Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- 1.1 Civil Society in Normative Theory and Empirical Reality -- 1.2 State Weakness in Academic and Policy Discourse -- 1.3 Research Question, Methodology and Research Techniques -- 1.4 Empirical Starting Point: Civil Society and Weak Democracy in Bangladesh and the Philippines -- 1.5 Structure of the Book -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 2: Analysing Civil Society in Weak States -- 2.1 The State as the Context of Action for Civil Society

Scholarship on autocratisation has investigated the strategies of cooptation and repression that autocratic and autocratising regimes employ to maintain and enhance their power. However, it has barely explored how civil society reacts to these strategies. Concurrently, the existing research on civil society and social movements mostly suggests that civil society organisations (CSOs) will either resist autocratic repression or disband because of it, thereby often neglecting the possibility of CSOs' adaptation to autocratic constraints. In this article, I seek to bridge these theoretical gaps with empirical evidence from Cambodia. I argue that for CSOs that operate in autocratic and autocratising regimes allowing themselves to become coopted by the regime can constitute a deliberate strategy to avoid repression, secure their survival, and exert social and political influence. However, while this strategy often seems to be effective in allowing CSOs to survive and escape large-scale repression, its success in enabling civil society to exert social and political influence remains limited, owing to structural limitations embedded in the autocratic context. Moreover, CSOs' acceptance of cooptation often enhances divisions within civil society. (JCSA/GIGA)

Bangladesh continues to face a threat from Islamic terrorism. However, the drivers of this phenomenon remain under-studied. Research has traced terrorism in Bangladesh to wider processes of Islamization; a political context marked by conflict between the country's two main political parties and by authoritarian governance; the institutional weakness of the Bangladeshi security and justice system; and international factors, such as the Afghanistan War, influences from the Gulf, and more recently the Rohingya refugee crisis, as well as the increased interest of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in South Asia. Based on an analysis of the literature and interviews, I argue that while the growth of terrorism in Bangladesh has been a complex process in which all of these factors have interacted, different constellations of them have been decisive at different historical stages.

As of yet, Islamization by secular ruling parties has hardly been investigated in depth. To bridge this gap, the present article reviews the existing literature on Islamization, synthesizes the scattered existing theoretical insights on Islamization by secular actors and applies them to the case of Bangladesh. It argues that, especially when they act in conjunction, three main conditions can drive secular rulers to Islamize public policy: first, the rise of Islamist social movements; second, fierce political competition; and third, (semi-)authoritarian rule. Focusing on the current Awami League (AL) government, the article shows how these three factors have interacted to produce a top-down process of state-led Islamization in Bangladesh.