Nepal is a small beautiful country situated in South Asia, land locked by China in north and India in south, east and west. It is the youngest republic country in the world. The popular movement of 1990 issued a new constitution ensuring the sovereignty of the people, constitutional monarchy and multi-party elections held in 1991 to elect a truly democratic government under a constitutional monarchy. Under this system Nepal faced political instability by the frequent change of government, at the mean time Maoist insurgency started which destroyed Nepal’s overall internal security system.
After the Royal massacre Gyanendra Shah became the King and he started to rule country autocratically avoiding the political parties, which created unified revolution by the CPN Maoist and other leading parties in 2006. The success of popular movement of April 2006 brought the decade-long insurgency to an end. After election of the new constitutional assembly, the first meeting of the Constitutional Assembly historically declared Nepal as Federal Democratic Republic in May 28, 2008.The process of making new constitution under federal republic political system is going on and so Nepal is now in political transitional phase. Nepal is moving gradually towards a post-conflict environment, but it does so from a structural, cultural and social foundation of deep inequities. Although 31% of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line, the distribution of poverty among social groups is unequal.
For example, few amongst the Brahmin/Chetri and Newar groups live in poverty while poverty levels amongst Dalits and Hill Janajati’s and Muslims range from 41% to 48% (DFID and World Bank 2006: 17-20).With unequal access to resources and unequal distribution of land, women are most noticeably disadvantaged. Only 11 % of women have any land ownership; 72 % of women versus 48 % of men work in agriculture; and 60% of women work as unpaid family laborers (DFID and World Bank 2006: 24-25). A decade of war, the effects of weapons and sustained conflict have increased trauma and violence and reduced trust among Nepalese. This is a crucial time to promote a process of inclusive decision making at all levels and peace building as a means of moving into reconciliation.
The People’s Movement of April 2006 has provided a unique opening to stabilize gains made in the democracy movement and to approach the causes of conflict. It provides the impetus to visibly acknowledge and address discrimination, poverty,depleted natural resources and corruption – to provide people at the local level with assurances that change is afoot. The challenge for government and civil society will be to implement necessary reforms in the context of Nepal’s hierarchical society.Peace-building is marked by challenges at every step and Nepal is no exception to the rule. The signing of the CPA on 21 November 2006 set the peace process framework in Nepal and laid out an ambitious transformational agenda on equity, inclusion, accountability, good governance and restructuring of the state. This was in itself a big initial step paving the way towards a long process of addressing the root causes of conflict and the building of sustainable peace.
The peace process has achieved a great deal in the 7 years since the signing of the CPA.Some of the key achievements includes: the promulgation of the Interim Constitution (2007), the management of Maoist army personnel in cantonments, the conduct of free and fair elections to the Constituent Assembly (CA) in 2008. Others are either ongoing or not initiated yet and these include the drafting and adoption of a new constitution, the establishment of transitional justice commissions (TRC, COI-D). Countries affected by conflict have attracted widespread economic assistance and policy advice from the international donor community to support their recovery from war and rebuild their institutional capacities.
Bilateral and multilateral donors have pledged substantial funds for the immediate post-conflict reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1994), Kosovo (1999), East Timor (1999), Afghanistan (2002), Iraq (2003), and Georgia (2008), to name a few countries. Both scholars and practitioners have noted that successful reconstruction is key to preventing the re-emergence of conflicts in these regions. In 1997, the World Bank established its Post-Conflict Fund (now the Fragile and Conflict Affected Countries Program) to be able to respond more quickly and support effectively the immediate needs of post-conflict countries.Nevertheless, Collier and Hoeffler (2004) argue that due to the highly politicized nature of post-conflict situations, there has been considerable variation in donor response. Thereby not all countries affected by conflicts have attracted the attention of the donor community. In the past few years there has been increasing donor concern with engagement in Nepal; the intended or unintended impact of development or governance assistance on the very dynamics of the conflict.
Most of the international development actors operating in Nepal have conducted their own conflict analyses.While they’ve primarily focused on the implications for continued development assistance the studies provide descriptive overviews of the trajectory of the conflict and the roles of the actors as well as analysis of the root causes of the conflict. The broad conclusion is that economic deprivation and inequality have at least an indirect link to the conflict and that further efforts to promote development are warranted both to ameliorate the effects of the conflict and tackle the causes.There is, however, also recognition that providing development assistance in itself does not necessarily contribute towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict and that any efforts need to be assessed on their individual merits. Aid effectiveness and improving the impact of aid, particularly in fragile and conflict- affected states, has become a central policy issue for many bilateral donors and international organisations in the recent past, as these nations and agencies expend more resources in overseas development aid.Financial analysis reveals that overall aid levels have increased since 2000 and that fragile and conflict-affected states receive substantial amounts of this increased aid (Chapman and Vaillant, 2010).
The United Kingdom has contributed a large portion of the increased levels of development aid—in 2011, British Official Development Assistance (ODA) reached GBP ? 8. 70 billion (USD $14. 015 billion), the highest level of UK ODA to date and more than double the 2001 ODA levels (DFID, 2011). This study will develops and discusses a new analytical framework to understand the effectiveness of International aids in peace building process.In theory and practice, there is a wide variety of ways to categorize International aids contributions to development and peace building.
Donors tend to employ actor oriented perspectives, focusing on supporting activities of different types of civil society organizations in a given situation. I will examine the role played by the donor community in the process of post-conflict recovery. My goal will be to revisit the existing evidence about aid and growth in post-conflict contexts and Particular focus will be given to the timeframe of aid and growth recovery during the post-conflict decade.Thus this study aims to provide an overview of the concept of international aids, its history and understanding in different contexts. It will elaborate an analytical framework of International aids functions derived from international regime theory, development discourse and case study knowledge, which in turn will be applied to the context of peace building.
Peace building theory and practice is analyzed in terms of its international organizations functions and their validity, scope and content.The field of peacebuilding is relatively new, and, as such, has a limited amount of accumulated knowledge of what makes for effective peacebuilding, and under what conditions. In particular, there is little documented learning to help build a body of knowledge in this field. Similarly the concept of peace building will be studies in detail.
Peace building theory and practice will be analyzed in terms of international understanding. Some of the case studies in peace building practices in Nepal, Rwanda and other countries will be analysed for validity of the knowledge. The proposed study will be basically focused on four methodological steps.The first step, a review of literature pertaining to international aids, peace building and the interactions between the two will be conducted then at the second step the analytical framework will be developed to help understand international roles in peace building through functional, institutional and enabling environment perspectives. The third step will examine a set of case examples, which illustrate the core roles of international organizations in peace building and, in addition, will identify further lines of intervention.
The fourth step will develop key conclusions and recommendations.
