ABSTRACT
As in many polities of the Global South, politics and political institutions in Bangladesh are often shaped by the common experience of colonial oppression and nationalist responses to it, military dictatorship, or, more recently, new forms of violence ignited by market liberalization and a particular (often narrow) understanding of democracy (reduced to electoral rituals) and ‘progressiveness’ (in a teleological sense, the ‘West’ being the essential model). Although ‘human rights’ as an ideology emerged as a necessary corrective to the evils of colonialism, authoritarianism, and backwardness in the aftermath of World War II, most post-colonial states including Bangladesh remained in an ambivalent relationship with the notion of human rights. This ambivalence could be broadly characterized as two parallel streams: ‘human rights’ as an emancipatory move, and ‘human rights’ as a hegemonic language, or to use Marks’s phrase, as ‘romance’ and ‘tragedy’ (Marks, 2012). The first strand emphasizes the ‘ideology’ of human rights as a central element of the project to circumscribe the monopoly of coercive force by post-Westphalian modern states. It is conceived of as a ‘secular religion: an object of faith, a basis for hope and a code of morality we can all accept’ (p.313). The second strand, in contrast, problematizes the all-pervasive nature of contemporary discourses on human rights, and, without undermining its core values, tends to expose the way in which human rights as a neo-colonial political ‘language’ reinforces existing power imbalances at both national and international levels. To a great extent, an understanding of human rights in Bangladesh travels between these two registers.
