Scholars at Risk virtual Speaker Series – Academic Freedom and Democracy in South Asia: Context, Trends and Challenges

Digital International Week 2021 of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences

Host: International Office Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences

Type of event: Information event with subsequent discussion

Date of event: Tuesday, 04.05.2021

Time of event: 12.00 – 13.30 (CEST, UTC+2)

Zoomlink of event: https://fh-bielefeld.zoom.us/j/92528640856

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.