Bangladeshi politics is being radically recrafted under the current Awami League government. The period of intense, violent and yet competitive democracy through the 1990s and 2000s appears to be at an end. This project examines this transition and the character of the country’s emerging politics. 

Understanding how political coalitions establish and maintain dominance is crucial in light of authoritarian transitions worldwide. The centrality of capital cities to political systems suggests that they are of particular importance to how power is consolidated and resisted at a national level. This project examines capital cities as sites of dissent and control, and the dialectic between these dynamics.

My thesis centres on the involvement of NGOs and other humanitarian actors in Search and Rescue operations in the Mediterranean. It explores the difficult political challenges that emerge as part of NGOs’ relations with European states, private actors and migrants themselves as well as within a civil society divided by debates on migration. It asks how humanitarians have historically carried out programmes at sea and uses these insights to shine light on contemporary practices of interception, surveillance and interception.