JOURNAL PAPER

Research Works, Publications and Presentations:

1.      As a student of International Relations I have always had a keen interest in investigating the interplay between the uneven nature of the states and its inevitable consequence in international relations. My maiden article published in a peer-reviewed journal is, therefore, based on the premise that states are not on a level-playing field and their formation, or in many cases simply installation, is the root cause of many of the prevailing contending issues in international relations. Titled as ‘Nation-State, Demography and Migration,’ published in the second volume of the Journal of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University in 2009, the article was meant to be a prelude to a greater work that is supposed to unveil the historical injustices and obstructions to human emancipation in the process of modern nation and state formation, especially in the global south.

2.    Later on, I worked on the idea of nation-state, looking at this from a minority point of view. I took on a research project titled ‘Perception of State of a Divided Ethnic Community: the Garos of Bangladesh,’ under the research project scheme of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Jahangirnagar University in 2010. Under this project I conducted an empirical study on the Garo ethnic people in Bangladesh. I led a research team and visited the Garo inhabited areas in the north-eastern part of Bangladesh. We reached out people from different strata of Garo community in order to figure out their ideas and perception of state. Over all, this was a successful endeavor.

3.    The success of the Garo Project led us to believe that there is a necessity to study a few more ethnic minority communities to find out any possible common pattern in the thought processes of the minorities. In 2014, I along with my colleague Mir Masudul  Alam, an assistant professor at the Dept. of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, conducted a similar research on the Santal ethnic community living in the northern part of Bangladesh. Here we discovered that even though the Garos and the Santals are different in terms of their historical experiences and cultural and social values, these two minority communities have striking similarities in the ways they look toward the State and the majority who dominate politics.

4.     Having worked on the ethnic minority perception of state, I believe there is a need to rethink about the majority perception of state, boundary, sovereignty, etc. I am in favor of taking a ‘more humane approach’ in dealing with the minorities. I advocate for a flexible and ‘transcendable’- whenever necessary- national boundary that would validate and recognize the hitherto undivided cultural territories. And, this is why I am adopting an approach which I call Cosmopolitan-Pluralism’. I found that the type of plurality most of the modern nation-states are maintaining or at least claim to be maintaining has so many rigidities and blockages. Especially, when it comes to the very idea of state and the political system, instead of pluralism a dominating political meta-narrative is setting the mode of all the discussions. The same is true with regard to international relations, global order or international system. In a seminar held at the Institute for Training and Development (ITD), Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 2014 I presented a paper titled ‘A New World of Pluralism: the Role of the USA.’ It was later published by the ITD in the third edition of their e-publication Post-Hegemonic Global Governance.  In that paper, I tried to show that the world has always been plural largely, whether we recognize it or not. We still have all elements of plurality amidst all the confusions, conflicts and chaos that are going on worldwide. From polarity, we can shift to plurality for the sake of a sustainable peace. 

5.    My philosophical attachment with pluralism has given me an opportunity to look into some of the world’s intriguing trends in the history of thoughts and I found them to be profoundly useful in understanding and interpreting international relations. The Liberation Philosophy developed in Latin America deserves a significant mention here. The inclusive nature of that philosophy is a suitable example of what might be called a ‘philosophical pluralism,’ which I believe should be considered as an epistemological starting point to have significant ontological impact on the existing state affairs and ‘status-quo philosophies.’ In this regard, I completed another research project titled ‘Latin American Liberation Philosophies: Implications in Understanding International Relations’ in 2015. The project was funded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Jahangirnagar University.

6.   In search of a peaceful co-existence among groups divided politico-ideologically and culturally, I looked into the nature of democratic practices in the third world countries. In the context of Bangladesh I tried to discover the gap between the malfunctioning democratic system and national integration. My study reveals the difference in historical lessons among the same people within the same national boundary. Here also, the uneven or rather haphazard development of nation-state has appeared to be the prime reason behind the ongoing ‘democratic casualties’ in Bangladesh. In December 2013, I presented a paper titled ‘Democracy Train through a Shadowy Tunnel in Bangladesh’ in a seminar jointly organized by the Dept. of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University and Regional Center for Strategic Studies (RCSS) of Sri Lanka. The modified version of this paper titled as ‘Democracy and National Consensus in Bangladesh: Issues and Challenges’ has been published in 2016 in the Journal of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University.

7.   I participated in an international conference on Genocide, focusing on the Rohingya persecution in Myanmar, organized by the Liberation Museum of Bangladesh, held in October 2019. I presented a paper titled “State’s sacred exclusionary rites and the elimination of the Rohingyas”. In this paper, I analyzed the policy and behavior of the Myanmar states that promotes a majoritarian exclusionary nationalism at the cost of minorities like the Rohingyas. While the international community is condemning the crimes against the Rohingyas they are clueless about how to handle this sort of nationalism. It is mostly because this nationalism has become a constitutive element of many of the existing states, if not all.

 

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