Journal Abstract

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Editorial:

Governing the Fault Lines: Democracy, Identity, and Institutional Fragility in a Fractured World

What does it mean to govern well in an age of fracture? The six articles gathered in this issue do not offer a single answer,nor should they. But read together, they trace a remarkably coherent set of anxieties: about the erosion of democratic norms, the uneven distribution of institutional capacity, and the stubborn persistence of exclusion even where reform is most urgently needed. These are not abstract concerns. They are the prevailing conditions of politics across South Asia, the Indo-Pacific, and beyond.

We open with A.R.M. Imtiyaz's study of religious authoritarianism among Sri Lankan Muslims, and it sets an appropriately demanding tone. Many observers saw the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks as a sudden and unexpected manifestation of radicalization. Imtiyaz is not persuaded by this reading, and his skepticism is well-founded. By tracing the structural conditions that gave rise to the National Thowheed Jamaat—transformations in religious education, the logic of ethnic party politics, and transnational ideological currents—he shows that radicalization is rarely deviance. It is, more often, an outcome: institutionally produced, politically conditioned, and therefore politically addressable. Equally important is his refusal to treat Muslim authoritarianism in isolation from the Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism that shapes the environment in which minority identities are negotiated. Reciprocal radicalization, competitive victimhood, the long shadow of civil war—these are the actual coordinates of Sri Lanka's democratic predicament, and this article maps them with care.

Saeed Ahmed's contribution takes a wider angle of vision, examining how globalization has reordered not just markets but the grammar of political authority itself. The piece arrives at a propitious moment. The language of "deglobalization" has become fashionable in policy circles, but Ahmed resists the temptation of dramatic reversals. What he sees instead is reconfiguration—a messy, contested renegotiation of sovereignty, regulatory capacity, and institutional legitimacy that is reshaping governance from the inside out. His concept of glocalized polyarchic pluralism will not be to every reader's taste, but the underlying intuition is sound: that the real challenge for contemporary democracy is not whether to engage with global forces, but how to do so without further concentrating power or deepening inequality. In a period defined by platform capitalism, climate negotiations, and strategic decoupling, that question could hardly be more pressing.

Two articles engage directly with the internal stresses of Bangladesh's public institutions, and both reward careful reading. Shakila Akter and Sadia Khanom's study of university dropout confronts a troubling paradox: enrollment in Bangladeshi higher education has expanded substantially, yet attrition remains stubbornly high, and its burden falls disproportionately on students from low-income and rural backgrounds. The familiar culprits are financial precarity, inadequate housing, early marriage, and safety concerns, but the authors go further, examining how institutional failures compound material disadvantages. Poor academic support, communication gaps between faculty and students, and underequipped campuses: these are not incidental features but structural conditions that the post-COVID reassessment of retention policy cannot afford to ignore.

Ayesha Siddika and her co-authors take up a different dimension of Bangladeshi governance reform through their examination of e-mutation services in local land administration. Digital land governance is, in principle, a promising avenue for reducing corruption and improving service delivery. In practice, the picture is considerably more complicated. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model, the study reveals how digital illiteracy, infrastructure constraints, the persistence of intermediaries, and gendered patterns of exclusion complicate adoption in ways that purely technocratic assessments tend to miss. There is a broader lesson here that extends well beyond Bangladesh: digitization does not automatically democratize access. Institutional design and social context remain decisive.

Jishad, Hassan, and Kwun-Sun Lau shift attention to the international arena with a timely analysis of Bangladesh-UK relations in the post-Brexit era. The argument—that Global Britain's strategic recalibration has elevated Bangladesh's geopolitical significance—is more substantive than it might initially appear. The authors are not simply documenting warmer diplomatic relations; they are tracing how Bangladesh's location, its role in Indo-Pacific security architecture, and its centrality to the Rohingya crisis have combined to make it a meaningful node in Britain's post-imperial foreign policy imagination. The incorporation of diaspora dynamics into this analysis provides a valuable layer of complexity, serving as a reminder that state-to-state relations are not always the entirety of the story.
Hasanul Haque closes the main articles with a reform proposal that is, in the best sense, refreshingly practical. The mismatch between ministerial authority and sectoral expertise is a structural problem in parliamentary democracies, and it is one that tends to worsen as policy domains become more technically complex. Haque's proposal for a dual mandate system—pairing constituency-based MPs with a small cohort of nationally elected sector specialists—is neither technocratic fantasy nor constitutional radicalism. It is a carefully reasoned attempt to strengthen democratic accountability and expert governance simultaneously, holding both values in productive tension rather than sacrificing one to the other. Whether it travels beyond Bangladesh is an open question, but the framework it offers deserves serious engagement.

Two book reviews by Clay Wescott and Khurshida Jahan Trisha round out the issue with characteristic critical acuity.