Abstract
South Asia is the sub-Himalayan southern region of the Asian continent, comprising eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. South Asia has a population of about 1.6 billion, which is characterized by significant cultural divergences between and within the states. An estimated 2,000 ethnic groups, at least six ethnic-linguistic families and several major faiths make South Asia one of the most diverse regions on earth. The states and societies in this vast region face challenges on several fronts. The major challenge is to achieve the social and political stability that is needed to enable their progress towards increased human development. Several factors, however, make the prospects of progress daunting. The rise in the region’s population is a key challenge. A large part of the population in South Asia lives in abject poverty.
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Notes
UNDP, Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2013, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/14/hdr2013_en_complete.pdf, accessed 21 June 2014.
T. V. Paul, The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World.
Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191; John Paul Lederach, Building Peace — Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Research, 1997).
UNDP, Human Development Report 2013.
Patrick Heller, ‘Social Capital as a Product of Class Mobilization and State Intervention: Industrial Workers in Kerala, India’, World Development 24, no. 6 (1996): 1055–1067; Ashok Swain, Struggle against the State (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013).
Interviews conducted in Nepal in September 2013 by Florian Krampe.
Ibid.
Ramachandra Guha, ‘Adivasis, Naxalites and Indian Democracy’, Economic and Political Weekly no. 11 (2007): 3305–3312.
Swain, Struggle against the State.
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John Whelpton, A History of Nepal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 202.
Richmond describes this as a post-liberal peace. Oliver Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
Arend Lijphart, ‘The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation’, The American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1 June 1996): 258–268.
For an explicit and complete rejection of the consociational theory with regard to India, see Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 342–343.
Kanti Bajpai, ‘Diversity, Democracy and Devolution in India’, in Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific, eds Michael Edward Brown and Sumit Ganguly (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 33–83.
Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Politics, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: Ecco, 2007), 4.
Swain, Struggle against the State; Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.
David Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Florian Krampe, ‘The Liberal Trap — Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan after 9/11’, in Mediation and Liberal Peacebuilding. Peace from the Ashes of War? eds Mikael Eriksson and Roland Kostić (London: Routledge, 2013), 57–75; Eriksson and Kostić, Mediation and Liberal Peacebuilding.
Krampe, ‘The Liberal Trap — Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan after 9/11’, 72.
Ibid., 73.
Lok Raj Baral, Nepal — Nation-State in the Wilderness (New Delhi: Sage Publications Pvt. Limited, 2012).
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Florian Krampe, Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State legitimacy in Peacebuilding in Nepal. Conflict, Security, and Development 16, no 1 (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2016.1136138.
Denskus, ‘The Fragility of Peacebuilding in Nepal’, 54.
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Krampe, ‘Empowering Peace: Service Provision and State legitimacy in Peacebuilding in Nepal’.
See Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
James C. Hathaway, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 82.
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© 2016 Florian Krampe and Ashok Swain
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Krampe, F., Swain, A. (2016). Human Development and Minority Empowerment: Exploring Regional Perspectives on Peace in South Asia. In: Richmond, O.P., Pogodda, S., Ramović, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40761-0_28
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