
The focus in this book is on the important topic of poverty alleviation, in two relatively undeveloped areas in Asia, namely, West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh.
The book is about the identity politics in a post-colonial society that motivated the Bengali Muslims to participate in Bangladesh’s independence movement. Its approach is a major departure from the traditional analysis which tends to suggest that nationalist movement is a non contradictory political movement. To the contrary, the book argues, like all other social movements, the nationalist movement responds to restructuring the power relation in a society.
How violence and terrorism impact on societies has largely been ignored in mainstream security studies. However, in the post-cold war order, endemic violence has become part of life of people across the world, more so in South Asia. Within the current debates in security studies and efforts to make security conceptions more people-centred, the issue of violence finds some primacy.
In this book, translated into English from Bangla in original, Dr. Mamoon has shown his admirable capacity to see and separate the deeper meaning of events from the dark and the grey surrounding them as ingredients of historical change and development. With more than 150 publications to his credit, Dr. Mamoon, at present teaches history in Dhaka University. For his free thinking and challenging writings, in 2002, he was incarcerated in jail allegedly for anti-state activities by the present government.
This book is a detailed study to establish Bengali Language Movement which awakened the identity and distinction of the people of the then East Bengal/Pakistan. This movement, as most people know, ultimately resulted in the crystallisation of Bengali nationalism, and finally the struggle for freedom of the Eastern part of Pakistan.
The magic of 10% economic growth suggests that the real income of an average citizen can double every decade into the foreseeable future. The primary obstacle to long run sustained growth in Bangladesh is land allocation. This monograph builds on the thoughts of many earlier Bangladeshi’s and proposes a concrete way of solving the current impasse. The proposal is called Compact Townships and seeks to build small, yet economic and ecologically sound, urban islands in rural Bangladesh.
With widespread human deprivations and inequalities, the challenges of development over the years have remained enormous. So at the beginning of a new millennium, the world has adopted the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce basic human poverty by 2015. Today, the world is at a crossroads with impressive but uneven progress on some fronts, significant gaps remaining and new challenges emerging.