PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This thesis studies Bangladesh's twenty-first-century civil resistance event and explores students' participation and protest activism. This research engages both deductive and inductive analyses; the former aims to test theories in a case, while the latter aims to develop new arguments from the case by using the voice of student participants themselves. The empirical case upon which the two levels of analysis draw is the Shahbag movement which unfolded in 2013 against the backdrop of the trial of war criminals in the country. In the deductive analysis section, the study investigates how the Shahbag movement turned out to be a civil resistance event. It explores the reasons for facilitating students' participation and identifies the use of nonviolent methods in the protest. With the inductive analysis, the study posits a claim that students found the Shahbag movement a practice ground for doing protest activism informed by Culture and Technology (CuTe) attributes. For many years, the conventional wisdom dominating the scholarship suggests that Bangladeshi student protest typically harbors experiences of the violent game of power politics. The scenario, however, appears to be different in the 2013 Shahbag movement. Based on the empirical findings, the current researcher argues that six CuTe connotations seem necessary to account for Bangladeshi students’ activism experience in civil resistance. These include students’ agentic identity disposition of collective mobilization in situations deemed unjust to them, emotion-driven protest participation, a cultural tie of belonging, experience of civil protest culture, enacting citizenship politics through claim-making protest, and penetration of technology into the protest activism. The analysis presented in this thesis is based on student participants’ interviews and secondary information collected from diverse sources, including published books, scholarly journals and non-scientific contents including media reports, and visual contents that appeared in internet sources. Findings from this study provide an indication of a new approach, that is, a nonviolent perspective of Bangladesh’s protest movement and its associated student activism experience. This research is expected to be a significant contribution to civil resistance and student protest movement scholarship. Especially the analysis of the Bangladesh case, being representative of South Asian civil resistance in the twenty-first century, is expected to enlighten scholars of other regions. Moreover, this research is expected to be a unique reference point for future scholars interested in studying students’ nonviolent action in Bangladesh.