The information politics of peace and conflict NGOs Reporting on Nepal's Tarai-Madhes region

NGOs such as Crisis Group, Conciliation Resources, and International Alert produce reports about armed conflicts and political violence in order to influence policy and practice. These ‘peace and conflict NGOs’ are national and transnational NGOs with a normative focus on reducing violence and promoting peace. As part of their information politics, these NGOs make choices about what information to include in their reporting, what to leave out, and how to formulate what they write. The dissertation theorizes this information politics as operating through three main mechanisms: (1) simplification for policy makers who cannot be assumed to have detailed knowledge of the conflict context, (2) dramatization of issues to demonstrate the urgency of action, and (3) navigation of red lines – topics defined as off limits by the governments of the countries on which these NGOs report. In order to examine this empirically, the dissertation draws on a case study of reporting about an episode of violent and nonviolent protests that occurred in Nepal’s southern Tarai-Madhes plains in 2015-16. The first empirical chapters identify patterns of distortion, bias, omission, and error in NGO reporting on this episode. On the basis of expert interviews about the reporting process, the final empirical chapter demonstrates how this information politics plays out in practice, and the dilemmas and trade-offs this entails. The dissertation contributes to our understanding of the information politics of reporting on armed conflict and political violence more broadly, and also to our understanding of civil society responses to information controls by (semi-)authoritarian states.