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Despite a positive economic outlook in 2014, political tensions and income inequalities continue to challenge the country’s democratic image. Power has been concentrated in the executive, state violence has increased, and there is pressure to improve working conditions and infrastructure in the garment sector. For the re-elected Awami League government, addressing employment issues is essential, given its focus on attracting foreign investment.

Accumulating Insecurity examines the relationship between two vitally important contemporary phenomena: a fixation on security that justifies global military engagements and the militarization of civilian life, and the dramatic increase in day-to-day insecurity associated with contemporary crises in health care, housing, incarceration, personal debt, and unemployment. Contributors to the volume explore how violence is used to maintain conditions for accumulating capital. Across world regions violence is manifested in the increasingly strained, often terrifying, circumstances in which people struggle to socially reproduce themselves. Security is often sought through armaments and containment, which can lead to the impoverishment rather than the nourishment of laboring bodies. Under increasingly precarious conditions, governments oversee the movements of people, rather than scrutinize and regulate the highly volatile movements of capital. They often do so through practices that condone dispossession in the name of economic and political security.

In this chapter, I interrogate the Vested Property Act (VPA) to explore one aspect of the uneven and contradictory project of democratic state formation in Bangladesh. The Act, initially sanctioned by the state of the then-East Pakistan, and continued in independent Bangladesh through various military regimes and democratically-elected governments, paved the way for the displacement of millions of Hindus from both ownership rights and their security as citizens. By drawing attention to the Act’s institutionalisation and struggles over its legitimacy, I show how the promise of democracy, as well as of secularism, reveals the violences that are entailed in actually existing democratic practice, including in the construction of the Hindu citizen as unworthy and a threat to national security. This construction of the minority as “other” and the making of majoritarian rule reveal the violence that attends to a democratic politics that includes everyday inaction and omission, rather than one which focuses solely on acts of force that usually involve physical harm or injury.

The year 2015 was the most violent in Bangladesh since independence. A growing sense of fear and insecurity prevailed, along with a crisis of governance that limited social accountability. However, there were notable contributions to global climate change initiatives, and the Land Boundary Agreement with India offered enclave dwellers the rights of citizenship after almost 70 years.

In this chapter, I interrogate the Vested Property Act (VPA) to explore one aspect of the uneven and contradictory project of democratic state formation in Bangladesh. The Act, initially sanctioned by the state of the then-East Pakistan, and continued in independent Bangladesh through various military regimes and democratically-elected governments, paved the way for the displacement of millions of Hindus from both ownership rights and their security as citizens. By drawing attention to the Act's institutionalisation and struggles over its legitimacy, I show how the promise of democracy, as well as of secularism, reveals the violences that are entailed in actually existing democratic practice, including in the construction of the Hindu citizen as unworthy and a threat to national security. This construction of the minority as \"other\" and the making of majoritarian rule reveal the violence that attends to a democratic politics that includes everyday inaction and omission, rather than one which focuses solely on acts of force that usually involve physical harm or injury.

The year 2015 was the most violent in Bangladesh since independence. A growing sense of fear and insecurity prevailed, along with a crisis of governance that limited social accountability. However, there were notable contributions to global climate change initiatives, and the Land Boundary Agreement with India offered enclave dwellers the rights of citizenship after almost 70 years.

Despite a positive economic outlook in 2014, political tensions and income inequalities continue to challenge the country’s democratic image. Power has been concentrated in the executive, state violence has increased, and there is pressure to improve working conditions and infrastructure in the garment sector. For the re-elected Awami League government, addressing employment issues is essential, given its focus on attracting foreign investment.

The contemporary Bangladesh economy is marked by sustained increases in women's paid employment, a rise that began in the 1980s with complex and contradictory effects on the lives of women and communities. Today this increase in the numbers of employed women recasts gender relations and the gender and social contract, with wage employment leading to new sources of mobility and social, economic, and political freedoms for women, but also to contestation over rights and security, and, in some cases, to declines in women's welfare. In this paper, I offer a window on the relationship between macro-economic changes in the Bangladesh political economy, the meso-institutional changes created by policy reform, and changes in women's labor market relations. I highlight emergent relations of regulation as they create, organize, and control women's social behavior and normative practice. As I will suggest, the emergent gender division of wage employment in Bangladesh unsettles the causality presumed when changes in economic and cultural organization build on an already available pool of surplus labor that can straightforwardly lead to changes in women's behavior. Three themes animate this discussion. One theme emphasizes the contradictory effects that incorporation into export production has for women; they are simultaneously emancipatory and highly exploitative. Second, I note that neoliberal reforms articulate differently in particular places making it crucial to draw attention to how specific antecedent labor force practices, ideologies, and policies contribute to constructing a female labor force. Finally, I suggest that women are increasingly viewed as disposable and redundant even as their labor is becoming central to imaginings of family maintenance and sustainability. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]