The State of Relief on the Bangladesh-India Border

By focusing on a remote part of the Bangladesh-India border, this paper seeks to understand how the state has been reconfigured from its older, developmental paradigm, involving large-scale infrastructural change and resource redistribution, to its contemporary NGO-driven avatar. The paper suggests...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Delwar Hussain
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud 2014-07-01
Series:South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3728
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Summary:By focusing on a remote part of the Bangladesh-India border, this paper seeks to understand how the state has been reconfigured from its older, developmental paradigm, involving large-scale infrastructural change and resource redistribution, to its contemporary NGO-driven avatar. The paper suggests that the state today is merely one of multiple governing agencies that participate in producing ‘state-like effects’ on a territory and its population. Sometimes these agencies are in competition; often they work alongside one another. NGOs are agencies of this kind and are a major focus of this paper. In light of this, the idea of a sovereign Bangladeshi state which is apparently being eroded by neoliberalism, is not a complete picture. Other than a particular moment in the post-colonial period where there was optimism that the contrary would be achieved, sovereignty has in fact always been a mediated, fragmented affair in the borderlands as well as in Bangladesh as a whole.
ISSN:1960-6060