Description
This paper examines how the hopes generated by mass protest movements for rights, justice, and equality fare in the post-protest period. Perhaps because we live in what can seem like “hopeless times” of authoritarianism, climate emergency, and inequality, there has been a resurgent attention to hope – in activism, arts, and politics. Yet, the role of hope in and after protest movements, such as Bangladesh’s 2024 Student-People’s Uprising, remains under-studied. Under Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year premiership, Bangladesh gained a reputation for democratic backsliding, corruption, and digital repression. In June 2024, students took to the streets after the Supreme Court reinstated a discriminatory quota system for government jobs. Although hundreds were killed, the protest transformed into a mass movement that forced Hasina’s resignation and ushered in Nobel prize-winning development economist Mohammed Yunus as interim head. Our paper analyses post-protest hopes for accountability, constitutional change, and social justice in Bangladesh as revealed through focus groups in Dhaka and Chittagong. It also discusses the role of arts and participatory arts-based methods, as well as the larger political economies of hope in Bangladesh. In these ways, our paper makes a wider contribution to the growing literature on “constructive resistance” – that is, the prefiguring or enacting of alternatives to existing power – which, as Roland Bleiker (2021) argues, “chang[es] how we – as collectives – think and imagine the world differently.”
