Content of event:
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Historically, during the colonial and the immediate years of the post-colonial period, universities, faculties, students and graduates played a significant role in state making and democratic state building in South Asia. The leader of the independence movement in India, Jawaharlal Nehru was a graduate of the Trinity College Cambridge. Pakistan's founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah was educated in England. In East Pakistan from 1952 onwards, the role of the university students in shaping its Independence movement for Bangladesh is widely recorded. Yet, in 2021, academic freedom and democracy in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India looks grim against the backdrop of rising authoritarianism, nationalism and religious radicalism. This lecture looks at the background, causes and developments with regard to the partly negative development of academic freedom in South Asia. Dr. Mubashar Hasan is an adjunct researcher at the Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative, Western Sydney University, Australia. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of the book Islam and Politics in Bangladesh: Followers of Ummah (Palgrave, 2020) and the leader editor of the book Radicalization in South Asia: Context, Trajectories, and Implications (Sage, 2019). He also serves in the advisory board of the RESOLVE Network at the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, USA and as a Research Member at the AVERT Research Network, Deakin University, Melbourne.
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