Academic and Reference Books

The dominant role of bureaucracy in governance in Bangladesh is well-known. Bangladesh has been and continues to be an administrative state. The need for reforming bureaucracy was recognized  even during the Pakistan times. However, all efforts to reform an entrenched bureaucracy failed to a large extent.

In the The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington provocatively laid down the global fault lines of the post Cold War era. Huntington sees the West as involved in an unavoidable collision with two major civilizations—Islamic and Confucian. This controversial thesis, originally published in Foreign Affairs and now developed into a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is said to have generated more comments than any other  contribution to Foreign Affairs in recent times.

Bangladesh is one of the least developed countries in the World. The great majority  of  its people depend on agriculture for earning their living. Despite planned efforts by the government to increase agricultural productivity for more than three decades, the growth and output in this sector has not kept pace with the growth of population. This is a matter of great concern for the people as well as the policy makers of the country.

After decades of stagnation, Bengali agricultural output finally began to grow faster than the population from the mid-1980s onwards. While this achievement has been widely heralded, there has been no effort to analyse in detail the reasons for and the consequences of agrarian change in the region. Providing a unique interdisciplinary synthesis, this volume— which draws chiefly upon micro studies of villages in West Bengal and Bangladesh—explores the complex causality between agricultural growth, government policy and local level practice, and agrarian social change.