Habib Siddiqui

  Heavy monsoon rains and landslides in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar refugee camps have exposed the limits of the country’s Rohingya refugee policy. Although extreme weather triggered the latest deaths and destruction, the scale of the emergency has been intensified by overcrowding, unsafe settlement patterns, inadequate shelters, weak drainage systems, funding shortages and restrictions on durable construction. Bangladesh hosts approximately 1.2 million Rohingya refugees and forcibly displaced people from Myanmar. Most live in 33 highly congested camps in Cox’s Bazar, where bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters have been built across steep and environmentally fragile hillsides. These camps were established as emergency settlements, but the emergency has continued for almost a decade. The latest monsoon disaster demonstrates the danger of treating a long-term displacement crisis as a temporary administrative challenge. Between 4 and 9 July 2026, hundreds of weather-related incidents were recor...

You are invited to an exciting BDI webinar featuring Professor Syed Saad Andaleeb, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Marketing, Pennsylvania  State University, 3rd Vice-chancellor of BRAC University  Toward Epistemic Emancipation: Research Universities and Academic Renaissance in the Global South Moderator: Prof. Munir Quddus  Saturday, August 22, 2026 10:00 am USA (Central); 9:00 pm Dhaka, Bangladesh,  via Zoom: https://american.zoom.us/j/7905913249?omn=93091477184   Join from Zoom Workplace app - Zoom “Bangladesh lacks visibility as a scholarly society…[with] a relatively disjointed and poorly institutionalized field of knowledge production” (Van Schendel, 2019). This searing observation ought to awaken all Bangladeshis in the academic world. Where China was once at par with Bangladesh on academic metrics in the 1960s, it has overtaken the United States today in research production, both in total scientific output and in top-tier, high-impact publications...

  Take a map of South Asia and let your eyes trace the outline of one small waterlogged country tucked into the curve of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh. Now look at everything touching its borders. To the west and north, India roughly 80% Hindu. Further north, hidden in the Himalayan foothills, Nepal Hindu majority as well. To the northeast, Bhutan quietly Buddhist. Along the southeastern edge, Myanmar, Buddhist too. Every single neighbor this country has is majority non-Muslim. And yet, inside that border, in a nation you could tuck inside the state of Iowa with room to spare, lives somewhere close to 170 million Muslims. That makes Bangladesh the fourth largest Muslim country on Earth, behind only Indonesia, Pakistan, and India in sheer population. No caliph ever sent a fleet up these rivers to conquer this land for Islam. No great Arab army marched across this delta in the name of the faith. So sit with that question for a second because it's stranger than it first sounds. Ho...

On 5 August, an uprising that began with students brought down a 15-year government in a day of bloodshed, celebration and historic change The morning of 5 August was cold, strangely so for early August. The night before had been the worst of my life and the most alive I had ever felt, both at once. Hundreds of thousands of people had announced they would march on Ganabhaban that day, and my Facebook feed had turned into a scroll of last wishes and farewells. I wrote a long post setting down what I wanted to say if I did not come home.  That was the temper of the time, people were ready to die. I did not sleep. As the first light came up I got out of bed, thinking, almost calmly, that if I were to leave the mortal realm today, what a peaceful day it would be to meet my Maker. At 8 in the morning I was ready in my bulletproof vest and helmet, and my sister tied a rakhi on my wrist and saw me off with tears in her eyes.  This was the day the uprising had been walking toward sinc...