Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Quotas for veterans of major conflicts in this kind of third-world post colonial nation aren’t just a matter of favoring supporters, they’re a necessary coup-avoidance strategy to avoid getting overthrown by men who have guns and know how to use them.
For example, some people are suprised that Mugabe was fine with much of Zimbabwe’s farmland being owned by whites for the first 20 years of independence; he only changed position significantly in the late 90s after agitation by various veteran allies, many of whom were still well armed, and who hadn’t received the dividends they’d been promised after a series of long post-independence separatist struggles they had won. White farmland wasn’t redistributed to these veterans out of some kind of Malema-esque nativist-socialist platform, but because Mugabe feared being overthrown if he didn’t do it.
In Bangladesh Hasina started abolishing the system in 2018, but there were powerful constituencies in both the Awami League and the BNP (and in the ~20 or so extended families who rule Bangladesh and dominate every aspect of its political, economic and legal elite) who feared the consequences of no longer being able to reward the families of countless mid-level peons, and so the courts reversed the reversal, and now the higher courts have reversed that. We shall see what happens.
More generally, the Bangladeshi elite are highly westernized and secularized in what is largely a conservative and deeply religious Muslim country that has (like every Muslim country) seen the growing and significant influence of fundamentalist Islam since the late 1970s that emerged from the Gulf and spread with oil money, and which has extreme levels of wealth inequality. The BNP is in opposition but still largely dominated by these same elites. They all fear being overthrown by Islamists, and have all stashed billions of dollars in Singapore, the US and Canada. Every aspect of politics in Bangladesh must be viewed through this lens.
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