Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

This article investigates the changing role of youth in Nepali Maoism following their transformation from a guerrilla army to a parliamentary party after 2006. Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how the category of youth gained renewed relevance after the war and allowed the Maoist movement to sidestep complicated issues of class in the urban fabric. Building on a Gramscian framework of subaltern politics and Harvey's dialectical utopianism', I argue that youth in the post-revolutionary context have become aligned with the political project of building New Nepal' and that this allows youth, as both a category and a subject position, to emerge as tools for utopian communist politics. Through an analysis of a divided class landscape in Kathmandu, the article documents the new and difficult alignments between Maoist ideals and positions of youth in the city with lasting outcomes for the party's revolutionary project.