Recent Journal Articles

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Nationalism and national identity formation in Bangladesh: A colonial legacy behind the clash of language and religion –

The nature of identity formation is complex. The production of identity in South Asia, with its colonial past, has been largely dependent on the region’s colonial history. In this article we chart the process of political identity formation in Bangladesh. We identify the various historical causes that led to the creation of each of the two types of identity prevalent today. These two divisive identities based on language and religion, one pitted against the other, each became the central platform of each of the two major political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). This disquisition shows clear patterns of political distress that resulted in the bifurcation of these two divisive political identities that ossified by the late 20th century due chiefly to the actions of the colonial government of the Raj.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Charisma, populism, and the formation of national identity: Sheikh Mujib and Bengali nationalism-

Identity formation is a complex process and has been discussed by post-structuralist discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau. This paper focuses on Laclau’s proposed ideas on the means of identity production and populism and studies the popular independence movement for Bangladesh under that rubric. It locates charismatic leadership as a necessary condition for populism and identifies Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the charismat suturing the various chains of equivalence that rose to become the populist movement that resulted in the nation’s struggle for independence in 1971. This paper also looks at the transformational leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and acknowledges it as a necessary condition for the patterns of identity creation in East Bengal in the late 1960s.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Traditions in Flux: Global Impact on Religio-Cultural Foundations and the Future of Nationalism in Bangladesh –

In keeping with the topic of the volume, this chapter shall attempt at an elucidation of the future of nationalism in a non-Western nation. Nationalism is inherently a socio-political phenomenon and as such, ever-changing. This chapter shall focus on the nature of national identities and nationalist ideologies that preponderate in Bangladesh, and attempt at identifying future changes that might become manifest, with specific emphasis on the impact of global media and technological trends, development of political Islam, and South Asian regional politics. The foundations of any nationalism are based on a set of core myths and traditions, which are malleable over time. This chapter shows the critical links between new global trends including (i) algorithms, filter bubbles, and media consumption in the age of the internet, (ii) global media perceptions and the flowering of political Islam, and (iii) the interconnections between these two and regional South Asian politics, that is changing the core foundational myths of nationalism in Bangladesh. Thus, elucidating some possible futures of nationalism in Bangladesh.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Myths of nationhood: Cultural nationalism, political Islam, and the movement against sculptures in Bangladesh –

In November 2020, the government of Bangladesh announced plans to erect a 25-foot-tall sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the national memorial located in the country’s capital, Dhaka. This announcement caused a massive uproar among the religious ulema and quickly turned into a quasi-mass scale movement, sparking a torrent of political and religious rhetoric from both sides. This article argues that behind the religious rhetoric, the true cause underlying this fracas was purely political in nature, and tied to the clash of two contrasting nationalist dogmas. The country’s Islamic political parties and the Qawmi madrasas leaders face a clear and perceived threat from the nationalist narratives expounded by the ruling political party, the Bangladesh Awami League, and this movement was a retaliatory attempt and will not be the last.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Islamic Political Parties in Contemporary Bangladesh: Paragons of Democratic Politics, or Rent-Seeking Parasites?

A variety of Islamic political parties proliferate the South and South-East Asian nations, most of which advocate a sharia-based form of government. This paper articulates the political participation of Islamic parties in Bangladesh and attempts to delineate the nature of their participation in more recent times. While Islamic political parties in Bangladesh fall between a range of political ideologies, their activities, especially their nature of participation in the 2018 general elections, were far removed from those stated ideologies and fell more in-line with exploitative rent-seeking models of politics.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

Purveyors of Radical Islamism or Casualty of Cultural Nationalism: Situating Jamaat-e-Islami in Contemporary Bangladesh Politics

Between 1979 and 2013, the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami was the largest Islamist political party in the country and the only one that ever played a prominent role in government. In 2013, the party had its registration revoked, effectively banning it from running in elections, and has since been stigmatized as a terrorist, or at the very least a terror-sympathizing, organization. This paper looks at the nature of the party and the roles it has played historically in Bangladesh politics. It also investigates the party’s alleged links with religious extremism and terrorist activities in the country, and the roles the party has played in perpetuating religious nationalism.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

A relatedness-based model of transformational leadership: a case study of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and 1960s East Bengal

Recent academic work on leadership has focused largely on organizational leadership. This study takes a close look at political leadership, especially that given to popular movements, and delineates a new model of transformational leadership. The current study borrows models from organizational leadership research and applies them to a specific case study to reveal critical concepts underlying transformational leadership. Application of these models to Bangladesh’s founding father, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, during the two decades of the 1950 and 1960s, shows potential for a new flexible framework for transformational leadership with added significance on leader–follower relatedness, socio-historical context and charisma.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

The Persistence of Islamist Political Parties in Bangladesh: A Rational Choice Argument

In 1971, the new country of Bangladesh was carved into the world political map. The country’s first government identified it as a secular nation primarily due to the religious identity averred by the Pakistani state apparatus, its former oppressor. Over half a century after its independence, the country has seen a considerable impact of religion in politics, with many academic publications on Islamist movements and politics since the early 2000s. A conspicuous gap in this literature is the lack of focus on Islamist political parties, even though all Islamist political movements emerged from within those parties. This paper argues that the continued existence of Islamist parties is due to two specific factors: institutional change and large madrasa networks. This paper adopts a ‘rational choice’ approach to investigate these two factors critically.

BY BOBBY HAJJAJ

THE EFFECT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEMS IN EMERGING MARKETS—A CASE STUDY OF MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY BANGLADESH

Discussions on entrepreneurial ecosystems have been a relatively recent addition to the corpus of entrepreneurship literature and have focused heavily on fostering aggressive growth, often technology-based, ventures. Here, we tune the ecosystem model to fit the non-technologically innovative entrepreneurial spaces of emerging economies. We propose a new framework for viewing the cultural effect on entrepreneurship through interactions between the individual entrepreneur’s identity, and networks within specific infrastructural and institutional regimes wrought by predominant culture. In applying the model to mid-twentieth century Bangladesh, we find a culturally predominant negative perception of entrepreneurial activity. We show this contributed to the growth of certain types of entrepreneurship in the country that were rife with (i) higher risk-tolerant behavior among entrepreneurs and (ii) the rise of entrepreneurs having strong links with specific social networks, which together led to an increase in institutional decay and the rise of corruption.