The Emergence of Bangladesh analyses and celebrates the first 50 years of Bangladesh as a nation, bringing insights from key scholars in Bangladeshi studies to an international audience, as well as ‘bringing home’ to a domestic audience the work of some of the nation’s greatest intellectual exports, the Bangladeshi scholars who have made a mark in their field of study in academia. The book offers unique coverage of the battlegrounds on which the founding of the new nation was fought, including language, power and religion, and provides unique insight into some of the hot spots that continue to shape the development of the nation: the issues of gender, culture, ethnicity, governance, the economy and the army. Those with an interest in understanding the past or present Bangladesh will find this a trove of frank and readable analysis.

Habibul Haque Khondker (Ph.D University of Pittsburgh) is Professor of Sociology at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi. He is the co-editor of Covid-19 and Governance (Routledge, 2021), Asia and Europe in Globalization (Brill, 2006). He co-authored with Bryan Turner, Globalization East and West (Sage, 2010). His research is on global studies.

Olav Muurlink has been involved with education development in Bangladesh, principally Bhola, for 25 years. He is Head of Country, Bangladesh, and chair of the Australian NGO Cooperation in Development (Australia) Incorporated,. He is associate professor in sustainable innovation at Central Queensland University in Brisbane, and formerly Senior Research Fellow at Griffith University.

Asif Bin Ali, a journalist turned academic, is Erasmus Mundus Fellow (2019-2021) at Swansea University, the UK, and Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the lead editor of Buddhist Nationalism Rohingya Crisis andContemporary Politics (2019).