Papers by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
Forum: A Monthly Publication of the The Daily Star, 2008
Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky suggests how the BNP can re-invent itself for the future after the c... more Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky suggests how the BNP can re-invent itself for the future after the civilianized military coup on January 11th, 2007 and before the 2009 national elections under a military backed caretaker government.
Journal of Asiatic Society , 2022
Electoral corruption is a form of political corruption that has its roots in electoral misgoverna... more Electoral corruption is a form of political corruption that has its roots in electoral misgovernance. It is a concept derived from criminal law that deals with significant issues of deviations from acceptable norms of voting in an election. This could include anything from voter intimidation to bribery to forgery. Electoral corruption is systematically related to electoral rules but more generally this could include a wide range of deviant behavior that manipulate the process by which ballots are obtained, marked or tabulated or the process by which election results are canvassed and certified. In this paper, I address all well-known forms of deviations from electoral integrity judged by international standards set by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the United Nations through its Declaration of Principles for Election Observation (DPIEO) and Administration and Cost of Elections (ACE) project. I also discuss how the electoral governance and electoral laws of Bangladesh can be improved by evaluating existing laws and practices by a framework created on the basis of principles of good electoral practice set forth by those three institutions.
This research will investigate political and economic causes and consequences of Dutch naval matu... more This research will investigate political and economic causes and consequences of Dutch naval maturity and Anglo-Dutch rivalry leading to the decline and fall of the Dutch empire in India.
Could one believe in justice and freedom for mankind and yet have the same freedom of justice imp... more Could one believe in justice and freedom for mankind and yet have the same freedom of justice imprisoned within " narrow domestic walls " ? Could a sense of global communal harmony be achieved in fear of the " other " ? For most of the Twentieth century freedom and justice were ideas associated with a territorially defined nation-stated where voices of the oppressed could only find space within an imagined community nurtured in mythology and utopia. Rabindranath Tagore's metaphysical poetics for much of the twentieth century universalized that discourse of nationalism creating a new meaning that would transcend the boundaries between home and the world in uniting the imagined communities. Sigmund Freud had famously claimed that the state had forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing , not because of a desire to abolish it but because of a desire to monopolize it. Rabindranath Tagore never met Freud but this was the muse of Tagore's poetics of nationalism that captivated the world devastated by the two World Wars.
Dhaka Tribune, 2022
The local is a microcosm of the global. What is unacceptable globally could also be unacceptable ... more The local is a microcosm of the global. What is unacceptable globally could also be unacceptable locally. Regimes that support good economics and bad politics, silencing democratic institutions with a high growth compensation, will have no problem with the bad politics of Vladimir Putin of invading Ukraine or Crimea as they have no stake in good politics whether it is local, regional or global. This makes the allegedly oppressed major opposition party in Bangladesh a natural ally of those who are pursuing a neoliberal strategy of good democratic governance, fair elections, free press, fiscal transparency and a vibrant civil society.
Research Papers in Economics, 2006
In order to understand criminal legislation, one needs to refocus from criminal legislation to it... more In order to understand criminal legislation, one needs to refocus from criminal legislation to its most modern form, the code ─ by turning one's historical attention to the significance of criminal codes, thereby reconnecting the analysis of law to the analysis of the state, jurisprudence to politics. Therefore, particular attention needs to be provided to two analytic distinctions ─ between private and public law, and between criminal and civil law. Modern criminal law scholarship fails to recognize that its subject in large part no longer represents a species of law at all. The category mistake, in other words, transcends that of law and extends to the range of coercive methods available to the modern state. Insofar as criminal law has been transformed into a mode of regulation, it has been transformed into a species of police, rather than of law. Not only the distinction between public and private law remains unclear and unexplored in English Criminal Law scholarship, so does...
he rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in n... more he rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in new challenges to a people who had only recently attempted to grapple with their new identity as a "British nation", instead of separate communities with English, Scottish and Welsh origins. Britain's colonialism, as argued by Linda Colley, evoked a sense of "British patriotism" through the domination over, and in distinction from, the millions of colonial subjects beyond their own boundaries". Accordingly, a sense of "Britishness" went along hand in hand with the empire that was in the making.
he rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in n... more he rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in new challenges to a people who had only recently attempted to grapple with their new identity as a "British nation", instead of separate communities with English, Scottish and Welsh origins. Britain's colonialism, as argued by Linda Colley, evoked a sense of "British patriotism" through the domination over, and in distinction from, the millions of colonial subjects beyond their own boundaries". Accordingly, a sense of "Britishness" went along hand in hand with the empire that was in the making.
The Daily Star, 2019
Dedicated to the memory and the legacy of the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who mothe... more Dedicated to the memory and the legacy of the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who mothered the independence of Bangladesh from the Islamic paternalism of Pakistan in 1971.
The Dying Gaul is a Hellenistic masterpiece of a defeated Aigina warrior, an ancient Roman marble... more The Dying Gaul is a Hellenistic masterpiece of a defeated Aigina warrior, an ancient Roman marble replica of a lost bronze original made under the patronage of Attalus I of Pergamon between 230 and 220 BC to memorialize his triumph over the Galatians, a Celtic people living in Anatolia. It is the finest rendition of the semiotics of victory and defeat since Michelangelo's David. The Dying Gaul depicts the artist's vivid imagination of a realism of a wounded warrior who struggles to fight for his survival. He is known to be a Gaul by his necklace, the sword by his side and his trumpet. His body is full of strength and masculinity, much like a warrior of his time but his suffering is expressed vividly as he leans on one arm. From his body language it is also understood that he is unwilling to accept death as he was fighting for his life. His stance and blank glances holding his wounds tightly also depicts a painful suffering with his bleeding upper torso, reminding the viewer of the realism of defeat of those Galatians who fought and the triumph of those who were victorious. This monumental sculpture served as Pergamene propaganda to publicize Attalid's aspirations to compete with not only his Hellenistic rivals but also with great artistic programs of Pericles and other major Greek rulers of the Archaic period. It sought to promote Pergamene nationalism by revealing power of the victor over the defeated in sculptural rendition of the Dying Gaul.
DESCRIPTION The primary aim of this paper is to critique the complicit culture of contentment of ... more DESCRIPTION The primary aim of this paper is to critique the complicit culture of contentment of consumers and producers of islamophobic news in the West that ignores cultural relativism. The substitution of universalist standards for women spread across diverse cultures with cosmopolitan standards for women that tend to normalize the dominant discourse of young, white middle-class women located in the Western centres of cultural and political power are discussed as it compromises all scopes for any objective rendition of journalism on Muslim women.
DESCRIPTION Consociational democracies like the one in the Netherlands produce through a system o... more DESCRIPTION Consociational democracies like the one in the Netherlands produce through a system of pillarization (verzuiling), one of the most tolerant societies in the world where tolerance is practiced, cultured and cultivated in a manner where different social and religious groups are separate but equal.
The action orientations of society’s members and a focus on how the action consequences are coord... more The action orientations of society’s members and a focus on how the action consequences are coordinated without necessitating the will or the consciousness of participants, gives rise to what Jurgen Habermas calls the celebrated distinction between the life-world, based on social integration, and the system, based on system integration. In this paper I examine whether or not transformation of life-world is possible in troubled states and failed states of the developing world through discursive formation and discursive practices of a public sphere.
In order to understand criminal legislation, one needs to refocus from criminal legislation to it... more In order to understand criminal legislation, one needs to refocus from criminal legislation to its most modern form, the code ─ by turning one's historical attention to the significance of criminal codes, thereby reconnecting the analysis of law to the analysis of the state, jurisprudence to politics. Therefore, particular attention needs to be provided to two analytic distinctions ─ between private and public law, and between criminal and civil law. Modern criminal law scholarship fails to recognize that its subject in large part no longer represents a species of law at all. The category mistake, in other words, transcends that of law and extends to the range of coercive methods available to the modern state. Insofar as criminal law has been transformed into a mode of regulation, it has been transformed into a species of police, rather than of law. Not only the distinction between public and private law remains unclear and unexplored in English Criminal Law scholarship, so does...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-... more This paper examines the relationship between statutory monopoly and collective action as a multi-person assurance game culminating in an end to British Empire in India. In a simple theoretical model, it is demonstrated whether or not a collective good enjoys (or is perceived to enjoy) pure jointness of production and why the evolutionary stable strategy of non-violence was supposed to work on the principle that the coordinated reaction of a ethnically differentiated religious crowd to a conflict between two parties (of colonizer and colonized) over confiscatory salt taxation would significantly affect its course. Following
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper examines the hidden link between mythologized juridical unconscious and the juridifica... more This paper examines the hidden link between mythologized juridical unconscious and the juridification of manifest criminality in the codification of the Indian criminal law. History is nothing but an artificial extension of social memory. The historian writes history by looking at the past. The legislator judges the past by looking from the future. When the future judges the past, history becomes a tool for the vindication of the future and the law offers the past a funeral service.
Books by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
The author looks into the governance of a country where legal order is destroyed and a condition ... more The author looks into the governance of a country where legal order is destroyed and a condition is created through weak or no enforcement either because of no intention to enforce, or incapability to enforce, law and justice. Over time various national and international situations ultimately turn such a state into a 'troubled state,' 'weak state,' 'disabled state,' 'quasi state,' 'marginal state,' 'arbitrary state,' and finally appears as a 'Compromised Republic.' In such a situation, the state like Bangladesh fails to fulfill the basic needs of the majority of the population and the citizens lose interest in the state. The author explains the behavior of different institutions and actors within and outside the state boundary. He very aptly studies the 'status politics' in Bangladesh and shows how different actors, groups and institutions draw special rights and enforce conditions for legislation to sustain gains of these extra privileges even at the cost of priorities of the Republic. He further tells how extra legislation the gains accrue to these groups in the form of tax evasion, rent seeking and all types of government regulated honors and privileges. Because of this phenomenon, according to the author, the enforcement of legal rights becomes expensive and remains in many cases, unenforced. In this situation the legal order is destroyed, good laws cease to have validity. A situation is further created where not only the domestic forces, but forces and institutions outside the legal political boundary of the country take advantage and dictate the Republic and she accepts all kinds of such dictations and further becomes a 'compromised republic'.
Thesis Chapters by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
Could one believe in justice and freedom for mankind and yet have the same freedom of justice imp... more Could one believe in justice and freedom for mankind and yet have the same freedom of justice imprisoned within " narrow domestic walls " ? Could a sense of global communal harmony be achieved in fear of the " other " ? For most of the Twentieth century freedom and justice were ideas associated with a territorially defined nation-stated where voices of the oppressed could only find space within an imagined community nurtured in mythology and utopia. Rabindranath Tagore's metaphysical poetics for much of the twentieth century universalized that discourse of nationalism creating a new meaning that would transcend the boundaries between home and the world in uniting the imagined communities. Sigmund Freud had famously claimed that the state had forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing , not because of a desire to abolish it but because of a desire to monopolize it. Rabindranath Tagore never met Freud but this was the muse of Tagore's poetics of nationalism that captivated the world devastated by the two World Wars.
Talks by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
This research will investigate political and economic causes and consequences of Dutch naval matu... more This research will investigate political and economic causes and consequences of Dutch naval maturity and Anglo-Dutch rivalry leading to the decline and fall of the Dutch empire in India.
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Papers by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
Books by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
Thesis Chapters by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky
Talks by Chowdhury Irad Ahmed Siddiky