In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

As the May 28 deadline for Nepal’s Constituent Assembly looms, threatening to postpone the drafting of the nation’s new constitution again, three Asia Foundation consultants and reconciliation experts with Notre Dame University’s Kroc Institute for Peace Studies, look to the experiences of peace processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Mozambique, Cambodia, and beyond for lessons that could inform Nepal’s own process. Each piece takes one of three critical, unresolved issues:  Integration of Maoist ex-combatants, power sharing, and constitution drafting, and compares how related issues were handled in other countries. The authors, professors at Notre Dame, John Paul Lederach, John Darby, and Madhav Joshi, established the Peace Accords Matrix to provide reliable and comparable online data on about 30 recent peace accords and have used comparative insights from the Matrix in supporting the Nepal Transition to Peace (NTTP) Forum, a Track 1.5 dialogue process supported by The Asia Foundation since 2009. The articles first appeared in Republica, an English-language daily published in Nepal.