Moments of Rupture in an Exhausted Political World

Abstract

This editorial reflects on the conditions of political violence, moral exhaustion, and uneven rupture that have marked 2025 globally and in the Himalayan region. Taking recent unrest in Nepal as an analytic point of departure, it considers how moments of breakdown expose exhausted forms of authority and reopen questions of legitimacy, responsibility, and agency. Situating the journal’s work against the normalisation of political fatalism, the editorial reaffirms HIMALAYA’s commitment to historically grounded, ethically attentive scholarship. It introduces the contributions to Volume 44, Issue 2 as engagements with ritual, ecology, art, migration, and care that together insist on complexity, situated knowledge, and the continued possibility of critical thought in unsettled times.