BASAS Annual Lecture & Book Prize Presentation

Professor Naomi Hossain (SOAS, University of London) will speak about 'Bangladesh’s Monsoon Uprising' in this lecture co-hosted by the British Association for South Asian Studies & University of Leeds

The student-led popular uprising that unseated Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina after 15 years of increasingly authoritarian rule in 2024 erupted out of nowhere. The international community, expert observers, and much of the Bangladeshi public – even many protestors themselves – were surprised by its success.

Because it was so unexpected, it unleashed a tsunami of speculation, conspiracy theories, and misinformation. These have clouded understanding of the causes and mechanisms of the uprising, and obscured the lessons for the democratization effort that has been underway since.

In this lecture, Professor Naomi Hossain will review the main explanations of this political cataclysm in the world’s eighth largest nation, assessing the supporting evidence for the different claims. Drawing on explanations from political economy, political sociology and Bangladesh’s turbulent political history, the lecture will show that the Monsoon Uprising is best understood as part of a larger international wave of popular anti-incumbent politics amid a protracted cost-of-living crisis.

But while the main drivers of the Bangladesh uprising are rooted in a broader global failure to govern the economy for people instead of profit, the repertoires of protestors and the responses of public authorities must be understood in the context of Bangladesh’s specific political economy and its bloody political history.

About the speaker

Professor Naomi Hossain is Global Research Professor in the Department of Development Studies and Director, SOAS Development for Transformation Centre (DevTraC). As a political sociologist interested in how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need, Naomi’s work centres on two distinct but occasionally converging areas: the politics of Bangladesh’s development, and the contentious politics of public services and disasters (beyond Bangladesh). In both areas, she focuses on issues of state accountability and responsiveness, protest and civic agency, and the role of aid. To both she brings an interest in concepts and frameworks from social history, in particular the ‘moral economy’.

With an academic background in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies, Naomi’s work aims to be collaborative, inter-disciplinary, accessible and to make a difference that goes beyond the scholarly. She has worked with researchers from around the world as well as with social movements, civic actors, artists, governments and aid agencies around the world. She has researched extensively across Bangladesh, as well as managing large international studies spanning another 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

Her work has examined elite perceptions of poverty; accountability for hunger, social protection, and inflationary price crises; complaints mechanisms; the politics of educational reform; civil society and civic space; the political effects of disasters; and the role of protest in holding public authorities to account, among other issues. Naomi is Bangladeshi-Irish and has lived in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the UK and the USA. She previously worked at the Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO; the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.

More information

The lecture will be followed by a wine reception ((6-7:30pm) in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. Please complete this form if you wish to attend the reception.

There is no need to book for the lecture: please just turn up!

This event is co-hosted by the British Association for South Asian Studies (BASAS) and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

For further information please visit the BASAS website or email Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy at d.roy1@leeds.ac.uk.

Image

Professor Naomi Hossain from SOAS, University of London. Image courtesy of the speaker.