When Sheikh Hasina’s regime fell in August 2024, it came as a relief but also as a bit of a surprise. There had been signs of dissatisfaction over the years, including increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the economic performance, a number of previous protests, and a mounting social media criticism. But few would have predicted, even a few months earlier, that her entrenched and long-lasting regime would come crashing to such a sudden and ignominious end – with her fleeing in a helicopter to India, her ministers and MP s in hiding or scurrying across the border, and her entire ruling edifice dissolving.
The articles that have been collected into a special issue of Journal of Bangladesh Studies have been brought together both to understand the 2024 mass uprising and to investigate how an analysis of the events that have been called the long July can help us understand mass uprisings as a political and cultural event. What forces – political, cultural, social – were at play?
We argue that democratic backsliding or autocratisation is a process with a ‘hidden twin’, that of an unwillingness to accept the loss of the right to voice dissent and, ultimately, that of resistance. In other words, that autocratisation will necessarily engender resistance. Secondly, we see in the case of Bangladesh that as autocratisation is a slow and at times erratic process, so too is the formation of its hidden twin. There is a long-term development of increasing oppression of criticism that engenders resentment, a medium-term development of perhaps poor governance and economic malaise that engenders opposition, and a short-term violent oppression that engenders massive street protests – as when the murderous police actions on the streets of Dhaka and elsewhere in July 2024 constituted a tipping point, although the resentment and public anger had long been in gestation.
Read the special issue here!