Domestic and International Consent: Regime Durability in Bangladesh (2009–2024)

Abstract

Existing literature attributes the durability of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s regime (2009–2024) to authoritarian tactics such as personalistic rule, electoral rigging, restricted opposition participation, corruption, and extrajudicial disappearances and murders of opposition members, which exemplify the corrosive dynamics of power accumulation in an authoritarian system. However, this article addresses another aspect of the authoritarian puzzle: an alternative, noncoercive pathway to regime durability. It emphasizes how the prior government’s cultivation of a positive political image, contrasting with the previous political regime’s limitations, economic capacity-building, large-scale infrastructural projects, internal security assurances, growth of foreign currency reserves, elevated gross domestic product ratios, advancements in gender equality, and improvements in the Human Development Index, shows all these achievements have been constantly published through various means to ensure domestic political support, attract foreign investment, and be used in the form of a circle.