Reviving Youth’s Role in Nepal’s Peacebuilding

Nearly four years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord marked a ceasefire between the government of Nepal and the Maoists, many marginalized groups still remain on the fringes of the decision-making process. Across political, ethnic, and social divides, Nepal’s young people are finding it particularly difficult to make their priorities matter in the halls of power.

Although 60 percent of Nepal's population is believed to be below 25 years old, the youth still struggle to be heard in policy-making decisions. Above, young people gather to discuss Nepal's constitution in town hall meetings organized by The Asia Foundation.

And given that 60 percent of Nepal’s population is believed to be below 25 years of age, the youth represent a critical constituency for ensuring a successful peace process and developing a legitimate constitution. If the current government is able to meaningfully engage the growing youth population, it could mean the difference between sustaining the achievements of the pro-democracy movement of 2006 and allowing the country to descend once again into violence and conflict.
While there have been some positive steps toward mainstreaming youth in the recent past – the formation of the Ministry of Youth and a National Youth policy drafted by the Ministry of Youth and Sports to address issues concerning the youth in Nepal, as well as a strong youth representation in the Constituent Assembly (CA) – there’s no clear evidence that they will in fact have a meaningful leadership role or impact in policy-making. For example, though 137 out of 601 total CA members are below 35 years old, in reality, strong political party whips have thus far dissuaded them from deviating from party lines in order to voice concerns on behalf of Nepal’s young people. This has had the effect of watering down the potential influence of youth representation in Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.
This situation is compounded by an overall lack of educational and economic opportunities in Nepal. Many young people are poorly educated and unemployed or underemployed. A DFID report published last year on youth exclusion, violence, conflict, and fragile states refers to econometric analysis which shows a relationship between low education levels and risk of conflict. The report also mentions studies that suggest youth unemployment and under-employment can cause conflict or lead to youth involvement in criminal activities. These studies explain the Nepali experience in which young people have been pivotal for recruitment in new and emerging radicalized groups like the Young Communist League, the Youth Force, and other armed militant groups that lean toward extremist political agendas. Such groups primarily depend on young people to further their political cause that often tends to be violent. This is particularly critical now as 2,973 ex-Maoists under the age of 18 (at the time of the signing of Comprehensive Peace Accord) have been released from cantonments since January, while the fate of 19,602 more, average age of 25, is in discussion, according to unofficial Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) sources.
To help increase meaningful youth participation in policy decision-making, The Asia Foundation – under its Nepal Peace Support Project – organized from January to March 2010 a series of small town hall meetings in 45 municipalities to bring together young people to engage in constitutional dialogues. The meetings were designed to strengthen the voice and role of youth in the Constituent Assembly process, particularly among youth from smaller towns in Nepal where educational and employment opportunities are few, and where young people have less exposure to the political process. In those areas, the Foundation also worked with Women ACT Nepal, the Rural Community Development Council, and Samudayik Sarathi Nepal to conduct civic education and constitutional consultation programs in addition to the town hall meetings.

A group of young people gather after participating in a town hall meeting.

During the meetings, young community members discussed some of the most contentious constitutional issues proposed in the drafts prepared by different committees in the CA and still being debated by different political parties. These include forms of governance, federal restructuring, provision of compulsory military conscription, the judicial system, and citizenship issues. An analysis of their opinions and perceptions suggested a lack of support for the drafts on federalism presented by political parties and almost signified a veto against ethnic federalism.
In one meeting in Surkhet, in midwestern Nepal, participants voiced a strong preference for rethinking the stance on state restructuring, and questioned whether Nepal really needs a federal model with the promulgation of the new constitution. One of the participants stressed that if federalism is introduced to curb the centralization prevalent in the unitary system, but the same ineffective governance mechanism currently in place continues, the chance that federalism will be able to help decentralize the system is slim. Furthermore, the provision of compulsory military conscription in the draft constitution presented by the Committee on Preservation of National Interest was deemed infeasible and rejected by a majority of participants. Participants had mixed reactions regarding the ongoing debate over Nepal’s form of governance. Whether a parliamentary or presidential system of government is decided upon, the group insisted that there needs to be a system of checks and balance to ensure accountability to the people.
These perceptions highlight the sharp disconnect between the voices and perceptions of the youth and the current views dominating the CA discussions. The drafts on Federal restructuring of Nepal presented by all political parties have components of federalism based on an ethnic composition model. The largest party, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), has even proposed that the leadership of each federal district be taken by a particular ethnic group. This has been widely debated, as Nepal has 103 ethnic groups and 93 languages with no clear majority of any one ethnic group. While most political parties have voted entirely for, or for components of ethnicity-based federalism, the young people at the town hall meetings said that the federal lines should be delineated on the basis of geographical and economic strengths rather than ethnicity-based federal delineation. Such disagreements around fundamental issues of the constitution between the majority-young citizens and the older generation who dominate the social and political life in Nepal pose a threat to the legitimacy and ownership of the upcoming constitution in times ahead.
The youth engagement and involvement in the town hall meetings was encouraging and seemed to help bring these young people into the constitutional debates. Such anecdotal opinions that we gathered at the meetings will also shed light on how to further involve youth in the peace process and, more specifically, in constitutional debates. And, as the fate of Nepal’s constitution draws near, 60 percent of the nation’s citizens will be waiting to see if policy-makers have considered their opinions in the final constitution. If so, this will have paved a way to engage Nepal’s youth for the future; if not, we risk repeating our history of leaving out our young people yet again.

Youth Activism: Digital Natives with A Cause

by Maesy Angelina in Digital Natives — Jul 30, 2010 01:40 PM

Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

The last decade has witnessed an escalating interest among academics, policy makers, and other practitioners on the intersection between youth, activism, and the new media technologies, which resulted in two narratives: one of doubt and the other of hope. The ‘hope’ narrative hinges on the new plethora of avenues for activism at the young people’s disposal and the bulge of the population, stating that the contemporary forms of youth activism represent new ways of conceiving and doing activism in the present and the future (see, for example, UN DESA, 2005). The ‘doubt’ narrative, on the other hand, questions to what extent the digital activism can contribute to broader social change (Collin, 2008) and some proponents of this view even call it ‘slacktivism’, stating that online activism is only effective if accompanied with real life activism (Morozov, 2009).

Before assessing the potentials of youth’s digital activism to contribute to social change, it is imperative to first gain a comprehensive understanding about this emerging form of activism. A brief review of existing literatures on the topic found that most of the analyses are centred on three perspectives, each with its own approach, strengths, and weaknesses: the technology centered, the new social movements centered, and the youth centered perspectives.

The technology centered perspective places a great emphasis on the instrumental role of the internet and new media (see, for instance, Kassimir, 2005; Shirkey, 2007; Brooks and Hodkinson, 2008). It discusses how internet savvy young people are able to exercise their activism differently, because the technology can remove obstacles to organizing, provide a new platform for visibility and make transnational networking easier. In this perspective, internet and new media technology is seen as an enabling tool and the web is viewed as a new space to promote activism. However, this perspective mainly stipulates that there is already a formulaic form of activism that can be transferred from the actual, physical sphere to the virtual arena; it does not consider that the changes caused by the way the youth are using technologies in their daily lives may also create new meanings and forms of activism. This perspective is the most dominant in literatures on the topic, being the lens used by the pioneering studies on youth, internet, and activism.

The new social movements centered perspective goes beyond that and looks at how new meanings and forms of politics and activism are created as the result of the way people are using new media technologies and the internet. This perspective is leading the recently emerging literature on the topic and emphasizes on the trend of being concerned on issues related to everyday democracy and the favour towards self organized, autonomous, horizontal networks (for examples, see Bennett, 2003; Martin, 2004; Collin, 2008). However, this perspective treats young people merely as ‘vessels’ of the new activism and neglect to examine how their lives have been shaped by the use of new media technologies and the internet.

The youth centered perspective, represented for example by Juris and Pleyers (2009), acknowledges that ICTs have always been part of young people’s lives and that it intersects with other factors in shaping how they conceive politics and activism. Most of the studies in this perspective were done with youth activists in existing transnational social justice movements, such as the global anti-capitalism or environmental movements. Nevertheless, this perspective mainly views youth activists as ‘becomings’ by defining them as the younger layer of actors in a multi-generational group that will be future leaders of the movement. There are very few researches on autonomous youth movements that are created and consist of young people themselves and look at the youth as political actors in its own right. In addition, the majority of studies also focused on the youth as individuals but not as a collective force.

In addition to the shortcomings of each perspective, there are also common gaps in the current broader body of knowledge on the intersection of youth, new media technologies, and activism.

Firstly, existing researches tend to define activism as concrete actions, such as protests and campaigns, and the values represented by such actions. It neglects other elements that constitute activism together with the actions and values, such as the issue taken up by the action, the ideologies underlying the formulation of action, and the actors behind the activism (Sherrod, 2005; Kassimir, 2005). Divorcing these elements from the analysis gave only a partial view of what youth digital activism is.

Secondly, the majority of studies zoomed into the novelty of new media technologies and how they are being used as a point of departure to investigate the topic. This arguably stems from an adult-centric, pre-digital point of view, which overlooks the fact that internet and new media has always been ‘technology’ for most young people just as how the radio and television have always been ‘technology’ for the previous generation (Shah and Abraham, 2009). This way of thinking divorces the ‘digital’ from the ‘activism’ in digital activism; consequently, it ignores all the other factors that are causing and shaping youth activism and fails to capture how youth actors themselves are viewing or giving meaning to this digital activism.

Finally, researches on the issue skew excessively on developed countries. It must be acknowledged that the ‘digital divide’, or the unequal access to and familiarity with technology based on gender, class, caste, education, economic status or geographical location, in developing countries is deeper and that the digitally active youth are a privileged minority. Yet, a neglect to understand their activism also means a failure to understand why and how the elite who are often perceived to be politically apathetic are engaging with their community to create social change.

The weaknesses identified above demonstrate that our understanding on this particular form of contemporary youth activism is currently obscured. Hence, the two narratives of ‘hope’ and ‘doubt’ lose their relevance given that the subject of assessment, the digital youth activism, is not even clearly understood.

Based on the above overview of the limitations, it is imperative to find a new way to approach to understand the phenomenon of digital youth activism. I will explore the possibilities of such an approach with the following arguments as the starting point.
Firstly, I argue that the key limitation lies on the adult-centric perspective in viewing youth’s engagement with new media technologies, thus what is essential is to go beyond the ‘digital’ and focus on the ‘activism’ part of youth digital activism. Secondly, I argue that exploration of the issue from the standpoint of the youth political actors themselves is crucial to counter the adult-centric perspective dominating the literatures on this topic. Thirdly, since so many researches divorce the youth from the context of their activism, it is crucial to focus on a particular case study to a tease out the nuances of youth digital activism.
I have the opportunity to explore the approach through a study with The Blank Noise Project, an initiative to address the problem of street sexual harassment in public spaces that originated in 2003 in Bangalore. It has since expanded into nine cities in India with over 2,000 volunteers, all young people between 17-30 years of age. Known for their unique public art street interventions as well as their savvy online presence, The Blank Noise Project was also chosen because its growth and sustainability over the past seven years are a testament to its legitimacy and relevance for youth in India.  
The research does not aim to assess the contribution of The Blank Noise Project to social change nor does it claim to represent all forms of youth digital activism in India. Rather, it aims to offer insights on one of the forms of digital natives joining forces for a cause. The research is interested in the following questions: how do young people involved in the Blank Noise articulate their politics? Who are their audience? What are their strategies? What is their conception of the public sphere? How do they organize themselves? How do they represent themselves to others? How do they see and give meaning to their involvement with the Blank Noise? How can we make sense of their initiative? While ‘activism’ is the popular term that is also used in this research, is their initiative a form of activism or is it something else altogether? More importantly, how do these young people define it by themselves? For the next few months, I will share stories, questions, and reflections that emerge along my journey of exploring those questions with The Blank Noise Project on the CIS blog.  

India at 63: Indian Youth

Youth Perspectives: Local Students Dance for Charity

What started off as a simple suggestion has inspired two girls to establish a Summer Dance Camp for charity. Led by upcoming senior Anika Nayyar and upcoming sophomore Kiren Singh from Foothill High School, the girls are providing Bhangra dance classes free of charge.

The two does accept donations from their students to go towards two charity foundations: Amar Jyoti School and Asha Kiran School, which both aid handicapped and underprivileged children in India.

Both Nayyer and Singh are established competitive and professional dancers.

Nayyar was inspired to create the camp when a parent of one of her previous students requested her to continue teaching Bhangra over the summer. She had dedicated her time in spring to train a local Bhangra team named Virsa Punjab in which the students were 7 to 11 years old.

Bhangra is a traditional Punjabi dance from northern India, and has recently grown very popular among high school students. An estimated 80 students were involved in Bhangra teams this past school year, around 60 at Foothill and 20 at Amador.

"I want to spread more awareness of my culture and of Bhangra," Nayyar said. "Most people just get to watch it or hear the music, but not a lot of people get the opportunity to learn it. I just want others to experience the same joy that I feel when I dance."

Although Nayyar had initially planned to teach children, her method of social media marketing attracted more teenage students. For now, they have five persistent students who show up to each practice.

Nayyar was also motivated to teach after volunteering at the Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust in India last winter. There, she found the opportunity to provide a dance instruction to some of the handicapped students.

"I was amazed at what they can do," she states, "interacting with those kids definitely changed me."

She decided to incorporate the charity into the summer dance camp idea. After informing her good friend, Singh, about the program, the two joined forces and Singh asked that Asha Kiran School be included to the cause.

The Asha Kiran School guides mentally challenged and hearing impaired children to live independently.

"I've worked with mentally challenged children through Special Olympics in the US too," Singh said. "So it made sense to support Asha Kiran because volunteering there made me really happy and I felt good that I was helping these children, who were so welcoming and warm."

Along with the satisfaction of knowing that they're participating for a good cause, students such as Nehal Tenany and Alina Nazar were attracted to join the camp so that they can "expand their dance horizon," as Tenany explains it.

Practices are usually one hour long, but they may run over by 15 to 20 minutes over. Everyone has to learn the routine. They begin by learning the footwork, followed by the hand movements. After putting it all together with the beat, the students practice a few times with the music, and the rest is repetition.

Along with Bhangra, Nayyar and Singh will also teach Giddah, Bollywood, Hip-hop, and Jazz, teaching a new dance style each week. The camp lasts seven weeks and began in July 11.

Practices are every Saturdays at noon at 310 Brianne Court and students of all ages are welcomed.

For more information, contact anikanayyar@gmail.com or kirensingh@gmail.com