 Okay, good morning or good afternoon or good evening depending on where we're finding you and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace virtual conversation. My name is Dan Markey. I'm a senior advisor with the South Asian Program at USIP and it's a real pleasure today to be able to introduce the two authors, the co-authors of a recent USIP report and to be able to host a conversation with them about the contents of that report and its implications. Now our plan today is to have a moderated conversation at the outset and then eventually we'll open the floor to your questions from the audience and so I just wanted to flag that from the outset that for those of us who are joining us virtually you can do so on a variety of different platforms but if you wish to ask a question the best way to do that is through usip.org where you'll be able to find a question function you can just type it in and that way it'll get to me so that I can pose it to our two authors. What I'd like to begin by doing of course is to introduce our two authors and they are on the screen with me now. The first is Mubashir Hassan. He is an adjunct research fellow in the Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative at the School of Social Science and Psychology in the University of Western Sydney. He's the author of the book Islam and Politics in Bangladesh published in 2020 and the co-editor of the book Radicalization in South Asia published in 2019. He's a member of the Research Advisory Council at the Resolve Network and formerly a Resolve Network Fellow in Bangladesh in 2017. He worked as a researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway from 2018 to 2020 and taught political science and journalism in Bangladeshi universities. In 2022 Griffith Business School at Griffith University in Australia awarded Mubashir with an outstanding International Alumnus Award for his works on democracy and human rights in Bangladesh. He holds a PhD from Griffith University in Australia. So he's our first author. Our second author is Jeffrey McDonald. He's a senior advisor for Asia and Bangladesh at the International Republican Institute and he is from 2018 to 2022. He was IRI's Bangladesh Country Director where he oversaw IRI's programs on countering violent extremism and other democracy and governance issues. He lived in Dhaka from 2019 to 2021 and continues to travel to Bangladesh regularly. He's written over a dozen articles, reports and book chapters on Bangladesh which have been published by Foreign Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. Institute of Peace, of course, and other academic and policy outlets. He holds a PhD from the University of Denver and is taught political science at Grinnell College, George Washington University and elsewhere. So obviously we have two tremendous experts on the topic here and the specific issue that we'll be focusing on of course is the persistent challenge of extremism in Bangladesh and you can access not only this video but also the report itself on the USIP website and I would certainly commend it to you as a great place to learn more about this issue. But for now we're going to dive right in. I'm going to kick it off with a question for Jeffrey, a general question. This report looks at the topic of extremism in Bangladesh and I guess one good place to start would be to ask how you actually define extremism and how your report tries to frame that issue. Thanks Dan and good morning, good evening to those watching today. I think to frame our report Mubasher and I wanted to critically assess this narrative in Bangladesh as a country that essentially has extremism under control right in recent years and look of course in some sense this is certainly true. Terrorism is down precipitously in Bangladesh since the holy artisan attack. The audience probably familiar with the holy artisan attack in July of 2016. Five militants stormed a cafe in the diplomatic zone of downtown Dhaka, executed 20 hostages and had a long standoff. It was a quite spectacular attack that I think shocked a lot of international observers and I think kind of shook a lot of the domestic policymakers in Bangladesh and since that point we've seen a real decline in terrorist attacks and deaths due to terrorism and this is certainly due in part to effective state action and a lot of international attention and funding but since that point we've seen attention wane on this issue and so we felt that this narrative about kind of Bangladesh having kind of controlled this is kind of conflating extremism and terrorism in a way that obscures other types of violence behavior of beliefs that kind of might share some of the maybe ideological correlates of Islamist extremism that drove the holy artisan attack and these are kind of violence against LGBTQ people, Ahmadiyya, Hindu minority, atheists and others and so we wanted to examine this issue with a broader lens and I'll take just a minute more to talk about what that lens was and so we structured this report around a spectrum of religious extremism essentially defined by its level of militancy. So we got on the one end religiously inspired or grounded illiberalism that's often held by many ordinary citizens in Bangladesh this can include intolerant or violent attitudes towards the LGBTQ community religious minorities other minority groups these attitudes often don't necessarily result in violence unless there's a specific incident that provokes it or you see elite manipulation on the issue right on the other end of the spectrum you've got violent extremist organizations like ISIS, AQIS which continue to advocate and employ violence to support an Islamic political and social agenda in Bangladesh and then in the middle you've got these organized Islamist groups that are certainly illiberal right and advocate a strict form of Islamic governance but typically do not openly promote violence and so you've got this spectrum which you know of organizations or ideas that share this illiberal and exclusionary interpretation of Islam but have differing degrees of ideological coherence and willingness to use violence and so we thought this spectrum which we use in the report better captures this challenge of religious extremism in Bangladesh and of course you know there's always have to create that use the caveat here that religious extremism apparent to Islam or unique to Islam but as a Muslim majority country Islamic extremism is the most prevalent and consequential form of religious extremism so it's the focus of our report. That's great and a great way to kick things off in terms of framing the various issues and and how at some level they're interconnected I want to get into that a little bit more but let me let me push it over to Mabashir now and get a different aspect of the framing of the report because you know in this report it's clear that there are some complicated relationships between a series of different ideas. You've got Islam as Jeffrey was just talking about not necessarily a driver but is certainly implicated in these questions. We've got secularism which is a critical part of Bangladesh's political history you've got just outright politics in the normal sense of contestation for power and you have violence which is obviously the thing that worries us in some ways the most so I'd like you to at least pick a piece of this and maybe you can focus on the relationship between religion and secularism in Bangladesh and how that relates to this question of Islamic militancy within that environment which doesn't make Bangladesh unique but certainly is a bit different from other societies and it's worth thinking about it in its own context. Thanks Dan it's a great question I think when we talk about religion and secularism in Bangladesh it's complicated and there is no clear dichotomy between these two concepts in the country so in Bangladesh there are people and in political spectrum religion is translated as a pluralist idea which is in many ways true in many contexts and also secularism was translated as a religious idea that protects people from all faiths and promotes religious harmony so you could see that that this lack of clear dichotomy makes the issue of Bangladesh and the analysis on Bangladesh quite tough to decipher that what's really going on and where is the boundary between religion and secularism and I think what we try to what Jeffrey and I try to unpack in our report is that there are many meanings of religion and secularism and they kind of overlaps in many in political spectrums and when we put that those concepts in relation to Islamic militancy and violence we also need to remember that in Bangladesh political violence and state violence both are quite prevalent and we are looking at an issue that is part of in many ways part of cultural production when you say cultural production it means that there are religious violence there are even secular violence to to some extent and within this context there are many groups that we laid out in our report quite clearly that promotes particular particular worldview and they're also connected with the geopolitical evolution of Islamist militants again if I can follow up just just with a question to get a little bit more into just this sort of at a definitional level and a historical level what what is secularism in Bangladesh because different societies in a sense have you know same word but different practical meanings and I'd be curious to better understand it in the in the Bangladeshi case so there are there are when we talk about secularism in Bangladesh we need to be mindful that there are two levels of interpretation one is from the society level where there are secular activists and groups and another is from the political and state platforms and I have seen in my research and through the through our report as well that in political spectrum secularism does not exclude religion so you know prior the current prime minister Sheikh Hasina has publicly mentioned many times that secularism is part of Islam and that promotes religious harmony and if you go back to the beginning of the history of the emancipation of Bangladesh even then even though it was a constitutionally secular state there are many religious policies being taken and I think that if we want to define political secularism in Bangladesh perhaps the current constitutional notion explains it better which is it is a constitutionally secular country but the state has a religion that is Islam and many people who don't really find it difficult to decipher but once they would delve into the history I think it would make more sense but that is different from the societal explanation of secularism especially when you talk about secular activists and so forth right right so at a political level secularism in Bangladesh doesn't mean the absence of religious faith in fact it means the presence of a vision but one that's supposed to create space for different faiths but it does so through a religious lens which you know one could be forgiven for finding that a bit complicated but it's an important thing to understand let's move on you know this report looks at the state of contemporary extremist attitudes and violence as Jeffrey you pointed out since that horrific 2016 terrorist attack and it looks at four kinds of extremism so it looks at violent extremism extremist organizations or shorthand VEOs it looks at LGBTQ attacks it looks at attacks on non-muslims and it looks at attacks on Muslim minorities and secularists so I wonder if you could at least pick a couple of these and give us a little bit more flavor and detail so maybe the VEO story and the LGBTQ attacks if you're willing what's what's going on there yeah absolutely and I think these are these two types of violence that that you cited here the VEOs extremist organizations and the LGBTQ attacks are kind of on either end of our our spectrum in some ways that that I laid out at the beginning and so I can start with the violent extremist organizations and so what we're seeing again over the past now you know six years or so right since since the since the holy artisan attack there has been a clear decline in incidents of terrorism and deaths due to those incidents still you do see the presence of transnational regional domestic extremist groups that continue to operate and recruit in or at least want to operate and recruit in Bangladesh and on the on the transnational front you know though much diminished right in recent years right isis has released bangla language propaganda they they apparently nominated some sort of the Bengali Amir right to kind of oversee its operations in Bangladesh and you've seen isis recruitment in Bangladesh focus in on the kind of the what they would they cite as the kind of the oppressive nature of the government that parties are insufficiently Muslim that there's too much western and non-muslim influence and isis has taken credit for recent I think it was in 2019 a series of small scale kind of bomb attacks on police and isis took credit for those attacks and the the trial for the holy artisan attackers one of one of the the the the attackers came out of the courthouse and was wearing an isis cap right and it was very much shocking to to those watching right and it demonstrated a continued at least social influence of these sorts of transnational terrorist groups you then have the regional terrorist groups right AQIS okay to in the Indian subcontinent is probably the most prominent you know they have been implicated in blogger murders and other kinds of violence over the past decade they continue to recruit online with similar messages to what we see isis using about Indian and Hindu influence in the country a government that's insufficiently Muslim and religious and that women are inappropriate leaders is another component of their messaging and of course Bangladesh has been been led by almost consecutive women leaders since since 1991 and then you have a series of domestic groups right like Neo-JMB, ABT, a lot of acronyms here of these smaller groups that have at least nominal affiliations with those bigger kind of regional and transnational movements and so you know while we have seen this decline in in terrorist attacks we do see the persistence of these organizations we don't want to overstate this problem right I think the scope and reach of these groups is not entirely clear but they certainly have an undeniable presence online we continue to see that type of recruitment and we're seeing Bangladesh police security forces arrest people who are affiliated with these organizations on the ground so they're clearly still there and it's still an issue right and so that on our kind of spectrum is a kind of one side of that sort of the kind of militant Islamism on the other side which again has some relations certainly to it is these sort of extremism targeting the LGBTQ community now this is a type of extremism that has been perpetrated by some of these extremist organizations that I just laid out I think it is more often than not though takes the form of nonviolent harassment or kind of non-life life-threatening violence targeting LGBTQ individuals right so you had in 2016 the high-profile murders of two LGBTQ activists Rohan Manan and Tanoy Mahbub which you know were were big right international events right kind of got a lot of attention since that point these sorts of high-profile murders of LGBTQ activists have declined to probably at least in part to effective state action but also just LGBTQ activism has gone underground right there's been you have a real movement away from any kind of public advocacy on this issue and there's you know research that I've worked on at IRI has shown a lot of this that we conducted a snowball sample survey and a focus group study of the LGBTQ community in Bangladesh which show is kind of persistent and routine violence harassment social ostracism in the community this includes within the family sexual violence from strangers from the police discrimination and housing jobs medical care and elsewhere and in these studies are the participant's site and illiberal interpretation of Islam is one of the key drivers of this violence and discrimination in another study we did a content analysis of online commentary around this incident that occurred in 2020 where a former of this online education firm posted a pro LGBTQ comment on his Facebook page his personal Facebook page and he immediately started received death threats and the company itself was targeted and the employees that worked for the company were received death threats and so what we did was do a kind of a content analysis of some of the common the online commentary on this issue right on on YouTube videos or Facebook posts and we found kind of unsurprisingly is that you know a lot of these comments and posts right were kind of grounded in a kind of religious prohibitions on same-sex intercourse right and and LGBTQ individuals and so overall while these these anti-LGBTQ attitudes in Bangladesh typically they're not always certainly produced less I think deadly violence than the explicitly violent belief systems of these extremist organizations that I discussed earlier these anti-LGBTQ attitudes are certainly they're more widespread they're no doubt impact more people and they share a lot of the ideological underpinnings of these organizations these more explicitly extremist organizations which it's why it's on the sort of spectrum of extremism that we wanted to discuss in the paper thanks Jeffrey that's that's a really great way to characterize kind of again this spectrum of attitudes you're starting with a sort of highly organized and extremely militant with clear connections to violence on the one hand and then the other hand a kind of a diffuse societal potential for violent views but with lacking that organization and so just a quick follow-up on that actually have a couple of questions there one is you know you made the point that there there are kind of ideological underpinnings that link these two but why maybe this takes you back to your first argument why see them as like or interconnected in other words could you have one without the other do the highly organized really violent maybe most most dangerous groups swim in the societal sea of these illiberal attitudes in other words do they give them sustenance or are they basically just operating kind of in parallel how do you how do you actually see the the connections between the two ends of the spectrum other than purely on the basis of kind of ideas under underlying them I would say I think they use your terminology kind of swim in this kind of sea of of social liberalism and probably can pull from it and and grow within it but also inflame it right and so I don't think it is it's certainly not a coincidence that that many of these extremist organizations have explicitly targeted and murdered lgbtq activists right so it's very much part of the overall ideology now I think anti anti lgbtq beliefs are probably widely held in Bangladesh it doesn't mean these people are necessarily are are going to run over to these extremist organizations I think that's of course not the case right but it demonstrates I think a kind of social raw material that these sort of extremist organizations can pull from and then their attacks their rhetoric their online recruitment inflame some of of those social attitudes and then normalizes it in a variety of ways so I think they are they're related in the kind of an ideational way but it's a kind of I think a complicated and almost reciprocal relationship between the sort of social conservatism that exists and then the organized extremism that can draw on it but also inflame it that's it's really helpful I guess one one other but more specific question is that if I'm not mistaken in the report there was an observation that the government seemed to be downplaying this kind of spectrum of attitudes or or concerns especially about the high end groups like ISIS did I get that right is that is that correct and and why would that be I wasn't clear on on that sure I think the I think the concern on the part of the awamili government is a post holy artisan you had a kind of evaporation of economic activity you had embassies started treating it as a high security post you had companies pulling out right and so this hurt the the the country economically it also hurt the general reputation of the country as a as a country of some kind of syncretic and liberal interpretations of the religion and so I think the the awamili government but probably any government that was in power right if it was a different government probably would have been doing the same thing has I think been wary of kind of overstating these connections right that they want to say these are domestic groups that are that are kind of coming out these the terrorist groups are kind of domestic organizations that we can control ourselves these are not linked to these bigger international issues right and by also keeping it as domestic as terrorism as a domestic problem it can be linked up to domestic politics which is also to the advantage of the ruling party so there are islamist movements in the country opposition parties right and when you kind of ground it in domestic issues you can you can more effectively infuse politics into it if it's a problem that's emanating from outside of the country it's harder to make it political and it's also harder to control so I think the government has downplayed this connection but to me the connection seemed quite clear that that ISIS AQS these organizations have some degree of operations either online or on the ground in the country despite many of these denials I think is well documented in the media and and other other reports great thank you very helpful Mubash let me let me come back to you now you know there were these other so we had four categories of extremism and Jeffrey's talked about two of them I wonder if you could pick up on on some of the others this violence against non-muslims in Bangladesh and violence against Muslim minorities and secularists no I mean this this has been a persistent problem since 2013 we've seen that there was every year there were targeted attack on religious minorities they could they are Hindus they are Buddhist and also some Sufi Muslims as well who are proclaimed as non-muslim by more hardline Islamist and this issue has been a recurrent theme and that degree varies year to year I think there was a and also atheist where the target of the militant attack and over 40 of killing that happened between 2013 and 2016 in Bangladesh and they were by highly organized militant attack and there were in the media there were reports that there was a hit list and these people were being targeted many of them were slain and the issue of Hindus the issue of attack against the Hindus has been persistent and also the Buddhist and the with the evolution of Facebook and the widespread use of Facebook Facebook become a medium of what is the best way to put it medium of promoting religious hatred against religious minorities and it is it is becoming a problem and as I said the degree varies year to year but against the backdrop of international pressure and march reporting it seems to be quite down at the moment but the mentality persist and another complicated thing about these attacks is that many of them could be not religiously motivated while using this religious violence phase many of them could be to overtake their homes their properties and those sort of stuff and in Bangladesh land grabbing of political opposition is part of political culture I'm not downplaying the by anywhere that the problem persists and what I'm saying that it is difficult to disassociate which one is religiously motivated attack and which are not religiously motivated attack even an attack which is not religiously motivated attack could use the camouflage of religious violence. Thank you very helpful and a couple of things I want to the threads I want to pursue with you a little further before I do that I did want to remind our online audience that if you have questions you can put them in the question box on usip.org if you're watching us through that but again let me let me pick up just at least one piece of this because you mentioned Facebook and this is this is a problem not just in Bangladesh but elsewhere in terms of the connections between social media and mobilization of violence within societies and I just wanted to give you the opportunity to say a little bit more about how that has actually worked and what if anything anyone including Facebook itself has done or might do to address that one specific piece of the puzzle. I think I would answer part and it would be great if Jeffrey Johnson because we both co-read an article for the foreign policy magazine on this about how Facebook who has religious violence so the part I want to focus on is the the pattern of the attacks on Facebook based on Facebook post or persistent it's just someone would create fake Facebook post and in the Facebook post there will be message that some religious someone who is from religious minority background heard the or dishonored the Muslim prophet and god and with that messaging they would mobilize they would mobilize the local people and then they will attack and this this this has been the way many religious attacks took place in Bangladesh against the minorities maybe Jeffrey could jump in with our finding on how Facebook now addressing this problem. Yeah that'd be great Jeffrey. Sure you know I should first say you know I think I'm not a tech specialist but I can give my kind of understanding you know when you know a lot of this stuff has been public there's been a long-standing kind of I think debate between Facebook and its critics now for for years at this point you know I think what what Facebook says is they are trying to hire more as mobile said right so you have explicit hate speech some of it fake designed almost designed deliberately to to provoke these sorts of attacks it seems right and it's being put on Facebook and Facebook is going to platform to provoke these sorts of attacks you don't need Facebook for this type of violence but we're seeing Facebook playing an increasingly common role in this type of violence so how do you control it Facebook is saying they're hiring more kind of Bangla language specialists to be reviewing this they're tweaking their algorithms but it just quite honestly just doesn't seem to be working right I mean and it maybe it is maybe it is diminishing it's hard to know the counterfactual right of what it's taking down and how much it's able to control overall but we're seeing it's essentially an annual recurrence here of this type of social media driven violence in fact we're about the kind of the year anniversary here is Durga Pooja right of the a year ago you had these large-scale Hindu riots that were provoked by a fake Facebook post that was that was very there was a video that was clearly deliberately fake that was made to provoke this sort of violence so I think what you know not being a tech specialist I would say I think what we're interested in in Facebook doing more or maybe enhancing its efforts to control this sort of rhetoric online and limiting its spread right it's hard to to prevent it from going online but you can limit its spread right how many times it's shared how many likes it gets how long it lasts online and the offending videos from a year ago if I remember correctly we're online for for three days if I double check me on that but for an extended period I think it was three days right online right being shared provoking the sort of violence before Facebook took it down so it's it's an extraordinarily difficult challenge to address no doubt I mean the Facebook as a kind of communication platform is just difficult to control but it seems clear that that more needs to be done to prevent this type of hate speech fake fake rhetoric that's that's being designed to exacerbate this sort of violence interesting well this raises a lot of questions about policy options and policy directions I want to get to those in a minute I do want to make sure that we get to the the heart of the matter which is I'm gonna come back to Mubasher why why does this continue to be such a such a problem I mean we've the two of you have done a fantastic job kind of sketching out the the categories of the problem and systematically reviewing it and giving us reasons to be worried that it does persist but what are the what are the factors that that lay this out I think the report sets out five of them some of them are longstanding some of them are new one is the influence of Islamist social political movements so I wonder you know that's if you can unpack that what Islamist social political movement what what you mean by that and what work it's doing in your analysis so Islamist social political movements means there are illiberal religious forces in the society who are organized and who are pursuing and advancing at least until 2018 vigorously they are pursuing agendas like secular and atheist authors should be should face capital punishment there would be no mixing between man and women in the public and and and so forth so that is that is based on the Islamic seminaries and an organization called Hefa Jyothi Islam that who pursued it and their their route many people finds their route in 2008 13 but they are deeply rooted and they their route could be traced back to the British colonial period so they are deeply rooted into the society so that that is a that is a platform that advances illiberal values and then there are more formal Islamist parties who also support these illiberal values and if you see the target of the who were the target in 23rd from 23rd into 2016 they were the secular atheist writers bloggers publishers Sufi Muslims non-Muslims and so forth and if you see that there is a correlation between the between the demand of these Islamist social political movement who do want them to be tried legally but at the same time what do they do is that they popularized this idea that they are enemy of religion and within the popularized idea that means that it gets some fuel and which are then by are recruited by the militant organization and execute those things so that's that's the way it at least it worked in in the in the past decade so and also the problem of the counterpart the secular when we say secularist we're not really talking about the liberal force it's also liberal in many ways so there is so within this illiberal political socio-cultural practice more organized militant groups took advantage very important okay thank you so so that gives us a kind of a window into features of Bangladeshi society and politics some of which are actually deeply rooted as you say and quite long-standing i mean go back to to pre-independence timeframe um jeffrey if i can switch over to you uh there are aspects that are also new and different so the story is evolving and some of these are are uh quite new um you the report points to covid-19 as a as a perhaps an exacerbating factor but also regional politics and i wonder if you could pick one of these i'm actually quite interested in the regional politics angle um how Bangladesh's neighbors and what's happening with them maybe affecting uh what's happening inside of Bangladesh uh on these on these issues sure happy to focus on the regional politics so we can come back to to covid if there are there are questions on that so you know i think when we think about how regional politics is exacerbating this challenge of extremism there are i think three key countries to look at you gotta look at india you look at Myanmar and you look at afghanistan right india really has the the outsized influence here as the as the big neighbor and what we've seen under the the bjp is a rise in rhetoric and policies that are widely perceived in Bangladesh if not kind of explicitly seen as as anti-muslim right the citizenship registry in Assam the citizen citizenship amendment act there have been border killings of Bangladesh she's on the border right a lot of this is kind of ramping up right anti-indian sentiment right that i think at least anecdotally appears to be growing and there's not not great survey data on this question but you know i've been working on Bangladesh for for close to a decade i think you hear on the street at the elite level criticism more far more criticism of india than i've seen right you think it's been building over time and kind of reaching a peak at this point and i think what we saw i think demonstrated by the the protests in 2021 around the renderer modi's visit to Dhaka you had large-scale protests you know hafaza led many of them right you Mubasher discussed hafaza but there were also conservative madrasas you had leftists also protesting right so it's a it's a diverse movement here that's quite critical of india right and because anti-hindu and anti-indian sentiment um are seen in the rhetoric of these extremist organizations where you see it online you see ISIS AQIS these other extremist organizations talking about how indian influence hindu influence is a is bad for Bangladesh when you see the masses also moving to that view it also it kind of feeds this this dynamic and so you have anti-muslim actions in india pushing this dynamic of extremism in in Bangladesh um on Myanmar i think the actions of of Myanmar on targeting the the muslim marhinga community also feeds extremism right and probably in in two key ways one it can it can provoke anti-buddhist action and sentiment in the border regions right and i've done research in these border regions with with in buddhist communities that have been targeted by kind of islamist and jamaat led led violence in those areas and they'll say that when you see repression of muslims across the border jamaat islamist movements in the local area will use that example to target to target their community and so you've seen it spur this this type of radicalization a second way is just the marhinga camps themselves have become focal points of potential radicalization at least right so you're seeing kind of islamist groups like like arsa in the marhinga community becoming more powerful islamist Bangladeshi groups are providing a lot of aid and support they're quite popular in the camps we don't want to overstate this threat and and present refugees as kind of inherent threat um because they're they're certainly not but research in the camps and including my own and my own research in in the camps like there is concern even among marhinga themselves about the influence of kind of islamist movements and and radicalization there right so you're seeing like the anti the Myanmar action inflaming the problem finally afghanistan right which is is a much more contemporary issue i mean i guess they're all contemporary but afghanistan we're talking about the taliban takeover so so quite recent right and there's a lot there's a lot of concern that taliban victory has the potential to embolden terrorism there are reports that at least a handful of Bangladeshis went to afghanistan to join the the talibans fight against against the government there after the victory there's a lot of analysis of social media in Bangladesh that showed wide spread celebration and praise of of the taliban so there's concern among security analysts that the taliban's victory could inspire radicalization it could encourage militants potentially to go back to afghanistan for training which was an issue that that that Bangladesh saw in the in the eighties it could revive some of the support for domestic groups which seem to be be not quite dormant but but but but contained relatively well and potentially embolden some of these extremist groups to to ramp up their recruitment right and so you're seeing all these kind of regional dynamics kind of what happens domestically in these countries is feeding into a dynamic of extremism in Bangladesh it's hard for the Bangladesh government to control it's just something that is is occurring largely it's outside of their borders and in ways that they they can't they they don't they have they limited levers to control this this these sorts of issues thank you yeah an incredibly difficult neighborhood one could imagine sticking Bangladesh someplace else on the on the world map where it wouldn't have so many of these transnational factors to have to grapple with listen we're getting a lot of great questions coming in and i want to i want to give some some time to those i do want to remind our audience that if you want to ask questions you can put them in on usip.org there is a question function there mubasher i was going to ask you this anyway but some of our questioners have have already gotten to it they're trying to draw the connection between the state of democracy in Bangladesh and some of these outcomes and you know so here we have let's see if i can pull up one questions about the concentration of power in the awami league a shift in alliance with islamist politicians and actors towards the awami league so some of the features within democratic politics and specifically party politics but also if you wouldn't mind commenting on the broader state of democracy and how that relates to these problems i think that would be useful no that's a great question i think i think to understand Bangladesh one should look into the vast number of youths in the country most a majority of Bangladesh is now are born after 1971 so it gives them understanding that it's a it's a it's a country full of young people and it's a natural tendency of the youth to enjoy freedom if they're not grown up in a highly authoritarian dictatorial country which Bangladesh was not and then so there is a direct in many ways there are some correlation between the persistent authoritarianism human rights violation and people are not being able to express politically within the bound of law so i think it's a pair it's a paramount importance that um there you know there should be more uh on more to support political pluralism and democracy in Bangladesh the country hasn't seen any free and fair elections since 2008 and most of the most of the talks we talk about in our report happened within the past decade and that says a lot without saying things explicitly i think yeah so uh so the closing of political space uh you're pointing out is not just i mean it's an immediate problem or problem that's been going on for the past decade but it is also a kind of a deeper problem in terms of what the expectations of the young Bangladeshis are for their for their polity which is really important so you know we've we've spent a lot of time now talking about all the problems uh and uh and that's quite right because i think a big part of your report is to make sure that readers appreciate that um even if the the sort of absolute level of violence may be down in certain ways the problems the underlying problems as you put it do persist but let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some potential solutions or or partial solutions or policy recommendations that the report brings to bear so jeffrey you you talk about um maybe something about to do with uh efforts to promote social pluralism or tolerance uh counter online we already talked about countering online radicalization in a way or at least the the narrow issue of dealing with social media um and maybe also something to do with inter-religious uh relations uh that might be an area where where you can address to kick things off sure happy to i think you know we propose in the report some high level recommendations that that no doubt are building on existing approaches to to pcb that were kind of preventing about preventing encountering about extremism that should be expanded i think we could think of these as kind of strategic priorities many of which already exists that we should kind of build out in these local contexts i think part of these recommendations is not necessary to say that none of this is going on but some of it might might do but that we should maintain our focus on them right in this era i mean you've seen a lot of international funding shift elsewhere a lot of attention shifting elsewhere and so we think a lot the attention of what what we were doing what what was going on in Bangladesh right after holy artisan should still be doing right because a lot of those underlying factors remain even even if we're seeing the kind of level of attacks go down and so a couple issues that that that we raise on promoting social uh pluralism and tolerance right we're seeing as we lay out in the port a lot of survey data among ordinary Bangladesh hold show show a lot of illiberal social attitudes that feed some of this kind of domestic social violence targeting LGBTQ individuals or Hindus or atheists right others right and so certainly thinking about infusing more liberalism into the public education system into public messaging on television on radio on social media kind of foster more tolerance right in Bangladesh in many ways is a remarkably tolerant country again i want to come back to this point of trying not to overstate the problem but but we do see intolerance right we see it at the social level and we see people dying because of it right so so it is something that that needs to be addressed and i think efforts to promote more tolerance among alternative beliefs views identities lifestyles is an important component of a counter extremism strategy in terms of online radicalization you know we've we've seen under covid and and perhaps you can come back to this that the pandemic has fueled a lot of online radicalization so you can see counter messaging you know preventive messaging to try to blunt the impact of this there's always a concern around kind of freedom of speech in the online space right and there have been issues in Bangladesh around the digital security act right i think the state there's a balance here of certainly the state researchers you know NGOs need to be watching that online space closely for radicalization but make sure make sure it's hard to do but make sure that that boundary a legitimate speech in legitimate criticism right of the state or others is maintained right that that isn't perceived as radicalization as well and we those that sort of push and pull always has to be aware of we have to be aware of and then finally the other the other issue you you raised on interreligious kind of harmony across the region right as i laid out you know across south asia we're seeing religious tension within and between these countries rising that the actions of hindu's muslims buddhas in one country is kind of spilling over and feeding into kind of destructive political dynamics across the border you know Bangladesh has this long history and heritage of pluralism in in the country right and i think Bangladesh playing a kind of greater role in the region to foster this type of kind of cross-border interreligious dialogue and tolerance i think there's despite some of the problems that occur in Bangladesh it is i think well positioned as a country given its history given its record of pluralism and tolerance to play a leading role in promoting these types of ideas and so i think i'd like to see the Bangladesh government do more of that play more of a big diplomatic role on those types of issues thank you jeffrey um you know i want to come back to you in a minute first i want to go to fubasha again but um i want you to think about because most of those recommendations are directed really toward the government of Bangladesh and a lot of our questions that we're coming in right now have something to do with what outside countries whether it's the united states or others or or international NGOs or or other groups might do to more effectively address some of these problems as well but mubash are coming to you you know the report makes a point about what it describes as a do no harm approach to counterterrorism and one of the questioners has asked us and i think this relates very directly something about bangladesh's government the government's history of police excess and abuses and anti-terror laws and about the question of what protections there should be from the use of terrorism as a means to quash dissent and freedom of conscience especially with no functioning political opposition so it seems to be this this issue of maybe going too far the state using the the the goal of counterterrorism to certain political ends and you make the point that you know above all do no harm so what what do you mean by that what does that look like um no do no harm approach means the respect for rule of law um sorry um not politicizing counterterrorism operation making it as a focus of a state security while you know nowadays we're seeing uh terminology as such that information terrorists being used by the government to refer to dissents and critics and it's it's really down plays the seriousness of counterterrorism approaches second point i wanted to go back and then i will come back to the do no harm approach is that an important point we mentioned in the report is that even though there are wider support for illiberal values and the 2017 result network research found that there's a strong support for democracy as well so while there are support for illiberal values there are also support for democracy among the Bangladeshis and they say sharia or or certain some sort of Islamic governance as an as an alternative to a corrupt government so one could see and try to if they try to understand it there is a there is and there is a saying that legitimate political opposition is will be a some sort of antidote to this problem which goes back to the our own analysis is that opening up the political space and on the point of on the point of these do no harm approach means also is that rule of law respect for human rights no politicization of counterterrorism approach and finally it should it should increase the credibility of this operation among the community rather than as you could see from you from some of the comments that their credibility is not that high at the moment and government also need to be careful about using the word theorist as like you know information theories and those sort of widely spread and generalizing this thing thanks thank you yeah that's a in some ways that's a tough balancing act and it raises the question again i'll come back to jeffrey you know if you wouldn't mind commenting on so the the government of Bangladesh this government hasn't taken a number of these steps even some of the ones that you would recommend or others and has taken a pretty politicized approach to to these problems as we've already been discussing so for the rest of us outside of Bangladesh are there things say that the US government might do more effectively or international NGOs might do to push these issues in ways that would be constructive yeah i mean i think of of course there there are and in in some ways recommendations that that we make or others make to the to the government of Bangladesh can also they can be supported or implemented by NGOs and other types of organizations right so you know things like promoting pluralism and tolerance you know many NGOs might not have direct access to the education system but you can support civic education work across the country that promotes these types of values you can have NGOs doing online counter counter radicalization and many do the united nations has um dp has done this sort of work my organization iri has done this type of work of online piece messaging kind of counter and counter and alternative messaging online done to try to counter the radical radical views um you know on promoting democracy pluralism i think bobasher was was kind of alluding to this and we've talked a bit about how the the narrowing of political space can drive radicalization there's a role for democracy and governance NGOs to be promoting and encouraging uh you know open and fair competition strength of political parties across the board to make it just a more vibrant democracy in which all parties are participating and strong right and that is a party that does a type of a political system that can draw people in right as opposed to pushing people out right and i think we're seeing a political system that's a fair amount of political violence right a high degree of polarization and it's pushing people out and the more it pushes people out the more likely i think we are to see radicalization and so i think that the government of bungledash is aware of these issues can address them but no doubt NGOs can support the government of bungledash in that and directly implement a lot of these types of programs thank you um you know we're coming we're coming to the end of our time uh i did want to just uh you know there was there was one question about us bungledash security cooperation and you know that that raises the the point about how the united states is actually uh place sanctions on on the rab rapid action battalion um also on the question of the u.s not including bungledash in the democracy summit uh i wonder about sure i don't i don't want you to i don't want to put you on the spot for giving the united states a report card or a grade on its on its use of these kinds of tools of policy but do you see ways the united states might use its relationship with bungledash um effectively to to help to address these issues so not just the NGOs but the direct u.s government role it seems to me that there are more engagement between the government of both countries after the sanction and the um non-invitation uh to democracy summit and i think um it is in a way it is increasing and that also says something about the importance of this relationship within both countries so generally a positive positive outcome from that uh somewhat critical approach yeah good uh yeah i think that that made both governments to engage more that that we could see yeah good all right well we are at the end of the hour uh so this is my uh time to thank both of you um mabasha and jeffrey uh for both a great conversation and an excellent report uh again i commend it to everyone online uh check it out at usip.org the title is the persistent challenge of extremism in bungledash uh obviously we'll be doing more work on bungledash uh in the future and um you can also check out the other work that that our two authors have done uh with other institutions so thanks again to all of you and we'll look forward to seeing you at future events thank you