Bangladesh’s “Father of the Nation” and the Transnational Politics of Memory: Connecting Cross-Scale Iterations of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

‘I was celebrating the justice that the victims got’: exploring irreconciliation among Bangladeshi human rights activists in London

“…The concern with irreconciliation in this essay is not so much focused on the shortcomings of the reconciliation paradigm, but more on what happens if there is no scope for engagement in reconciliation and different ways of addressing past atrocities. In my research on the ways in which the violence of the Bangladesh War of 1971 is addressed in London in light of increasingly authoritarian politics in Bangladesh (see Visser 2019; 2020), the framework of reconciliation and transitional justice was unable to address contestations over the war. Instead, the reconciliation paradigm stood in tense relation with how politicians and human rights activists, on the one hand, relied on the human rights language central to transitional justice while, on the other hand, rejecting reconciliation and coexistence between people who stood on opposing sides during the war.…”