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In this project, Raqib aims to unfold the global field of transitional justice, a field typically associated with negotiated settlements and truth commissions rather than popular uprisings. Bangladesh’s recent trial experiment with enforced disappearance and crimes against humanity committed during the July revolution unsettles the classic models derived from South Africa, Latin America, and post-Cold War Europe. Like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission analyzed by Mahmood Mamdani (2000), the Bangladeshi process confronts the dilemma of whether to prioritize restorative reconciliation or punitive accountability. Yet here the initiative has not emerged from elite pact-making but from the survivors themselves, who demand that enforced disappearance be recognized as a crime against humanity. The tribunals also reveal the limits of the “transitional” frame; the very security statutes that once enabled authoritarian violence, through the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Special Powers Act, remain active. This simultaneity of rupture and persistence challenges the teleology implicit in transitional-justice scholarship, where authoritarian pasts are assumed to give way to consolidated democracies. Raqib's research aims to explore the ways justice is imagined when the transition is not from dictatorship to liberal democracy, but from one unstable sovereignty to another, and when the personnel of repression remain embedded in the apparatus of redress.

Part of the CGPACS Lunch Talks. Light lunch will be provided.

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