Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the changing role of youth in Nepali Maoism following their transformation from a guerrilla army to a parliamentary party after 2006. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how the category of youth gained renewed relevance after the war and allowed the Maoist movement to sidestep complicated issues of class in the urban fabric. Building on a Gramscian framework of subaltern politics and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism’, I argue that youth in the post-revolutionary context have become aligned with the political project of building ‘New Nepal’ and that this allows youth, as both a category and a subject position, to emerge as tools for utopian communist politics. Through an analysis of a divided class landscape in Kathmandu, the article documents the new and difficult alignments between Maoist ideals and positions of youth in the city with lasting outcomes for the party’s revolutionary project.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth mobilisation
• class identities
• revolutionary subjectivities
• Maoist politics
• Nepal
• war–peace transitions

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was supported by the Danish Research Council. The PhD research upon which this article builds has benefitted from the collective research project “Violent Organization of Political Youth,” hosted at Dignity and the Department of Anthropology, Copenhagen University, and directed by professors Henrik Erdam Vigh and Steffen Bo Jensen. I wish to thank Oscar Salemink for encouraging me to publish and supporting with patient and constructive feedback. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of Identities whose comments have greatly helped in sharpening the arguments presented in the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council: [Grant Number ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP].