Non-Knowledge and Political Violence: NGO Reporting on Protests and Repression in Nepal’s Southern Plains

Reports by NGOs such as International Crisis Group and International Alert are key sources of information for policy makers and practitioners seeking to prevent political violence. What shapes the information reported by these NGOs? How can we explain gaps, distortions, and errors in this information? Shortcomings in this type of reporting have been attributed to faulty information gathering methodologies and unequal valuing of technical versus local knowledge. On the other hand, the literature points to a variety of ways in which political violence functions as a machinery of non-knowledge through attempts to impose partial accounts and obstacles that make events of violence difficult to observe. This means that reporting on political violence is not a straightforward process of collecting information and conveying it to policy makers and practitioners. In this paper, I draw on theoretical insights from ignorance studies in order to inquire into sources of non-knowledge – a term used to broadly indicate that which is not known, ambiguous, kept secret, uncertain, or simply incorrect – that stem both from the political violence on which these NGOs report and the wider incentive structures within which they operate. I use a case study of NGO reporting on violent and nonviolent protests, as well as repression by security forces, in Nepal’s southern Tarai-Madhes plains in 2015-16. I identify distortions, omissions, biases, and errors in the reporting on the basis of qualitative content analysis of 60 public reports. I further draw on 25 expert interviews in order to interrogate the sources of these distortions, omissions, and biases. Together with observations in the literature on political violence, in this paper, I first map sources of non-knowledge inherent to political violence. These range from difficulties in observing a phenomenon that is chaotic in nature and often temporally and spatially dispersed, to the pressures on information from governments and non-state groups that use violence. On the basis of this, I identify three main inadequacies in this reporting in terms of its usefulness for preventing political violence. First, a reporting focus on instances of violence to the exclusion of situations in which violence is absent, including situations of increasing tensions, obscures starting points for work towards preventing violence. Second, predictions of future violence often reproduce the discourses of actors involved in political violence, thus reinforcing and amplifying these discourses. Third, organizational policies mean that many details are not published. This unequal access to information among policy makers and practitioners results in different organizations and individuals having divergent understandings of political violence, and in turn leads them to design responses that are uncoordinated even to the extent of working at cross purposes. In sum, against the background of widespread concern about misinformation, this paper identifies multiple other ways that information becomes distorted. These emerge both from these NGOs’ reporting choices and directly from the political violence that is the subject of these NGOs’ reporting.