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ASA's origins can be dated to 1978 when a group of young NGO workers in Bangladesh, led by Shafiqual Haque Choudhury, pledged to develop a new sort of NGO. Its aims would be to eliminate poverty and injustice, and its role would be to spark a peasant movement eventually leading to a peasant-led democratic government for the new country.

Includes all relevant information on national elections and referendums held in Bangladesh since independence in 1971. Part I gives a comprehensive overview of Bangladesh's political history, outlines the evolution of electoral provisions, and presents the current electoral legislation in a standardized manner (suffrage, elected institutions, nomination of candidates, electoral system, organizational context of elections). Part II includes exhaustive electoral statistics in systematic tables (numbers of registered voters, votes cast, the votes for candidates and/or parties in parliamentary and presidential elections and referendums at both the national and regional level, the electoral participation of political parties, the distribution of parliamentary seats, etc.).

Looks at the different levels of change in the countries of South Asia (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) since the end of the cold war, and attempts to determine how, and to what extent, the end of the cold war has been a long‐term determinant in defining the region's foreign and domestic policies. The different sections of the chapter address: the security dimension (including consideration of the effect of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan); democratization; and economic liberalization and regional cooperation.

During the 1970s under Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the fourth High Commissioner, UNHCR embarked on new assistance programmes in a number of refugee and refugee‐like situations around the world. The most notable of these were in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Indo‐China. There were also highly politicized refugee crises in Chile and Argentina. The UNHCR was active in the repatriation and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons in southern Sudan and in Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique. In addition, there were mass exoduses of refugees from Cuba and Vietnam.

Malaysia and Pakistan sought to address their problems through economic growth and the management of ethnic tensions. Malaysia pursued the New Economic Policy (NEP) to favor Malay bumiputras (sons of the soil), and Pakistan, under a military government, pursued aggressive economic growth. However, these strategies did not resolve ethnic tensions as in Malaysia it did not alleviate the economic problems facing Malays, and in Pakistan it favored Punjab at the cost of other provinces, especially East Pakistan. Both states continued to experience serious challenges to their authorities in the form of racial tensions in Malaysia and the Bangladesh movement in Pakistan.

The implementation of the Convention in states in the Pacific, East Asia, South Asia, South‐East Asia, and the Middle East is summarily reviewed. CERD has disagreed with some governments about whether the Convention prohibits discrimination based on caste, and, for example, about the claim that Bangladesh constitutes a ‘post‐racial society’.

This chapter scrutinizes some of the elements of the “minoritization” of Muslims in India and China. Indian Muslims have a history that gives them a centrality in processes of state formation in India, as exemplified by the Mughal Empire, but also by the postcolonial formation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which cannot be found in the history of Chinese Muslims. In the comparison between India and China, the chapter highlights that despite the differences in numerical strength it is the transformation of Muslims from a variety of different groups into a “minority” that in both cases require scrutiny in relation to the construction of a national majority.

This chapter looks at two pivotal states of South Asia: India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan gained their independence in 1947. India succeeded in placing its armed forces under firm and virtually unchallenged state control right from the beginning of independence. However, civil–military relations in Pakistan have been far more “eventful.” The chapter makes three arguments. First and most important, by the end of the first postcolonial decade, the patterns for the drastically different military politics of India and Pakistan were already set. Second, of the numerous reasons for the evolution of different civil–military relations in the two countries, several lie in the circumstances of the 1947 Partition and in the immediate post-Partition period. Third, the British colonial period left behind profound legacies, most of which have positively influenced military affairs in the Subcontinent. The chapter also addresses Bangladesh—from its independence in 1971 to the military take-over in 2007—and what sets its military politics apart from Pakistan's.

This chapter studies the biggest haor system in Bangladesh, the Hakaluki Haor, located in the Sylhet and Moulvi Bazar districts of north-eastern Bangladesh which has been declared an Ecologically Critical Area (ECA). There is an attempt to develop a sustainable management plan for this haor, focusing on problems of conservation and extraction. Using a simple bio-economic model to provide simulations, the chapter examines the policy options available and whether the current policy adopted by the government with the help of NGOs ensures efficiency or sustainability.

This is a review of evidence on the relationship of women’s school attainment to child survival and fertility, with an examination of long-term studies in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Guatemala, an empirically based theory of social and economic causes of child survival, and a summary of previous studies of literacy and health in developing countries. The evidence that women’s schooling acts to reduce child mortality and fertility is strong, and the studies involving literacy are suggestive.

Chapter Nine, “South and South East Asia,” covers Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Maldives. The Maldives bans all religion except Sunni Islam and has used religious restrictions to crack down on religious and political reformers. The other three countries have reputations for moderation, some of them deserved, but there seems to have been an intensification of religious repression in recent years. In Bangladesh and Indonesia, Ahmadis are repressed, as are heterodox groups and Muslims who express reformist and modernist views. While there is government repression, a larger problem is violence by mobs and militias that the government cannot or does not control. Malaysia has had ongoing legal struggles over the conversion of Muslims to other religions, is trying to restrict the religious words that non-Muslims may use, and, claiming that its population is easily confused and so should not be exposed to a range of views, is also repressing heterodox and reformist Muslims.

This chapter explores the weakly institutionalized nature of citizenship in developing countries. It specifically describes how citizenship in developing countries differs markedly from citizenship in developed countries and thus allows more invisible absorption of illegal immigrants. “Blurred membership” attempts to distinguish between a “citizen” and a “foreigner”, which is common in many developing countries, like Malaysia, Pakistan, and India. Establishing the shape and character of blurred membership in these countries will expose how illegal immigrants take advantage of the phenomenon of blurred membership in facilitating their lives. The subjects of blurred membership are undocumented natives, that is, long-term residents without citizenship papers. The citizenship-related infrastructures in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, the three largest senders of illegal immigrants to Malaysia, India, and Pakistan, respectively, are considered to show how these migrants integrate with the populations of the recipient countries, thereby intensifying blurred membership. The existence of blurred membership maybe highlights some of the ways in which the Western, governmental, Westphalian, top-down model of citizenship does not fit the developing world.

The chapter focuses on the implications of India’s external security concerns in the eastern border for the development of the NER of India. It analyses how the development prospect of NER has been affected due to external security concern. It articulates how India’s conduct of foreign policy delimited the external perimeter as well as inner contents of the development of the NER. The central argument of this chapter runs as follows: while the geostrategic location of the NER necessitates an integrated cross-country sub-regional cooperation for its development, till 1990, India’s foreign policy calculus was not much informed of this interest. The external perimeter of development was not in harmony with the development interest of the NER. Although post-1990 Indian foreign policy has opened up opportunities for the NER, the consequent underdevelopment due to the past disharmony has already led to a political chaos crippling the region in responding favourably to these new opportunities.