice has been to form associations in different parts of the country with many now active at the grassroots. Such agency represents an effort to advocate for a formal process, but also highlights solidarity and local process, including memorialization, as an alternative to it. Victims’ organizations seek to represent victims, including families of missing persons disappeared by both parties, and to articulate their demands. They can bring all families with similar pain and experience together as a platform for families to develop mutual support and solidarity and a foundation for advocacy. Victims and their families use their own understanding of both their experience and their needs and set their own agenda. Commemoration and memorialization have become a priority for families to remember their disappeared relatives in the context of injustice and as part of collective resistance to state amnesia and impunity.

Victims’ groups have been crucial for victims of conflict, with the potential to influence policy as well as support victims in their communities. They also radically redefine what participation in a transitional justice process means, from victims participating on other people’s terms in mechanisms over which they have little influence, to the renegotiation of power relations between victims and other actors. Victims’ groups are one way of explicitly broadening the physical spaces in which transitional justice unfolds, shifting the locus of a justice practice from the invited spaces of courts and truth commissions to claimed spaces in communities and streets. They have challenged traditional repertoires of action in transitional justice, eschewing a focus on the evidence-based advocacy of human rights NGOs, in favour of demonstrations and sit-ins in public places, and other forms of contentious politics associated with social movement activism (Robins and Bhandari 2012).

The consolidation of local victims’ groups in Nepal, has led to the creation of broader coalitions of victims developing a national profile to advocate for an addressing of victims needs and a comprehensive transitional justice process. The vibrancy of local groups in areas affected by the conflict has led to an exploration of alternative avenues to justice, one of which is memory work. Memory work is ongoing in families, victim groups and communities, as they conduct commemoration, publish memoirs and engage in local political debate and documentation to recognize the contribution of the disappeared and their sacrifices for political change. Perhaps the greatest success of efforts at remaking understandings of the conflict achieved by victims’ organizations is their existence as articulations of solidarity between all victims. At the end of the conflict victim identities were polarized, linked to—and instrumentalized by—political parties, to the extent that victims of the state and of the Maoists would not even sit together. The contemporary victims’ movement in Nepal has created a victim identity and solidarity that transcends their perpetrators and acknowledges victims as sharing needs and an agenda around which they must mobilize politically.

Families of the missing, dominated by poor, often indigenous women, have needs that encompass truth and justice, as well as basic economic essentials, an end to stigma in family and community, and broader demands for social and political inclusion for the communities from which they come (Robins 2013). While their initial coming together was driven by a simple need for solidarity and peer support, this process was seen to be highly empowering, creating spaces where women could renegotiate what their victimhood—as families of the missing—meant, and providing a platform for social meanings to be challenged and transformed. In this sense, victims’ organizations—with a local presence and a national profile—constitute a transitional justice mechanism in themselves, as a result of their being able to address some of the needs of families of the missing. Local spaces—whether naturally emerging or created by victims’ groups—have transformed the lives of families by providing room for the circulation of discourses which can challenge those that are stigmatizing. The social support that such spaces facilitate can be understood as crucial elements of resilience, supporting families in renegotiating meaning and identity in positive ways (Robins 2014).

Remembering the missing is different from, and serves different purposes to, remembering the dead. While many families understand that their loved ones are likely to be dead, they remain caught between despair and the faint hope they might return: their lives are defined by uncertainty. Honouring the missing, while maintaining that hope, is seen as an obligation by many families to those missing. A study of families of the disappeared in Nepal (Robins 2014) has shown how memorialization can enhance the capacity of families to live well despite suffering from ambiguous loss (Boss 2004). Commemoration is an explicit effort to give meaning to the experience of having a missing relative, while acknowledging the ambiguity over their fate. The construction of commemorations and acts of tribute are a way both of revising attachment to the missing and normalizing the ambivalence that families feel. This represents an effort to socially construct positive meaning around the absence of the missing, giving value to the experience of both families and the missing themselves, in a social way, that is both shared with, and ideally affirmed by, the community through their acknowledgment of and participation in commemorations. As a result, rather than an institutional process in an elite space in the capital, the most valuable form of memorialization in rural and dispersed societies is a highly local one that can reshape local understandings of the violence to which families and communities have been subject.

That local efforts have proved at least cautiously successful stems from their distance from central authorities and necessary grounding in the realities of locality and community. This allows community members to engage with how memory work can meet the needs of victims, feed into broader societal peacebuilding objectives, and potentially facilitate the work of formal transitional justice mechanisms such as the TRC and CIEDP, should they become operational.

3.2 Local government as a transitional justice actor

One positive step visible to Nepalis, particularly those from traditionally marginalized minorities and in more remote areas, has been the new federal political system, which emerged as a result of the peace agreement that ended the conflict. This institutionalized decentralized local governments in seven provinces and 753 local municipalities to focus on local needs and to integrate local actors into policymaking and implementation (Acharya and Zafarullah 2020). This also links directly to the ethnic fissures that saw the conflict driven by an understanding that elites in Kathmandu drove policy enhancing the marginalization of those elsewhere, and particularly of minorities such as indigenous ethnic groups, low caste communities and the Madeshi inhabitants of the lowland Terai region (Pyakurel 2021). Local control has now partially been passed to regions where minorities dominate and can develop policy independent of a federal government led by traditional hill caste elites. This has had a concrete impact in terms of enhancing both the representation of such minorities through their presence in local governments and the responsiveness of those authorities to their constituents. One impact of this has been the possibility of unique localized memorialization approaches and the potential to advance local democracy by integrating local actors, including victims and survivors, into political processes.

Given the delicate political attitude at the centre towards the violations of the conflict, and the fears senior politicians have of facing accountability, local government has very concrete limits in engaging with the issue of disappearances. It cannot engage directly with issues of criminal or other responsibility or initiate efforts, such as exhumations, to identify the missing. Local government is however well placed to work with issues of memory, itself inextricably linked to truth-telling. In particular, memorialization efforts using sites where atrocities occurred and involving local actors and youth ensures sustainable processes that can become embedded in local community action (Hamber et al. 2010; Walby and Piché 2011). Such memorialization strengthens democracy when it includes local actors, including and beyond local authorities (Brett et al. 2007). There is also evidence that participatory memorialization involving local actors contributes to sustainable peace (Kim 2018).

4. Local authorities and memory practices in Nepal: an empirical study

The local authorities discussed here are part of the newly formed federal system that emerged in the constitution of 2015 as an explicit response to the excessive centralization of authority that had contributed to the conflict. The actors who fought for political change, notably the CPN-M who led the insurgency, have played a historic role in changing the political system, and are now themselves part of both local and national governance. The changes wrought by the end of the monarchy and the accompanying social and political upheaval have also seen the emergence of identity politics, in which various traditionally excluded minorities have mobilized in political parties that have been able to have significant impact at the local level in regions where they have a strong presence. This politics resonates with the fact that those most likely to become victims of the conflict were already victims of social exclusion and marginalization by virtue of their ethnic or caste identity. This drives a victim politics where the agenda of families of the missing necessarily overlaps with that of marginalized groups. Given that social exclusion and poverty drove the conflict, it is valuable to seek that memorialization includes violations of social and economic rights, as well as those arising from acts of violence. This has the effect of linking an engagement with violations of the conflict with ongoing structural violence against the excluded and makes such memorialization inherently transformative (Gready and Robins 2014), in the sense of having broader political implications, beyond a transitional justice frame.

Local political actors have in many cases responded positively to victims’ needs of memory and played an important role to localize memorialization efforts, reflecting their distance from the threat of accountability and connection to local issues and emotions. This is in stark contrast to politicians at national level who have sought to use highly partial and instrumentalized memory of the conflict for narrow political ends. The development of links between victim-led memory practices and policy agendas in local government has demanded that local authorities become aware of the need of victims for effective integration into their communities and for their agency in such a process. Integration here means the acknowledgement of conflict victims and their needs in context (by political parties, local authorities and communities themselves) that offers them social and political recognition in their communities. Integration demands, and is facilitated by, structural participation of local victims in political processes, which will ideally offer them space and resources, while enabling their agency. The examples discussed below show that access to political power and victim mobilization and action are mutually reinforcing in ways that show agency in transitional justice and active citizenship as inextricably linked.

While some victims and representatives of traditionally excluded communities have gained office in local government, most of the processes discussed here have not depended on such direct representation. The legitimacy of the victim movement has been confirmed in its recognition by local authorities and the success of victims in influencing political actors in shaping memorialization policies. Victims have been acknowledged as important social actors and the memorialization agenda integrated into political processes as part of a common political platform. This political acceptance, driven by victims’ activism, has led to local governments commemorating victims and inviting the direct participation of victims, as seen in the Lamjung and Bardiya examples discussed here. These locally led approaches to memorialization have challenged the inaction of successive federal governments and, while focused on memory, have questioned narratives of forgetting or ‘moving on’ advanced by the political establishment in Kathmandu, and included demands for accountability at the highest level. This has served to directly contest elite actors’ commitment to transitional justice in theory but not practice, and their refusal to address the victim agenda as it is articulated at the local level.

A novel approach has thus begun to emerge in small-town Nepal to drive local memorialization in collaboration with local governments. Two cases illustrate the process.

4.1 Barbardiya municipality: from victim mobilization to representation

Bardiya district in Nepal’s mid-west is home to large numbers of indigenous Tharu communities, who have traditionally had little access to resources or government structures and services. They have been engaged in a long struggle with caste Hindus who have used their connections to the authorities to gain ownership of land held by Tharu communities subject to traditional tenure (Guneratne 2010). As a result of the Maoists’ effective mobilization of Tharus around land issues, during the conflict they were targeted by the state and subject to atrocities alongside the structural violence they had long endured. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has documented more than 200 cases of enforced disappearance after arrest by the security forces in the district, the highest number of reported conflict-related cases in any district in the country, and the vast majority being of Tharus (OHCHR 2008).

Barbardiya is located in central Bardiya and is home to 73,000 people. This municipality was severely victimized by the state during the conflict, with many local youth joining the Maoists following their targeting by security forces. A group of families in Dhadhabar, led by families of those disappeared by the state, started a collective campaign to search for their disappeared relatives during the conflict, and after the conflict they became the Conflict Victims Committee (CVC). They then expanded their activities throughout Bardiya district, becoming one of the strongest family associations of victims in the country and a key element of national victims’ organizations, successfully influencing the national agenda. CVC was formally established when the conflict ended in 2006 with the aim of supporting conflict victims and establishing a victims’ network with the objectives of: making public the whereabouts of those disappeared during the conflict; making family members aware of legal avenues to address legacies of disappearance, including memory and reparation; providing livelihood and legal support to victim families; and playing a role in establishing a victims’ network for solidarity (CVC 2006). While being dominated by families of those disappeared by the state, CVC also includes members of the families of those victimized by the Maoists. CVC actively represents its members at both local and national levels, focusing on providing a platform to exchange stories and experience, offering counselling and trauma relief through sharing, collective commemoration and mobilization as a form of community therapy, as well as advocacy at multiple levels.

CVC in Bardiya is a group for and of victims, led largely by Tharus, whose action and visibility has led to wide recognition among political parties, authorities and wider communities. As a consequence, victims and their leaders are highly respected in their communities and have been able to influence local politics. Victims and their advocates had the chance to become involved in local politics after the promulgation of the new constitution in 2015 that restructured the political system into a three-tiered governance structure of federal, provincial and local governments. The first election after the new Constitution was put in place, in May 2017, opened a door for many local activists and victim advocates to enter politics, typically as a part of the Maoist party. In Barbardiya Municipality local elections were won by the Maoist party and one of the ward presidents elected was the son of one of the disappeared, a Tharu who had co-founded CVC and who played an important role in integrating families of the disappeared into social and political processes. For such victim advocates the agenda of memorializing the conflict and its victims was an important part of the commitments they made to electors. One result of both the election and presence of victim advocates in local government was the Municipal council’s adoption of a local memorialization policy to remember the disappeared, martyrs² and other victims of violations in the conflict. It also adopted a policy to support victims’ livelihoods and to advance their socio-economic status through income generation activities.

The families of the disappeared and martyrs formed a local coordination group led by victims’ families, and local government provided them with a formal space to come together and develop victim-centred policies towards memorialization and other support initiatives in their context. The local coordinator of the group reports:

It’s our great achievement in terms of receiving acknowledgment and support from the local authorities to include the victim agenda in the local government’s policy to remember and honour local victims, who contributed to political and social change processes.³

The former ward president, who played a role in formulating the policy and implementing these activities, said:

We have been fighting to draw attention to keeping victim memories alive and have been commemorating at the informal level, but the local government realized the sacrifices and contribution made by the disappeared and martyrs by providing a local space as the site of commemoration. This is a historic physical site for all the disappeared victims to be remembered, portrayed as indigenous and marginalised victims in Bardiya.⁴

In Barbardiya Municipality the Kumbher Adda Memorial park is named after the disappeared and missing, and the names of all those missing are written on ‘memory pillars’ in the park. Additionally, a local road has been named after Sagunlal Chaudhary, a local Tharu school principal disappeared by the military. The Municipal council also developed a policy to educate a new generation about the history of past atrocities, implementing a new curriculum in local schools for grades 5, 6 and 7. Included in textbooks was consideration of: the contribution of martyrs, the disappeared and injured, and discussion of the memorial park of the disappeared, with this element of the curriculum named ‘Pride of Barbardiya’. One family member and schoolteacher notes: ‘to the families of the disappeared, the written texts in the school textbooks have created local victim narratives and honoured them’;⁵ ‘The textbook itself has become a site of memory of the disappeared’.⁶ In the case of Bardiya district, the well-known community activism of CVC and the role a majority of victims played had an influential impact in driving the policy. Such social dynamics led CVC leaders to significantly influence local politics, making them actors to address the municipality’s past and advance an agenda through addressing local needs of victims for both memorialization and reparation.

The recognition of the former ward president that victimhood was linked to victims’ status as marginalized indigenous people demonstrates the transformative potential of such approaches. There is however little engagement in local government led memory work—including the new curriculum—with issues of the root causes of the conflict, such as the social exclusion and marginalization of Tharu communities and state oppression. Despite this, the net result of these processes is that victims, as well as the Tharu and rural people generally, are better represented at the local level and are finding routes to actively contribute towards transformative change in their communities. For example, local municipalities have facilitated the training of local victims in mental health and psychosocial counselling, microfinance, and farming, as well as in forming cooperatives, seeking to address the economic needs that transitional justice discourse in Nepal and elsewhere has largely ignored. This makes clear the link between memory of the violations of the conflict, the role of representative local government and a more effectively operationalized citizenship for Nepal’s Tharu people.

4.2 Marsyangdi Rural Municipality, Lamjung: policy on local memorialization

Marsyangdi Rural Municipality is located in Lamjung district, in the central west of Nepal in the mid-hills. Many families of the disappeared and martyrs, as in other rural areas, commemorate their disappeared relatives both individually and collectively. A group of families led by the son of one of the disappeared (and co-author of this piece) brought together local victim families and other actors, creating local spaces for victims, both physically and in a social and political sense. The families started different local initiatives through publishing memoirs, commemorating the days of disappearance, and raising their voice against social injustice.⁷

This initiative was led by the co-author of this article, who was influential with local leaders as a result of his activist profile and the renown of his disappeared father, an activist, artist and former teacher. Families of victims actively organized, evolving into a strong victim-led group, formalizing their existence as the Centre of Memory of the Disappeared and Martyrs. The Centre’s activities influenced both political actors and local government to develop formal policies and advance memory work in the municipality. The group of victims involved, led by families of the disappeared, built relationships with local political parties and as a result, elected local authorities accepted the issue of violations of the conflict as a shared agenda of political concern.

Following three years of continuous engagement of victims with local authorities, the Municipal Assembly proposed early in 2020 a ‘policy on memorialization and the honouring of the disappeared, martyrs, national personalities, and local political and social campaigners’ that was unanimously adopted by the assembly. The policy created a Memory Study Centre:

The Memory Study Centre will be institutionalized to conduct various memory works to honour the contribution of martyrs and disappeared persons during the People’s War, People’s Movements, various people’s struggles and other social campaigns. The Centre will organize various memory works and do the necessary coordination and facilitation to publish their life stories. The families of martyrs and disappeared persons will be honoured and felicitated to express the high-level respect for their contribution … Necessary initiatives will be launched to exert pressure on federal and provincial governments and line agencies in publicizing the whereabouts of the then teacher and social leader Tej Bahadur Bhandari⁸ who was forcibly disappeared (31 December 2001) by the then Royal Nepal Army during the Peoples’ War. The naming of roads, parks and public places will be made in the name of martyrs, the disappeared and national personalities to honour them. (Marsyangdi Rural Municipality 2020).

The public memory hall is named after martyrs and the disappeared and three main public roads in the municipality have been named after Tej Bahadur Bhandari, the disappeared father of one of the authors of this piece and two martyrs, Sukman Gurung and Kopila Ghimire. The Mayor and Deputy Mayor are trustees of the foundation that runs the Centre and the ward president a participating member, while the Centre remains led by victims’ families. The Centre has been allocated an annual budget and a physical space that has given both visibility and official recognition. Beyond the ongoing memorialization initiatives this has offered a sense of both reparative and transformative justice for conflict victims.

Transformation emerges from victim families’ sense of evolving from passive victims into political actors who can make an impact on their society and community. They have become a part of political processes and played a role in decision making, in terms of localizing memorialization, creating spaces for victim agency, mobilizing family members, gaining recognition, and providing support to the families. This has given a dignified identity to families of victims in the community as the policy has changed public perceptions of past violations and shifted narratives. The Centre has established and disseminated the narratives of victim families through publishing memoirs, organizing public events and launching a memory hall in the name of victims in the centre of the municipality, as well as making a public commemoration in collaboration with the local authorities. Such collective action has had a positive impact on families and the younger generation in the community, including through addressing conflict related trauma through acknowledgment and respect.

The role that a number of actors have played – including local authorities – has been to socialize and localize the victims’ agenda for truth seeking, dignity, memory, and reparation. This means that this agenda has been both widely disseminated within the community and integrated into the local political process. This has been particularly important where local victims are disconnected from the national, Kathmandu-centred, political environment from where transitional justice is led—and contested—by elites and external actors, including human rights NGOs (Robins 2012). This process has mostly ignored and excluded victims and their needs, particularly those in more remote and rural areas such as Lamjung. The mobilization of victim groups has permitted political access and the development of partnerships with local authorities that has allowed them to integrate into local political processes, where their voices are heard as legitimate local actors.

5. Local government led process as transitional justice

Given the impossibility of progress on a national stage, the involvement of Nepalese local authorities in memorialization represents a significant impact on state policy, despite ongoing impunity at the national level. This has been possible as a result of several factors. First, victim mobilization has built solidarity and allowed victims as a collective to construct an identity and be acknowledged as such in their communities. Second, the creation of new local governance structures under the post-conflict constitution has created routes to representation for a range of previously under-represented communities. This includes the indigenous Tharu whose identity in contemporary Bardiya is inescapably linked to their victimhood, both historically and during the conflict. Third, victims’ organizations have worked to build relationships with local government and advocated for such local action. Thus, the mobilization, representation and direct participation of victims at local level have driven effective victim-led policies of memorialization and created a new space for transitional justice, unsettling narratives of the federal government.

After years of waiting for answers, and disappointment at the federal government’s failure to take any action to address disappearances, family members of the victims are taking their cases to the communities where the incidents occurred. The victims’ movement appears to have run into a dead end at the central level, and so a majority of family members feel that they may achieve greater satisfaction in their hometowns, where the disappeared are remembered with honour and affection by communities, families, friends, relatives and, increasingly, also by local authorities. Listening to victim families, local governments are more concerned with public truth, memory and reparations than legal accountability.⁹ The policies and actions of local government can however also advance justice advocacy beyond memorialization to investigations and exhumations in the future. Such initiatives have the potential to create pressure on the federal government to investigate the whereabouts of the disappeared and create spaces for local actors to not only remember the disappeared, but also act on the broader agenda of the families.

Local governments and victim groups have together begun to support the construction of memory to establish and socialize narratives locally that echo those of victims. Memorialization is effective at acknowledging, commemorating and dignifying victims and integrating them into local political, social and economic processes. As a route to truth seeking that parallels the stalled official processes at the top, such memorialization offers opportunities for disseminating narratives that can challenge deeply rooted impunity. Local memory work can offer a community-based victim narrative dealing with the past in a way that a centralized official process is unlikely to offer. Such process combines the benefits of both local and formal approaches, as processes conceived and developed in tightknit communities, that seek local impacts. They are able to engage with and acknowledge the cultural sensibilities of the community, such as the particular position of the Tharu minority in Bardiya. Because they are driven by the mobilization of victims, they are inherently victim-centric but address victims’ needs in the context of the communities in which they live: in many cases victims’ needs concern their position within, and relationship to, their own community and a process led by local authorities is peculiarly well-placed to engage with this and to engage the concerned community.

That these processes have emerged through the elected representatives of a community means that they cannot ignore structural issues, such as the marginalization that drove the conflict. Just as their indigeneity was an important factor in disappearances of Tharus in Bardiya, so their memorialization draws attention to larger socio-political issues such regions face. Just as federalism has driven a new identity politics, so memory work that engages with these issues has a broader political resonance, challenging horizontal inequalities in Nepal and the compromised citizenship of the excluded that drove the armed conflict, or ongoing poverty. As such, this represents an avenue for a more transformative justice, resonating with the task some decentralized legislatures have set themselves and signifying the extension of a politics of victims’ rights in a way that permits it to engage with broader local and national politics.

Moving from informal victim-led memory work to that sanctioned by local government is important, because it constitutes formal acknowledgment of violations and of the experience of survivors. Local authorities have no power to conduct exhumations or try perpetrators, but their recognition of the crimes that occurred both serves victims and communities today, sustains the memory of the disappeared and keeps alive the possibility of central government action in the future. While it is not easy to influence central government, decentralized efforts can represent an example to politicians at the centre. If a majority of local governments can take such action, this can challenge the hegemony and the silence of the federal government and create momentum for wider change.

While the impact such work has on the prospect of criminal accountability is unclear, it does engage with a broader understanding of an accounting for the violation of disappearance, increasing the visibility of families and their experience and needs, and providing formal acknowledgment of the fact of disappearance. Such formal, local praxis in the ongoing pursuit of justice in Nepal can serve to destabilize transitional justice assumptions and has the potential to broaden and deepen the national justice debate.

Perhaps the most important conclusion to draw however is not that local authority action can drive novel impact, but that active victims are able to become actors of social and political importance, to the extent that their agendas can have an impact on local politics. While the route to influencing local authorities was enabled by the creation of new levels of governance in Nepal, the real achievement of the Nepalese victims’ movement is to have gained such significant visibility and influence, at both national and local level.

6. Conclusion: formal, local memorialization of the missing as a transformative practice

This article has sought to trace memory-focused activism from its origins in families of the missing and their organizations to state sanctioned action by local government that constitutes a formal, local transitional justice process.

Memory as a practice can create meanings and identities for families engaging with the incomprehensibility of disappearance that can enhance resilience and aid social reintegration (Robins 2014). Seeing local associations of families of the missing as crucial actors that enable the agency of victims, highlights a route to victim participation in a process that has been seen to have a significant impact, both on victim families and their broader communities. As such, the local, informal processes developed since the end of conflict around truth-telling about how people went missing, and who they were, led by family associations, represent a transitional justice process.

Such process articulates a victim-centred perspective, in the sense of an agenda that privileges victim agency and affects victims’ everyday lives, constituting a particular and deep form of participation in transitional justice. This highlights the value of victims’ organizations as a route to agency for victims, a collective agency that emerges from solidarity and mobilization, and that echoes the collective victimhood of communities terrorized by the Nepalese state. Such organizations articulate a theory of change that challenges the traditional, liberal understanding of human rights practice as focused on advocacy to impact state policy. Here, we have seen concrete change in communities, independent of any authority, creating narratives that challenge state amnesia and instrumentalization of the victims of the conflict. This resonates with efforts to understand victim agency in transitional justice in terms of relational autonomy (Daşlı 2024): those families active in family associations in Bardiya and Lamjung see their capacity to become actors in efforts to address legacies of violence enabled by the social relations in which they are embedded. Just as the impact of disappearance is a direct result of social relations, so efforts to address those legacies, at the individual, familial, social and political levels, emerge as a result of how people engage with each other. The construction of a political identity among victims from communities that have traditionally been both excluded and politically inactive, reflects that family associations are social movements that have served to construct an agentic victim identity, (Smithey 2009) challenging their traditional passivity. This resonates with ideas of critical victimology (for example Mawby and Walklate 1994), challenging the denial of victims as actors and acknowledging that they bring certain types of politics to a transitional justice process.

That family associations are political actors has then been seen in their successful effort to engage with the new municipal politics of Nepal. In both Bardiya and Lamjung—and in many other districts of the country—mobilized victims have cultivated relationships with local leaders. Local processes of memorialization in Nepal that have been implemented by local authorities, such as the naming of local roads and public places after the disappeared and martyrs, have been seen to have a concrete impact on families and communities, honouring their loved ones, supporting families in coping with having a missing relative and challenging their stigmatization. This represents an extension of understandings of victim participation in transitional justice process which has long been conceptualized as a process of enabling the agency of victims at the expense of the state in formal mechanisms unfolding in official spaces (for example Firchow and Selim 2022). This ‘zero sum’ conceptualization of participation fails to emphasize the complexity of the transitional environment (Gready and Robins 2020), including how local democracy in Nepal has made municipal authorities aware of the importance and relevance of victims’ issues more broadly. The case studies are also demonstrations of the impact of relationality as an important element of participation in transitional justice, in terms of victims influencing authorities through social processes that transcend traditional advocacy and allow victims to use or build connections that can enhance that influence.

That this form of participation unfolds in a society that remains highly patriarchal and unequal is reflected in who participates in family associations and indeed in local government. Since most of the missing and disappeared are men, it is largely women, notably wives and mothers, who are active around the issue. However, due to illiteracy, traditional understandings of a woman’s role, the challenges of travelling to the district centre, and the need for those who are often sole breadwinners to work, the ability to be active in family associations is constrained by gender and poverty, particularly among rural and indigenous women. As a result, in both Bardiya and Lamjung the family associations are led by men, and while CVC is highly inclusive of indigenous Tharus, the Lamjung association is dominated by educated and higher caste men. This demonstrates the importance of the socially transformative agendas that the family associations are seeking to advance in collaboration with local authorities: addressing the legacies of acts of violence must be accompanied by broader political efforts to address longstanding structural violence that drove conflict.

In Bardiya, victims’ demands of local authorities naturally articulated a transformative agenda, that is one which not only demanded an addressing of the legacies of violations but of their root causes. Because disappearances in Bardiya were rooted in the long-term social and political exclusion of the Tharu and the ongoing struggle over land rights, any effort to tell truths about the conflict had to engage with this historic marginalization. This, combined with newly empowered local authorities in Tharu majority areas, meant that CVC was able to ensure that a discussion of the truth about the past included an engagement with issues of Tharu empowerment, that had in turn been raised by the arrival of local democracy and a broader national political movement of indigenous people. This represents one example of a strategic approach for seeing victim-led transitional justice demands as a platform for broader transformative social change. The process of local memorialization in Bardiya, driven by both victims’ organizations and local government, has served to provide political and social recognition to both victims and their communities but also to the Tharu as a people. The presence of a local government that is sensitive to Tharu history and needs, in a way the federal government never has been, enables the prospect of an addressing of Tharu marginalization, and memorialization efforts can be a part of this. As such, local government-led process, triggered by pressure from victims’ groups, represents a novel form of citizenship that enhances the potential of local governance as an emancipatory and reparative space for victims of both physical and structural violence, at the hands of the state.

While it remains unclear as to the extent to which the multiple local governance innovations in transitional justice in Nepal have influenced national policy, at the time of writing, significant developments are underway. In August 2024 Nepal’s parliament unanimously passed a revised transitional justice bill that revives the TRC and CIEDP, and offers a new commitment to a comprehensive process. The passing of the bill is at least partially the result of the national victims’ movement, whose leaders described the new law as ‘historic and transformative ... It addresses the needs of survivors and represents our views’ (Guest 2024).

Conflict of Interest

None declared.

Funding

No funding to declare.

References

Footnotes