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

The Remake of a Statedomestic politics (for example, Nigeria). Each of these three types of casesrequires specific kinds of strategies for democracy promotion.Internationally, contradictions and duality have been dealt with twoapproaches, one relates to culture and the other to the communicativecontext in which they occur. According to the culturalist approach, theway we deal with contradictions and duality can be markedly affected byculture, so that people from cultural environments with different socialpractices are more or less inclined to accept contradictions. In particular,this approach predicts that Easterners are more likely to search for acompromise between two conflicting view-points than Westerners, whotend to follow a logical principle of non-contradiction. In contrast, theevolutionary approach considers that when contradiction occurs in acommunicative context, universal mechanisms designed to deal with theproblem of managing deceptive information go into effect and lead to thetendency of giving more weight to one’s own belief than to the other’sconflicting view (Van der Henst et al. 2006).3. State building challengesDealing with contradictions and duality becomes a vital part of post-conflictstate building process particularly in cases of violent armed conflictsfollowed by difficult and fragile peace processes. Post-conflict challengesare deeper than the war itself as post-conflict states are vulnerable to arange of old and new forms of violence. Feudalistic distribution of land, itsownership patterns and land administration systems in place by the statein favour of ruling elites have been the means of claiming control overpeople and maintain political power. This has been the historical causeof conflicts fueling the larger conflict in the country. Using the existingconflicts, Maoists backed the landless peasants to capture the land fromlandlords, politicians and bureaucrats during the armed conflict. This hasbecome a new form of violence and contradiction during the post-conflictperiod. Increasing militarisation of youths owing to Maoists experienceof becoming powerful political force in relatively short period of time,rising identity-based politics, mushrooming of armed groups in Terai foreconomic benefits and general acceptance of violence as a legitimateform of political force have caused the state to experience new formsof violence. Growth of urban violence rates resulting from weak law andorder situation are other forms of violence facing the state in transition.Some specific chapters in this same book have dealt with the mentionedissues. In a nut-shell, one can firmly say that the post-conflict Nepal is289