Introduction
In the last 20 years, Nepal’s literacy rate has increased by over 30%, and the number of people earning their School Leaving Certificates has increased tenfold. Families across socioeconomic demographics have invested in their children’s education, in the hope that it will yield salaried work (Jagir), particularly in the government sector.
Educational attainment is viewed as the key to a more secure life. However, the upheaval caused by a decade of civil war, violent political movements, and more recently the political stagnation and uncertainty of the postwar transition has weakened the economy and local governance and undermined educated young people’s attempts at gainful employment. So what happens when young people are unable to secure stable positions? How do they make meaning of their education after they fail to realize the ends in which they initially invested? This chapter considers what political violence means for young people’s prospects. It examines the meanings young Nepalis give to their education as they struggle to structure their lives amid a grim employment environment exacerbated by civil strife and political upheaval. The level of precarity in their lives may not differ much from what their parents have experienced, but they make sense of their possibilities differently. These young people see themselves as capable of moving beyond the local sphere of agricultural work and wage labor to pursue entrepreneurial and professional paths both in Nepal and abroad. Education has imbued them with the confidence to change their own lives and communities for the better.Youth may have limited agency; nevertheless, they are embedded in webs of social relations that determine how politics operates (Kallio and Hakli 2011; Skelton 2010; Wells 2014). Thus understanding young people’s perspectives is central to understanding not only their own being and becoming but also the being and becoming of the nation.
In post-conflict settings, the stakes are even higher because of the transnational focus on nation-state rebuilding. Young people’s views and experiences are central to understanding “locally experienced instantiations” of post-conflict, which is necessary to move beyond the normative global frames of post-conflict and the resulting politico-legal mechanisms (Shneiderman and Snellinger 2014). Studying young people’s personal experiences and perspectives in post-conflict settings elucidates an important connection between micro-politics with macro-politics. What Chris Philo and Phoebe Smith (2003) saw as potentially problematic in analyzing children’s political geographies - balancing the micropolitics of the personal with the macro-politics of the public sphere - is the very thing that allows us to understand “how conflict both configures and is configured into the social fabric” (Shneiderman and Snellinger ibid.). This chapter examines the meanings young Nepalis give to their education as they struggle to structure their lives amid a grim employment environment in postwar Nepal. I suggest these young people’s educational distinction is political because it is connected to the concerns of their families, communities, and the nation (cf. Buckingham 2000).Post-conflict contexts engender a renegotiation of the rules of the game (Byrne and Klem 2014). The players renegotiating these rules are elite domestic and international actors who are trying to reestablish their authority in governing institutions at multiple levels. Power is a function and determinant of these negotiations (Ferguson 2006; Hagmann and Peclard 2010). Nevertheless, these elite players know this process does not occur in a vacuum but rather at the intersections of state and society and thus determines the future of state-society relations. And thus their orchestrations are in vain without public support. Nepal’s conflicts have underscored that youth are a key demographic in maintaining post-conflict stability because normative interventions, like schooling, meant to cultivate nationalist subjectivities did not stem revolt at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Many have documented that socioeconomic despair was a main push-pull factor for the youth who participated in the Maoist Civil War, the street protests in the Movement Against Regression, and the Madhesi Movements (De Schepper and Poudel 2010; Ghimire 2002; Kohrt et al. 2010; Snellinger 2013b). Politicians and policy makers have taken heed and made youth a priority in their post-conflict agenda (Snellinger 2013b, 2014). Interventions made by the National Youth Policy and Youth, Small Enterprise, and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF) loan scheme are intended to “harness and maximize the productivity” of young people for the nation as explained to me by the vice-chairman of the YSEF program. These lofty intentions, however, obscure “an economic liberalization agenda that links peace to capitalist development” (Koopman 2011, p. 194), an agenda that does little to fulfill the aspirations of the young people with whom I worked.This chapter relies on ethnographic research undertaken from April 2013 through April 2014 in Kathmandu and the southern district of Parsa that borders the Indian state of Bihar, which is part of a multi-country project in North India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal entitled, “Alchemists of the Revolution?: The politics ofunemployed educated youth” supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant# ES/J011444/1). In Kathmandu, I researched the drafting and institution of the National Youth Policy (NYP) and the creation of the Ministry of Youth and Sports (cf. Snellinger 2014) and a Finance Ministry national loan scheme called the Youth, Small Enterprise, and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF) (cf. Snellinger 2013b). I researched the YSEF program in a top-down and bottom-up manner by focusing on the program at the national level, district level, and village development committee (VDC) level, including interviewing local loan recipients in Parsa. I used this research as an entree to identify educated but unemployed young people in Birganj and three Parsa villages.
I interviewed 75 young people about their education and employment experiences, took life histories from a quarter of these individuals, and conducted a household survey of 2800 households on education, migration, and employment in the three villages in which I conducted research in collaboration with the Centre for the Studies of Labour and Mobility. The analysis used in this chapter is derived from the interviews, policy analysis, and survey data collected over this period.In this chapter, I demonstrate that the level of socioeconomic precarity in these young people’s lives may not differ much from what their parents have experienced, but yet they make sense of themselves and their possibilities differently The first section provides background on how education became a tool of national development in Nepal, which structured citizens’ aspirations vis-a-vis the state in particular ways. The second section outlines the historical context of civil war, political unrest, and postwar transition to establish the socioeconomic impact national turmoil has had on these young people’s lives. The third section analyzes the different meanings young people give to their education and how they square it with their families’ expectations. These young people see themselves as capable of moving beyond the local sphere of agricultural work and wage labor to pursue entrepreneurial and professional paths both in Nepal and abroad. Education has imbued them with the confidence to change their own lives and communities for the better. They draw distinctions between themselves and their less-educated peers, claiming that their education allows them to “speak” on behalf of others. The fourth section demonstrates how they frame their educational development within the context of the country’s and their community’s development. I conclude that their priority to reinvest in their families and communities through service reciprocates the initial investment that was made in them, and this ongoing exchange perpetuates the national development project.
My analysis demonstrates how individuals internalize the structural process of citizenship production in the era of mass education. The investment families make in education may not pay off in terms of anticipated employment outcomes. However, young people translate that investment into commitment to family and community, which ultimately scales up to the nation. I suggest this type of meaning making is key to maintaining stability in Nepal’s postwar transition. Nevertheless, it does not address the endemic socioeconomic issues that fueled Nepal’s civil war and upheaval in the first place.
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