A Repeated Signaling Game of Nepal’s Transitional Justice Process

Abstract

Nepal’s transitional justice process has produced repeated episodes of formal institutional progress without durable victim trust. This article explains that gap through a repeated signaling game under weak commitment. The central claim is that accountability-exposed political actors can obtain legitimacy from low-cost institutional signals while avoiding high-cost commitments that would alter the expected probability of truth, reparations, prosecution, or non-recurrence. The model identifies a low-credibility pooling equilibrium: commissions, legal amendments, consultations, reports, and strategic plans keep the process formally active, but remain weakly informative when the same signals can be produced by both accountability-oriented and closure oriented actors. Victim distrust is therefore modeled not as procedural obstruction, but as rational belief updating after repeated weak signals. Applied to Nepal, the framework explains how political control over the Turth and Reconciliation Commission and Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons can allow statutory transitional justice mechanisms to generate process and answerability without credible enforcement. The National Human Rights Commission is applied in the analysis as a supporting accountability institution which provides additional evidence about whether documented violations transition into implementation. The article contributes to transitional justice scholarship by formalizing credibility as an incentive problem: victim-centered justice requires mechanisms that make accountability observable, costly, and difficult for closure-oriented actors to imitate.