This volume of essays comes at a most opportune time, as the Maoist insurgency in Nepal has come to an official and unexpectedly successful end, a success that occurred, broadly speaking, in two historical moments. First, ten years after the February 1996 submission to the prime minister of a forty-point demand by the recently unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, or CPN(M), a demand whose rejection spurred the beginning of the Maoist People's War and a second popular “people's movement” in April 2006, King Gyanendra allowed for free elections and for the redrawing of the national constitution; this process ultimately brought down the 240-year-old Shah dynasty. Second, when these elections finally took place in August 2008, it was the CPN(M) that the people elected to the prime ministership.
It is at this moment that The Maoist Insurgency steps in with the objective to “contextualize and explain the growth of a violent...
