Navigating Civil War through Youth Migration, Education, and Family Separation

Abstract

Why did youth move from their trans-Himalayan villages at very young ages to attend school with the risk of prolonged family separation? An in-depth study of youth from rural trans-Himalayan villages who travelled to Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, to live and study at a (free) boarding school, funded by both national and international donors, provides a starting point to address this question. The “People’s War” from 1996 to 2006 in Nepal contextualizes the study, given that the Maoist insurgency in the Himalayan hinterland aimed to recruit youth to the rebel cause. The study of youth from the trans-Himalayan region living at the boarding school as students was conducted between April and July 2014 in Kathmandu. The youth arrived at the school between the ages of four and ten years, and did not see their families for several years after their arrival, given the significant distances between their villages and the associated costs of travel. Drawing on scholarship in children’s geographies, the narratives of these youth are employed to underscore their agency in these biographies of migration and better understand these difficult separations during political uncertainty and civil war.

Advancing children’s geographies through ‘grey areas’ of age and childhood

“…The circulation of ‘ideal childhood’ models across the globe, fails to recognize that children and youth are categories conceptualized and constructed differently across time, space, and cultures between the Global South and North or even within a country or region itself. For example, Weller (2006) explores how the western construct, teenager, in the 1950’s (p. 99) was imported into parts of South Asia through various forms of media, which remains a contested transitioning category between childhood and adulthood to date, particularly for rural and remote communities (Khan & Hyndman 2015, p. 99). Other shifts towards addressing age‐based research globally can reveal how global (re)structuring impacts social constructions such as childhood.…”

“…Furthermore, social age expands on grey areas of age from indigenous world view of children in both western and non‐western life course approaches. This advances grey areas of age‐based transitions through generational positioning since, in many cultures, people do not know or have records of their age like participants in Clark‐Kazak’s study with the Democratic Republic of Congo refugees residing in Kyaka II refugee settlement in Western Uganda (p. 4) and Khan & Hyndman, 2015 and Khan, 2021 who traces complicated configurations of education‐work life course transitions of young rural migrants without any documents to confirm their age and citizenship throughout Nepal.…”

Connecting Crises: Young People in Nepal Reflecting on Life Course Transitions and Trajectories during Times of Uncertainty

“…This is important for children and young people who may not know their age due to factors such as identity documents being destroyed, lost, or never applied for during crises, as was the case for many of the participants in this study. For example, refer to Khan (2021b) for a discussion on how life course theory can better inform transitions of young people in global minority contexts when the social variable of age is problematized and approached from an interdisciplinary perspective and see (Khan 2021a;Khan and Chakraborty, forthcoming;Khan and Hyndman 2015) for examples of participants in displaced migration contexts without identity documents in Nepal. Furthermore, what the paper will elaborate on is, how LCT assists with navigating life course transitions and trajectories through young people's emotions, memories, and experiences with multiple crises, which allow them to create a landscape of resilience, which is explored in-depth by prioritizing the articulations of young Nepalese participants themselves in this study.…”

“…A child protection approach should also recognise a child's ability to participate in decisions about themselves" (Adhikari and Turton 2020, p. 394). From recognizing the involvement and/or articulations of children and young people in Nepal extends to other contexts such as navigating challenges children face with livelihood transitions when living on the street (Van Beers 1996; Sharma 2020); precarious and hazardous child and youth labour situations (Daly et al 2020a;Kamei 2018); past challenges with avoiding being recruited as child soldiers and/or navigating life course(s) after being recruited as child soldiers during the Civil War (Khan and Hyndman 2015;Medeiros et al 2020); managing post-traumatic stress after the earthquake (Acharya et al 2018;Sharma et al 2021) and more recently, life course transitions and trajectories uncertainties caused due to the COVID-19 crisis (Chalise 2020;Daly et al 2021;Khati and Bhatta 2020).…”

“…Nevertheless, from the start of the Civil War, there was, "plenty of violence in the form of mass strikes, riots, kidnappings, blockades, and terrorist bombings. Gradually, the Maoist insurgents dominated the rural regions of Nepal," (Pivovarova and Swee 2015, p. 209) in which a prime location for recruitment by the Maoist was the trans-Himalayan regions as they were geographically far away from centralized regions such as Kathmandu (Khan 2021a;Khan and Hyndman 2015).…”