On the difficulty of studying ‘civil society’: Reflections on NGOs, state and democracy in Bangladesh

In common with most countries of South Asia and indeed the rest of the world, discussion of the concept of ‘civil society™ has emerged recently in Bangladesh among academics and activists. Much of it has been generated by the international aid agencies and their ‘good governance™ policy agenda of the 1990s, and is concerned primarily with the increasingly high profile community of local and national development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which have emerged in Bangladesh since 1971. But there are also local meanings to the term derived from the independence struggle and the construction of a Bangladesh state, from local traditions of urban and rural voluntarism and from the organisation of religious life. The concept of civil society in contemporary Bangladesh…