This review article provides a reading guide to scholarly literature published in English about Nepal's political transformation since 2006, when Nepal's decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces formally ended. The article is structured around four major themes: (1) the Maoist insurgency or ‘People's War’; (2) state formation and transformation; (3) identity politics; and (4) territorial and ecological consciousness. We also address the dynamics of migration and mobility in relation to all of these themes. Ultimately, we consider the Maoist movement as one element in a much broader process of transformation, which with the benefit of hindsight we can situate in relation to several other contemporaneous trajectories, including: democratization, identity-based mobilization, constitutional nationalism, international intervention, territorial restructuring, migration and the remittance economy, and the emergence of ecological and other new forms of consciousness. By looking across the disciplines at scholarship published on all of these themes, we aim to connect the dots between long-standing disciplinary traditions of scholarship on Nepal and more recent approaches to understanding the country's transformation.

This article analyzes the discourse of contemporary Hindu nationalism in Nepal. Based on Hindu nationalist speeches and writings distributed between 2014 and 2015, this article demonstrates and explains the Nepali Hindu nationalist narrative that characterizes secularism as the product of a foreign conspiracy enacted in order to facilitate Christian conversion in Nepal. The article further illustrates how Hindu nationalist discourse suggests that imperial motivations lie behind the conspiracy. Four factors are crucial to understanding the emergence and valence of this narrative: 1) the historical relationship between the state and Hinduism in Nepal; 2) the pervasive sense that foreigners regularly interfere in Nepal's domestic politics; 3) the growth of Christianity in Nepal and its increasing visibility; and 4) a pre‐existing association between secularism and Christianity in Nepal's nationalist discourse.

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