Quest for Development and Challenges in Bangladesh

This ambitious work intends to bring three apparently different themes under a broad framework: development, neo-liberalism, and Islamic politics. The author, a young scho­lar associated with the Universities of British Columbia and Toronto at different points of his career, develops the book out of his doctoral thesis. Overall, the book is divided into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. The work begins with a brief introduction of the concepts and presents an overview of Bangladesh’s class structure, particularly the socio-economic formation of elites.

Chapter 2, “Development, Political Economy, and Neoliberalism,” begins with a brief but crisp survey of the evolution of liberal thinking in political economy since early capitalism, through the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 to the present times. Very succinctly, it traces the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant economic and policymaking paradigm at contemporary times, with proactive roles by org­anisations such as the World Bank. He also explains the failure of neoliberalism in developing countries. In tune with these arguments, the author presents a diagram (p 27), depicting the architecture of aid-flow in developing countries across the world. With diagrams and figures, a book can reach the readers rather easily, because the complex phenomena and arguments are exp­lained in brief and neat formats.