Media reports suggest that there were a variety of causes of the unrest in Nepal, including economic and social discontent surrounding high youth unemployment, the heavy reliance on remittances, and the struggling Nepalese economy broadly. How important were these economic factors in motivating the Gen-Z Protests?

There’s a very short answer related to educational and employment opportunities. And then there is, of course, a very long one. Starting with the short answer, unemployment among people under the age of 26 is on the order of 20 percent. That 20 percent figure likely underestimates both unemployment and underemployment, since the economy is still heavily dependent on subsistence agriculture, which makes it difficult to measure unemployment.

Discontent is widespread, and there are two different kinds of discontent. One is based on the widespread fact that, among youth outside Kathmandu, unemployment is very high. In the community where David Holmberg and I worked, two-thirds of the men and boys between the ages of about 15 and 40 no longer live in the village to work. Of those two-thirds, half of them have migrated to Kathmandu for educational or employment opportunities, with very mixed success. The other half of them have already migrated out of the country, mostly to the Gulf, but really all over the world.  I think that we can safely say that close to 30% of rural youth from Nepal are working outside of the country.

It is also important to note that records of official money transfer services suggest that 30% of the national gross domestic product comes from remittances. In the community where I worked, however, although lots of people sent money home, nobody used official channels, which indicates that the actual impact of remittances on the Nepalese economy may be much greater. There were two other studies that have looked, with some granularity, to find out how much money is coming in and how much is going through official channels. They both found that up to 60, or even 65, percent was coming in unofficially, so you can see what a huge impact it would have. The most important underlying factor, in my opinion, motivating these protests was economic opportunity.

The first public protest that came to Western attention was the 1990 protest, which convinced the King to relinquish some of his powers, to allow multi-party elections, and to establish national standards for human rights. They included the right to assembly, right to speech, the right to legal press, and so on. That movement, which was a very broad-based popular movement across the country to limit the power of the monarchy, was ultimately hijacked by the political parties that had been operating in exile.

When these parties returned to Nepal in 1990, they transformed the popular demand, which was for more economic opportunity and for a diminishing of royal power, into a demand for a multi-party electoral system. The political parties hijacked all public discourse. Parties came in, and over the next almost three years, they continued to dismantle royal power. However, they transferred it to themselves without any meaningful changes to what had become a very corrupt system. There’s a direct way in which people were protesting in 1990 - a broad base for political, social, and economic participation, which did profoundly affect the Constitution and the form of government in ways that are very striking, promising, and hopeful. But the actual administrative, political, and economic power moved from inside the palace walls to just outside them.

Additionally, some have suggested that the government’s social-media shutdown was a major motivating factor for protestors. Officials framed it as part of a new value-added tax on foreign platforms, but protestors saw it as a direct form of censorship. How has social media shaped the movement?

In addition, the very corrupt and nepotistic party leadership had very tight relations with business wealth and had become wealthy because they controlled the governmental systems of permitting and licensing. They had been talking for some time about requiring social media platforms to be registered in the country. It is my understanding that they used language like “in accordance with the law.” But it is also my understanding, although I have not verified, that there really isn't such a law.

You can look at the Prime Minister's official salary, and ordinary people would be very happy earning that salary. However, there is no way that that salary pays for the lifestyle that he and his children and his brothers and nephews enjoy. Social media became a place where people in wealthy families started posting selfies of themselves with Rolex watches and designer clothes in famous places in Europe. When the people who were struggling either to get abroad to work or who were abroad working saw those pictures, it didn't make them happy. The whole “Nepo Babies” or “Nepo Kids” hashtag trend in Nepal originated with the pictures that rich kids posted, which got picked up by people who saw it as a really insulting flaunting of great economic disparities. They felt that the economic system was not fair. They also felt that these economic disparities were produced not by honest work, but by being able to illegally tax other people and extort from businesses.

It’s not random that the officials wanted to tap into the wealth stream that the social media platforms represented. It’s also not surprising that when they shut them down on September 4, it catalyzed what the students and the youth had been planning as a general protest about economic and educational opportunities. It’s stunning that nobody in the government ever said, "You know, this might make people pretty unhappy."

The interim prime minister, Sushila Karki, was put in place until the country holds elections. How legitimate and durable is this interim government likely to be, both domestically and internationally? What immediate priorities should the interim government tackle in the coming days, weeks, and months to stabilize the situation and restore public trust?

The youth movement that organized the protests turned out to be much larger than it probably would have been if social media hadn't been shut down, but the media shutdown was not the main cause. When the army finally took control, people were very afraid that the army was going to stage a military coup. And if the army stages a military coup, the royal family is not far behind.

There are, of course, some people who want the King to return. That has been true ever since 1990, that there are extreme right-wing loyalists who lost with the fall of the monarchy and would gladly return to the socio-economic system that privileged them.  Even Nepal’s legal codes used to be based on caste, which institutionalized high caste and royal privilege. There are people who benefited directly from their positions, and they will forever be lamenting the loss of their privileges. But beyond that, it really was a very genuine problem. Who was going to run the place? The Army originally proposed to run meetings with everybody, including the royalists. The student protesters said, “Absolutely not, no royalists.” But these young protesters are not in a position to run a government, as that is not necessarily their skill set or experience. So, who? And how were they to be selected?

Regarding Sushila Karki’s biography: Krishna Adhikari, who taught Nepali language in England, was quoted in the media in Nepal describing Karki, saying, “She’s as clean as Nepal gets.” And that's absolutely true. She has a stunning record of trying to bring corrupt politicians to justice. The problem was that when a party was in power, the opposition party would accuse the party in power of corruption. They would then start getting prosecuted, and then they would get thrown out of power. Then they would start accusing their original accusers. All the cases that were in front of the Supreme Court undoubtedly had merit, but they were motivated by political goals. Karki managed to resist that crossfire very successfully.

Karki cannot be a candidate for the next election. Her husband has strong party affiliations, but she does not. There were names of some other candidates floated who would have also had strong support, notably the man who turned the lights back on in Nepal. At one point, anywhere in the Kathmandu Valley, there was electricity for only a few hours a day on opposite sides of the clock, rotating across the days of the week. Life was really hard, and it was impossible to do business. And this one man, Kul Man Ghising, who had been a career employee in the electric corporation, knew where the electricity was going. He knew that it was primarily business interests that were willing to pay into private pockets to get electricity, so it was turned on for them. That produced the scarcity of electricity. Ghising knew where the numbers were; he knew how to rearrange them. He is also seen as a person of great integrity, and he's now a minister in Karki’s cabinet. A third politician who was promoted, Balendra Shah (Balen), the current Mayor of Kathmandu, is a likely candidate in the coming elections and is not in the interim cabinet.

What are the policy priorities in Nepal today? Should anti-corruption legislation, electoral changes, the expansion of federalism, or media deregulation be central to the next government’s agenda in order to promote stability and growth?

I stand with people who would like to see a non-corrupt government with truth and justice. The critical piece will be what happens in the parties. Right now, the parties are still doing old-style politics. They are trying to take Sushila Karki and the current government to court, saying that the dissolution of the parliament and her appointment were unconstitutional. Number one, we must hope that the court does not. If the court capitulates and agrees with them, we're back where we started. We've just destroyed all this public property, killed 72 people, and the country is back to the old status quo.

So how do you get the parties to change? How do you change a political culture that has hundreds of years of institutional history? Two things would be worth exploring. There is a lot of energy in Gen Z. While very few of them are in a position to become a minister or the head of a department, they are media savvy. Their commitment to the idea of change and their awareness of how much political corruption disrupts the free flow of education, people, and goods are things that would make Nepal a vibrant society and economy. They should have pivotal roles in identifying those who committed violence during the protests—both state and private actors. The entire protests were recorded on hundreds of mobile phones. Although the government is asking citizens to share their videos and their information, I do not believe that the people have enough faith that there won’t be retribution from government actors, but I do believe that Gen-Z actors could manage to gain confidence and protect the privacy of those who cooperate.

Moreover, every single official political party in Nepal has a youth wing. Those wings have generally relied on young people who did the party leadership's dirty work, by which I mean the physical “gunda”. They were the ones who would go beat up your opponent's driver or supporter. My hope would be that some of the youth leaders’ current passion for non-corrupt governance could be used to change the way existing parties operate and to take over leadership there, perhaps in collaboration with the existing youth wings. Or, if Gen Z groups themselves created new parties, they could put representatives up for election. Then, perhaps some inroads could be made into transforming how parties operate at the present. The existing parties are direct heirs to the same system of exploitation that the Kings indulged in. If that doesn't change, nothing has changed.