Literature on household headship has, by and large, tended to homogenize female-headed households (FHHs). We present a mixed methods approach to disaggregating the experiences of female-headed households (FHHs) in the post-conflict period in Nepal. One of four households in Nepal is estimated to be female-headed, either as a result of conflict-related male deaths (de jure, or widow heads) or due to male out-migration (de facto, or wives of migrants). We examine similarities and differences in the work responsibilities and labor market participation of de jure and de facto female heads using quantitative data from the Nepal Living Standards Surveys (NLSS) and qualitative data collected through fieldwork in Nepal. While both types of households share some similar concerns, de jure and de facto female heads face different challenges in negotiating their everyday household and labor market roles. Findings inform policy interventions that can be specifically targeted toward each type of household.
Critiques of liberal, top-down approaches to peacebuilding have motivated a discussion of alternative, locally-led, and community-based approaches to achieving and maintaining sustainable peace. This article uses a case study of women's savings and credit cooperatives in post-violence Nepal to examine the ways in which grassroots-based, locally-led peace initiatives can counter top-down approaches. The article presents ethnographic evidence from fieldwork in Nepal on how cooperatives expand through their everyday activities the definition of peace to include not only the absence of violence (negative peace) but transformatory goals such as social justice (positive peace). By focusing on ongoing root causes of structural violence, cooperatives problematize the postconflict period where pre-war normalcy is presumed to have returned. They emphasize local agency and ownership over formal peace processes. The findings suggest ongoing struggles that cooperatives face due to their existence within larger, liberal paradigms of international postconflict aid and reconstruction assistance. Their uneasy relationship with liberal economic structures limit their scale and scope of effectiveness even as they provide local alternatives for peacebuilding.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.