Foreign assistance and its impact on civil-military relations: a case study of federal democratic Republic of Nepal

• Main Author: Chand, Bobby
• Other Authors: Chatterjee, Anshu N.
• Published: Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School 2014
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/41357

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. === As Nepal went through a sea of political changes since 1990, civil-military relations (CMR) also came into the limelight. Nepal's democratic CMR can be understood best by dividing it into two distinct time periods, from 1990 to 2005 and from 2006 to 2012. The first period illustrates Nepal's practice of multiparty democracy with a constitutional monarchy, and the second period represents the transition into a republic with a multiparty democracy. In both periods, despite constitutional provisions to bring the Nepalese Army under civilian control, the military has prevailed over the civilian government whenever there was friction in civil-military relations. In addition to the domestic interplay, the divergent foreign assistance'guided mainly by the donor's geo-strategic and political interests'has complicated Nepal's civil-military relations. Given Nepal's geo-strategic location, it receives significant amounts of foreign assistance from both its neighbors India and China, and from the world superpower, the U.S. While foreign assistance benefits many programs in Nepal, it can also affect the dynamics of CMR as various political parties and the military have long-established relations with these external powers. This research studies the impact of foreign assistance on the CMR by analyzing various types of assistance provided by India, China, and U.S., and their motives behind rendering the assistance.