Mobilisation and social navigation in student politics at Dhaka University, Bangladesh

Contact person: Morten K. Andersen

In correspondence with the overall VOPY programme this proposal set out to understand how issues of governance, politics and authority operate in present day Bangladesh. The focus is on the sites of incubation for political leaders and state servants - the youth in student politics. The aim is to explore the interplay between youth's efforts to manage life and livelihood within organisations, and the organisations efforts to mobilise and guide youth to advance political projects.

The subject is the interplay of state exercise of authority and political agency of organisations and people in the blurred boundaries between state practices, student politics and youth agency, in Dhaka (Gupta 1998). Focus will be on how governance and public authority are contested and shaped in relation to how youth appropriate membership of the allied student organizations, Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal and Islami Chhatra Shibir.

In Bangladesh student organisations have contributed to the continuous upheaval of violence to protest or condone political leadership and decision making through mass demonstrations, strikes, blockades (Daily Star 2007, ICG 2006). Although, student violence is a regular feature in political and social life in South Asia (cf. Ali 1970, Chatterjee 2006, Sobhan 2002), limited research have ventured to explore how the mobilisation informs governance, politics and authority. Taking up the interplay of state and youth, I pursue the following questions:
· How and under what circumstances have student organisations emerged as a social and political force?
· How exercises of political and religious authority inform the mobilisation of the youth and the turn to violence?
· How do the youths navigate and shape the social environment for own desires and wants?

Analytical framework
In line with the overall framework, I side with a growing academic attention to how the state is created in a dynamic process of political contestations and appropriations of authority, legitimacy and control (cf. Blom Hansen & Stepputat 2006). It is approached via three specific conceptual relations; state formation and student politics, political projects and patrimonial networks, and mobilisation and navigation.
- The focus on student politics illuminates the organisations role in contemporary Bangladeshi politics as cardinal sites of mobilisation and political contest. It displays how state formation and authority are informed by violent encounters between state and youth that accentuates governance, political legitimacy and citizenship (cf. Lund 2006).
- Violent mobilisation brings to the forth motives and aspirations of the youth to be organised within a specific network or political project, which are shaped in the prospect of social mobility. The study will centre on how youth mobilisation relate to patrimonial networks of affiliation (cf. Barth 2000, Khan 2000), which grant life chances of symbolic and social capital, recognition and material rewards (Bourdie 1992, Butler 2004).
- From the youth perspective the study illuminates the relationship between political and religious mobilisation and individual motives in the turn to violence. It denotes the way the youth navigate and reconfigure exercises of exclusion and inclusion (Vigh 2003, 2006), for immediate and imagined life chances by the appropriation (de Certeau 1984), of political and religious radicalisation and violence.