Protesting Women in the People’s War Movement in Nepal

Like many revolutionary movements, Nepal’s Maoist People’s War (1996–2006) produced heterogeneous and contradictory effects in society and polity, and a definitive analysis may take decades. The long-brewing protest movement officially started with the United People’s Front’s forty-point set of demands made to the government in February of 1996 and swiftly became an insurgent movement, sweeping the nation into a full-fledged armed conflict. When Nepal’s government and the Communist Party of Nepal–Maoist (or CPN-M) signed the Comprehensive Peace Accord in November of 2006, more than thirteen thousand people had died, hundreds of disappearances were unsolved, and thousands were displaced from their homes. In my research, I argue that three key processes—militarism/militancy, displacement, and altered gender dynamics—ensued, each affecting the others and opening up moments of empowerment, agency, and transformation alongside periods of violence, chaos, and despair. In this symposium, however, I discuss the centrality of gender and women’s gendered bodies to forwarding the People’s War by the CPN-M and briefly examine the war’s intended and unintended outcomes for women.