Disabled Human Rights?: A critical study of the implementation of disability rights in a globalized Nepal.

Abstract

This thesis scrutinizes the governance of the implementation of disability rights in Nepal in the realm of neo-liberal globalization, and the different power positions that are produced during the process. Within Western academia the situation for persons with disabilities in the Global South is ignored to a great extent, and the case of the Nepalese disability movement is totally absent. A field of knowledge that this thesis intends to contribute to. The governance process of the implementation of disability rights in Nepal will be examined in the light of the expansion of neo-liberal governance and the human rights discourse in the Global South. The thesis is based on a theoretical framework that incorporates neo-liberal critique of global governance together with a post-structural theorization of the State. This allows the thesis not only to examine the transnational governance process of disability rights, but it also probes the position of the Nepalese state in a globalized world. Additionally, the impact of the human rights discourse on the implementation process is reviewed, which is analyzed as an actor through Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power. In the implementation process, the various actors’ power positions are taken under consideration and what political subjectivities that are produced in the process. I argue that a neo-liberal society has emerged in Nepal as an effect of the globalization of governance, and that the human rights discourse is replacing the function of the Nepalese state.