The first time I met Ram Bhandari in person was in January, in the lobby of the Gallery Park Hotel. We shook hands and he draped a Khata scarf around my neck. We met again this past Tuesday, in the Gallery Park Hotel, only this time welcoming each other with a hug.

My arrival is a return, not just to familiar faces, but to the rhythm of Kathmandu and its somewhat miraculous ballet of cars, bikes, and people moving ceaselessly down every alley, colorful shops, distant honks or dog barks, and smell of incense and gasoline, all bringing quiet recollections of my short trip here in January.

There is much I am eager to come back to (like dal bhat and friends in Bardiya) and all that I hope to experience this time around. But most of all, I am eager, and deeply privileged, to work with Ram. He is truly incredible.

On December 31, 2001, amid Nepal’s civil war (1996-2006), Ram’s father, Tej Bahadur Bhandari, was kidnapped from the streets of Besisahar and disappeared by the state. In his quest for justice for his own father, Ram met others like himself — children, siblings, wives, mothers, fathers — all seeking answers about their loved ones. Informal organizing starting at the local level led to his eventual formation of NEFAD, the Network of Families of the Disappeared, in 2009, which remains a central platform for raising the demands of families of the disappeared from across Nepal today.

A scholar and tireless advocate like his father, Ram has spent the last two decades fighting for the rights of conflict victims. He has submitted petitions to the UN and Nepali Supreme Court, organized memorialization conferences, raised the demands of victims and survivors in meetings with top political leaders, spoken before the UN Security Council, pushed for amendments to the Truth and Reconciliation Act, and, most recently, been at the forefront of the effort to demand the formal transitional justice process be transparent, credible, and victim-centered. Ram is not alone — victims and survivors from around Nepal have organized to demand truth, justice, dignity, memory, and reparation.

The victim movement in Nepal is remarkable not just for its advocacy surrounding the formal process, but for the ways in which victims and survivors have worked to realize key elements of transitional justice at the grassroots level. Memorialization is a telling example. Many families of the disappeared have memorialized their relatives through local conferences, ceremonies, parks, embroidery, names, statues, or other physical monuments. In doing so, they facilitate healing, resist the erasure of disappearance, insert their stories in the public conscience and historical narrative, and challenge the stigma faced by relatives of the disappeared. All of these are key elements of transitional justice. Often local memorialization projects are the result of sustained mobilization and engagement with local government, itself arguably also a piece of this process. (Ram has a great article on the significance of local memorialization and victim mobilization as a part of the transitional justice process which you can find here.)

While much movement has been made, there is still a ways to go before victims’ rights are realized in Nepal. Among many other things, Ram is currently fighting for new commissions, ones that would reflect a genuine and credible attempt at transitional justice. He is also working to start a center, with the support of a team composed of Lecturer Niraj Acharya, PhD student Shuyuan Zhang, Wesleyan student Laila Azmy, and myself. Our goal is to create an institution that will facilitate collaboration between civil society, victim movements, and academics, monitor and report on the unfolding process from the perspective of survivors through articles and a monthly newsletter, and engage local and international students in learning about survivor-led transitional justice.

The work is already underway, and many meetings feel, as Niraj put it in a recent text message, like important landmarks towards our vision. At every step, I am reminded of our mission at its core: to advance truth, justice, and survivor’s narratives. I am lucky to be working with such an incredible team of people, all of whom are wholeheartedly dedicated to this project.

The full team at our first meeting together in Kathmandu