Revisiting Personal Laws In Bangladesh

The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is centrally located in South Asia and is one of the eight countries that constitute the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). This unique volume gives a voice to the different religious communities affected by the current laws and practices in force in Bangladesh. The reader will find an overview and gain understanding of the legal issues that need to be addressed in each case.

This book traces the evolution of organisational activism among Muslim women in India. It deconstructs the 'Muslim woman' as the monolith based on tropes like purdah, polygamy, and tin talaq and compels the reader to revisit the question of Muslim women’s individual and collective agency. The book argues that the political field, along with religion, moulds the nature and scope of Muslim women’s activism in India. It looks at the objectives of four Muslim women’s organisations: the Bazm-e-Niswan, the Awaaz-e-Niswaan, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan and the India International Women’s Alliance (IIWA), in close interaction with the political landscape of Mumbai. The book explores the emergence of gender-inclusive interpretation of Muslim women’s rights by Muslim women activists and challenges the dominant and reductionist stereotypes on Muslim women, community, and absolutist ideas of Islam. It argues that Muslim women are not passive victims of their culture and religion, rather they can develop a critique of their marginality and subjugation from within the community. Revisiting Muslim Women’s Activism traces the evolution of a community-centric approach in women’s activism and records a fragmented view on women’s rights from within the community and religious leadership. It also delineates the distinctiveness of this activism that considers religion and culture as resources for empowerment and as sites of contestations. Moreover, the book documents the narratives of Muslim women’s struggle and resistance from their location and lived experiences. It will be of interest to students and researchers of women’s studies, gender studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, and Islamic studies.

This book focuses on the right to privacy in the digital age with a view to see how it is implemented across the globe in different jurisdictions. The right to privacy is one of the rights enshrined in international human rights law. It has been a topic of interest for both academic and non-academic audiences around the world. However, with the increasing digitalisation of modern life, protecting one’s privacy has become more complicated. Both state and non-state organisations make frequent interventions in citizens’ private lives. This edited volume aims to provide an overview of recent development pertaining to the protection of the right to privacy in the different judicial systems such as the European, South Asian, African and Inter-American legal systems. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

This book looks at Bangladesh at and beyond its fifty years since its formation in 1971. A comprehensive, holistic narrative is constructed to track key development dynamics at the sectoral, sub-sectoral and macro levels. This much-needed exercise dispels the notion that the 'Bangladesh surprise' can be reduced to singular dimensions such as the trauma of the 1971 war or women's empowerment and micro-credit. The mixture of economic history, political economy and institutional and actor analysis provide fresh insights to the themes addressed. A well-argued case to view emerging Bangladesh as the newest member of the Flying Geese club, The Odds Revisited includes a detailed review of macro and sectoral developments over the last fifty years and provides new material and insights into the rise of Bangladesh's capitalist class; a socio-economic perspective of the role of Dhaka-based urbanization; and the rise of a new middle class.

Some two decades since the publication of London the Promised Land?, which charted and investigated the successes and failures of the migrant experience in London over a period of three hundred years, this book re-examines the migrant landscape in London. While remaining a beacon for immigrants, the migrant face of the city has changed rapidly and dramatically from one which was heavily populated by semi-skilled and unskilled post-colonial incomers, to one which now embraces the EU Accession Countries, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, oligarchs from Russia, the new wealthy from China, economic migrants from Latin America and Ireland, and still, post-colonial immigrants - at the same time witnessing the exodus ’home’ of incomers, or their descendants, who now see opportunities where there were none before. The contributors, all leading academics and practitioners in their diverse fields, examine changes to the migrant landscape of contemporary London at the micro, meso and macro levels. London the Promised Land Revisited thus explores a range of experiences in the capital, including the presence and treatment of illness amongst migrants, the phenomenon of migrant ’invisibility’ and asylum, the migrant marketplace and ethnic ’clustering’, and interaction with local and national government - across a variety of migrant groups, both ’new’ and ’old’. As such, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in migration, migrant experiences and the contemporary ’global’ city.

It is a political study of the controversy surrounding the issue of the uniform civil code vis-à-vis personal laws from a South Asian perspective. At the centre of the debate is whether there should be a centralized view of the legal system in a given society or a decentralized view, both horizontally and vertically. This issue is entangled within the threads of identity politics, minority rights, women’s rights, national integration, global Islamic politics and universal human rights. Champions of each category view it through their own prisms, making the debate extremely complex, especially in politically and socially plural South Asia. So, this book attempts to harmonize the threads of the debate to provide a holistic political analysis.

Scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology critically revisit the history of human rights.