This article revisits the evolutionary trajectory of economic diplomacy practices in Bangladesh, arranged into three distinct periods. Strengthening economic diplomacy has emerged as an important means for Bangladesh to tackle the upcoming challenges stemming from its graduation from the least developed countries (LDCs) and to smooth its process of transition from an LDC to a developing country. Existing literature demonstrates the role of state and non-state actors in a country’s economic diplomacy decision-making process. For many scholars, economic diplomacy is primarily directed at boosting inter-state economic relations practised by elite government officials; on the other hand, many scholars recognise the increasing participation of non-state actors (i.e., multinational firms, NGOs, think tanks, business groups, etc.) in fostering economic diplomacy practices of a country. However, the article argues that neither the statist analysis nor the non-state-centric approach is adequate to illustrate Bangladesh’s economic diplomacy practices. Rather, in Bangladesh, economic diplomacy has always served as the regime survival strategy for Bangladesh’s ruling elites. Whereas the period of foreign aid dependence demonstrates how the ruling elites of Bangladesh were forced to pursue economic diplomacy with the Western donors through agreeing to the creation of a Paris-based consortium named Bangladesh Aid Group to keep themselves in power, the period of the dominance of international financial institutions shows how the radical change of the ruling elites in 1975 transformed the nature of economic diplomacy of Bangladesh, in which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund became the mentors of the economic diplomacy regime of Bangladesh by promoting their concepts of privatisation, trade liberalisation and others.
Shah monarchy in Nepal deserves the credit for creating the modern state of Nepal, keeping it independent from the British Empire, and pursuing an independent foreign policy during the Cold War. The credit for the foundation of modernisation and the maintenance of ethnic harmony in Nepal also goes to the monarchy. Yet, the first meeting of the constituent assembly held on 28 May 2008 abolished it and declared Nepal a republic. This study has attempted to answer the puzzle and finds that the monarchy invited its fall in 2008 as it repeatedly breached the political contract it had reached with its potential coalition partners. It also finds that the entry of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists into peaceful politics in 2006 further accelerated the death of the monarchy. While this study is an insightful contribution to the domestic politics of Nepal, the argument is a new proposition to the host of existing theoretical arguments on the breakdown of monarchy.
Fast-growing non-slum poor settlements in South Asia have received scant attention in scientific research in which the focus has been on slum or informal settlements. Bibliometric analysis reveals that almost all aspects of slum life have been scientifically studied. As a result, a considerable amount of academic literature is available on slum issues. However, a large and ever-increasing number of people now live in non-slum poor settlements throughout the South Asia. Access to slum areas for newcomers in the cities is restricted as slums are already overwhelmed. This article argues that despite the growing influx of population in South Asian cities, academic research outside of a defined boundary of slums is insufficient. Governance and other theoretical approaches to study slums did not consider the non-slum areas as those approaches are influenced heavily by tenure security and confined geography. Based on the findings from bibliometric analyses, the study recommends that a broader theoretical framework is required to extend the study boundary to explore the geography of inequality and issues of both the slum and non-slum poor settlements in South Asian cities.
This article seeks to focus on the changing nature of India’s parliamentary opposition in the 1970s. The article argues that, unlike the previous decades, the Opposition in India was resilient, even if not organised in the face of the authoritarian tendencies of Indira Gandhi pre- and during the Emergency. The analytical framework helps to understand the reasons for the growing opposition’s resilience. The manifestation of this resilience can be traced to the programmes and actions of the opposition parties undertaken in the 1970s inside and outside the parliament as the crisis of democratic governance deepened, as explained in this article. This article attempts to make sense of parliamentary opposition in the 1970s, unlike any other existing study that either focused on the Congress, party system, or emergency per se. This article brings the spotlight on the Opposition as a category that lacks constitutional safeguards, thereby missing the ‘equality of conditions’ in a democratic framework. An emphasis is given to analytically understanding the political processes that played a significant role in the government–opposition relationship. The study has been conducted with the help of primary archival materials, newspaper reportings, memoirs, commentaries and governmental records such as parliamentary debates, along with existing academic works (though scarcely) on the making and functioning of the Opposition in India. The analytical approach in studying this particular moment in the political history of India helps us to understand the primacy, effectiveness, limitations and failures of democratic governance from the Opposition’s standpoint.
The B-school scenario in India is vast; with institutions in thousands, and hundreds of thousands in annual intake. Despite availability of ranking metrics, these portray only a partial picture of the top institutes alone, leaving the majority of Indian B-schools unmapped. The competitive arena for institutes is asymmetric, creating a problem with existing indexes as they do not aid aspirants or major stakeholders to make accurate estimates of institutional performance. Using secondary data from a statutory body (AICTE), the paper studies how this asymmetry is played out in aspects of graduate outcome performance- namely outturn and placement, as well as institutional financial performances within the context of a single state. Publicly available information from media and other intelligence reports have been further leveraged to augment facts. The study clusters institutes based on graduate outturn and placements into a vulnerability-risk grid, allowing accurate assessments of how B-schools are performing across a selected time-period. Financial risk assessment also helps in identifying the problem hotspots which require direct intervention. The paper is unique in its contribution to classifying risks among management institutes using a method which is scalable and adaptable. It identifies key imperatives to establish academic parity, by clustering deficit aspects based on the level of the b-schools performance.
