Destroyed by Love: nation,memory, and humanity in South Asia

Remembered experiences of violence, humiliation, and loss suffered in the 1971 war of Bangladesh offer a site for writing a new contemporary history in South Asia. Love, not for humanity but for nation, in survivors' memories was the site of violence in the war. The state's history-writing project cultivated hate against neighbors deemed enemies and encouraged violence against them. More than four decades later, the awareness of intersubjective relationships leads survivors—victims and perpetrators—to search for meaning beyond their national labels. The quest leads to the renewal of insāniyat, a South Asian concept of humanity, which survivors suggest is the site of human freedom from violence.     

The Tyranny of the Majority in Bangladesh: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts

This article analyzes how the construction of a national ideology in Bangladesh has been achieved through a style of majoritarianism based on “positional dominance.” This has resulted in the construction of a national identity that is based on a particular form of Bengali identity that subsumes and indeed delegitimizes other claims to identity within the state, including claims made by indigenous communities to their own distinctive, place-based identity. Although a formal peace treaty has been signed, peace remains elusive due to the cultural hegemony of Bengalis over the indigenous peoples in the name of the supremacy of the national state.     

frailty and debility

Drawing on empirical research from two focus groups, this article investigates the narratives and discourses that emerged around pregnancy, technology, birth and motherhood. In so doing, the article engages in some long-standing debates within feminism around embodied and maternal subjectivity, agency and identity. Seen here, the focus groups serve initially to remind us of the pervasiveness of gender inequality and the continual ambiguity of, and anxieties around, maternal subjectivity. The focus groups reconfigure these issues through a technological lens, which in turn seems to offer new spaces where agency can be (momentarily, problematically) claimed. This in turn extends existing debates in new directions through the particular framework of technology that is variously figured here as an object, as information and as imaginary digital space. All of these constructions, however, become problematic as they—despite their promises—nevertheless ultimately and profoundly return the women to an emplaced, embodied subjectivity that has been at the heart of feminist debate for so long.     

International practice of Public Legal Education: a missing element in the justice system of Bangladesh

Public Legal Education (PLE) is a recently developed international practice which aims at providing nationwide legal education and information services to the public by way of a variety of innovative methods. Compared to its presence in a number of developed countries, the practice of PLE is not very common in least developed and developing countries such as Bangladesh. However, its impact on the process of legal empowerment could be transformative. This article thus attempts to assess the necessity and the prospect of introducing PLE in Bangladesh. In doing so, the concept of PLE will be analysed first, focusing on the various methods that are applied for its delivery. Considering the presence of comprehensive PLE practices, the PLE framework in two other jurisdictions – Canada and Australia – will then be examined in order to achieve a comparative view on the subject. Upon analysing the relevance of PLE, the article will finally propose a number of key recommendations to introduce a PLE framework into Bangladesh.     

Forest land and peasant struggles in Assam, 2002–2007

Historically, and currently, agrarian mobilisation in Assam is – and has been – informed by a desire on the part of poor peasants in Tengani for security of tenure on forest land that they have occupied and cultivated in the course of successive historical waves of migration. The result was the emergence of a peasant movement, a process informed by and in turn structuring not just competing claims to nature, particularly as this involved a conflict between forest conservation and cultivation. This problem was compounded by the different class positions of those who subsequently became involved in the struggle: traders, moneylenders, poor peasants, better-off producers, NGOs, bureaucrats and government. These contradictions underwrote what became distinctions between the BTUSS and the DMSS, or the development of what in effect were two movements.