English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

The Remake of a Stateinstitutions of governance (Heathershaw 2008). It could be noted thatduring the April Movement of 2006, when the then king Gyanendra madea proclamation to limit himself as a constitutional monarch, it was Indiawhich immediately sent its formal recognition of Gyanendra's politicalstep. But the movement further aggravated the next day despite India'ssupport to the king and the king had to step back from his earlier stance.Ultimately, he was dethroned.Despite lacking the classical criteria of sovereignty, elites in these placesseek international recognition and aid in order to bolster their particularfaction. These 'tactics of government' are less about strategically buildingtowards the idealised endpoint of statehood, but more about the day-todaypolitics of making space for survival and consolidation of the regime(ibid).A UN report notes, "We are in an era where dozens of states are understress or recovering from conflict, there is a clear international obligationto assist states in developing their capacity to perform their sovereignfunctions effectively and responsibly' (The UN 2004, p 83). Heathershaw(2008) claims that this is also taken as highly interventionist approach.Beck (2005) mentions about the notion of 'militaristic humanitarianism'.This relates to the doctrine that war is engineered in order for peace tobe built. Many liberal commentators have come to the defence of such'humanitarianism'. Michael Ignatieff, for example, argues that imperialismdoes not stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect.Nations sometimes fail, and when they - the imperial power - do outsidehelp, they can get the nations back on their feet. State building is thusthe kind of imperialism you get in a human rights era, a time when greatpowers believe simultaneously in the right of small nations to governthemselves and their own right to rule the world (Ignatieff 2002).Such order of discourses, where military-led state building comes to beportrayed as humanitarian, and humanitarianism as necessarily requiringmilitary intervention, should raise questions about the very object ofintervention itself: the sovereign state. In the direct international militaryinterventions such as in Afghanistan and Iraq and their 'nation-building'fiasco, 'state building' lives on but is as far from realising its ideal of thesovereign state. Post-conflict reconstruction is not any benign and neutralactivity, but a highly political endeavour. Rubin (2006, p 184) neatlyargues that 'studies of state-building operations' often try to identify 'bestpractices' without asking for whom they are the 'best'.5