Nation–Building Policies and Ethnic Conflict in Bangladesh

Why does ethnic conflict occur in a post-colonial state? In this study, we address this question by examining the relationship between Mylonas’s three types of nation-building policies (accommodation, assimilation, and exclusionary) and the onset of ethnic conflict using Bangladesh as a case study. We argue that Bangladesh’s assimilationist and exclusionary nation-building policies founded on Bengali nationalism, Bengali language, and Islamization have resulted in the political marginalization, relative deprivation, and identity crisis of indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, resulting in a protracted ethnic conflict in the 1970s. To counter the insurgency, the government has created a national security discourse to justify its coercive and violent means of nation-building, such as militarization, Islamization, transmigration of Bengali Muslim settlers, massacres, forced displacement, and violence against indigenous women between 1971 and 1996. After over two decades, the government has adopted an accommodation policy and signed the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord with the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhaiti Samiti in 1997 to end this low-intensity armed conflict. However, after the Accord, the government altered its position and continued assimilationist and exclusionary nation-building policies. Hence, this research suggests that the solution to this ethnic conflict mainly depends on the nation-building policies of the Bangladesh government.