Introduction: Ethnographic perspectives on the state in Bangladesh

I The idea of the state, the state-effect and everyday politics

The difficulty of how to conceptualise the state has been long discussed in social science (cf. Abrams 1988 (1977)), and thus is by no means particular to Bangladesh. The state is at once highly elusive and abstract and thus not a clearly delimitable or observable phenomenon, but at the same time it manifests itself in different concrete institutions, regulations, practices, and material things (such as passports) that appear to be rather ‘real’. As Philip Abrams has famously noted, ‘the difficulty of studying the state can be seen as in part a result of the nature of the state’ (ibid.: 114).

There are, of course, several traditions that define more clearly what the state is and thus offer universalistic, yet competing, perspectives. One of the most cited delineations originated from Max Weber, who defined the ‘modern’ state as a ‘human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (1948 [1919]: 78). In this view, something is ‘a “state” if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ in the enforcement of its order (Weber 1978 [1922]: 54).

This delineation and other ‘classical’ conceptualisations by European scholars such as the ones by Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci evolved at a peak time of social change, industrialisation, and European imperialism. Their conceptualisation of ‘the state’ developed against the backdrop of their concern with modernity and a teleological understanding of history. While their theories were universalistic, they developed their ideas based on particular European states, arguably in specific temporal or even biographical contexts. ⁵ Regional and socio-cultural differences in these theories tend to be viewed either as insurmountable civilisational disparities or as different stages of societal evolution.

Contemporary scholars are unlikely to support Weber’s most unabashed statements of Western exceptionalism such as his assumption that

[o]nly the occident knows the state in the modern sense, with a professional administration, specialized officialdom, and law based on the concept of citizenship. Beginnings of this institution in antiquity and in the orient were never able to develop fully. Only the occident knows rational law. (Weber 1950 [1923]: 313)

Nevertheless, the modernist-Orientalist political teleology, as well as key ideas of these early thinkers, continues to influence more contemporary state conceptualisations, be it in developmentalist discussions of the ‘patrimonial state’, neo-Weberian approaches to the state such as those of Charles Tilly or Theda Skocpol and the neo-institutionalist approach of international relations. It makes sense to speak of the state or to ask ‘why nations fail’ only on the basis of universalistic and normative understandings’. Theories that want to break with centralist and statist-instrumentalist conceptions of ‘the state’ and that emphasise more diffuse, subtle, and diverse effects of power such as discussions inspired by Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ or system-theory that situate ‘the state’ in wider processes of functional differentiation are also developed against the backdrop of evolutionary underpinnings and an interest in distinguishing ‘modern’ from pre-modern or ‘capitalist’ from ‘pre-capitalist’ societies.

These theories of the state, deriving from European contexts, have of course been widely criticised from various disciplines. Recent anthropological literature has contributed to debunking many of the normative and universalist assumptions about statehood, be it by showing the limitations of Weberian notions of bureaucracy and the impersonal state (e.g., Gupta 1995; Hull 2012; Mathur 2016), highlighting the affective and moral life of state officials and institutions (Fassin et al. 2015; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015; Navaro-Yashin 2006; Steinmüller 2016), rethinking ‘democracy’ (Michelutti 2008; Witsoe 2013) or, crucially, by rebutting the idea of ‘the state’ as an abstract entity separable from society (e.g., Fuller and Bénéï 2001; Gupta 1995; Mitchell 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2012). Against Orientalist understandings of the ‘patrimonial state’ and liberal political theory that regard patronage as an impediment to development and democratisation, ethnographic perspectives derived from different parts of the world have shown that ‘patronage’ and ‘democracy’ or ‘modern statehood’ can indeed be seen as mutually reinforcing and intersecting (e.g., Chatterjee 2004; Lazar 2004; Michelutti 2008). Deborah James (2011), for instance, has shown how the role of brokers in South Africa was revived and reinforced in unintended ways through land redistribution reforms that aimed explicitly at more social equality and correcting historical injustice.

While it has been fruitful to approach the state from ‘its margins’ (Das and Poole 2004), the recent turn of the ethnographic gaze to ‘the heart of the state’ (Fassin et al. 2015) has powerfully belied the usefulness of universalist state theories not only in regard to post-colonial states, but also in post-socialist (cf. e.g., Thelen et al. 2014), and post-imperialist countries such as France (Fassin 2013; Fassin et al. 2015) or Britain (Forbess and James 2014; Koch 2018). Looking at social practices around core institutions has complicated our understandings, for instance, of police as mere ‘enforcers of public order’ and state laws, upsetting an imagination of the impartiality of the law and the supposedly legal-bureaucratic rational state. Such complication is demonstrated by pointing out how police actions are entangled in but also reinforcing of the existing ‘social order’ in Paris (Fassin 2013), or by showing how police power itself is ‘provisional’ and thus a contingent and socially negotiated resource rather than a monopoly of power in different parts of Uttar Pradesh (Jauregui 2016).

Given these fundamental reservations, some authors advocate abandoning ‘the state’ as an object of scientific enquiry altogether. In the preface to the classic seminal collection of Political Anthropology, ‘African Political Systems’, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown states that the state as ‘an entity over and above the human individuals […] and sometimes spoken of as having a will’ is ‘a fiction of the philosophers’ (1940: xxiii) and suggests to look instead at different ‘political systems’ (similarly: Easton 1953). However, system-theory-oriented approaches neither reduce problems of how to delimit the boundaries of ‘the political’ (cf.: Mitchell 1991: 80) nor do they consider the typological differentiation approaches or the focus of early political anthropology on supposedly ‘stateless societies’ to escape the evolutionary underpinnings and Orientalist preoccupation with modernity. Even more problematic, such an ‘artificial attempt to identify politics “without” the state’ does not only erase ‘the presence of the colonial power’ (Spencer 2007: 175), but such structural-functionalist analysis also tends to ignore other forms of centralised state power and the broader political and economic context. ⁶

Remarkably, several recent authors who have forcefully highlighted the ‘fantastical’ nature of the state and the ways in which social practices contradict social science theories about bureaucracy and ‘state institutions’, also show that people nevertheless continue to behave and act as if ‘the state’ was something real, a sovereign actor apart from society, as if bureaucratic procedures or papers mattered and thus affectively engage with what they perceive as ‘the state’. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) captured this aspect intriguingly in her ethnographic exploration of the case of the internationally unrecognised state Northern Cyprus and in her conceptual framework of the ‘make-belief state’.

Philip Abrams (1988 (1977)), in his influential article ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, suggests to abandon the study of the state as a material object. Instead, he proposes to treat the state as an idea or ‘an ideological project’ (ibid.: 76). However, the widely observable prominence of governmental regulations, the increasing dependence of state provisions and the multiple ways in which ‘state institutions’ such as schools, police, tax, or administration matter in the lives of most people, precludes any rushed dismissal of ‘the state’ or its analytical reduction to an ideological power. The most fruitful ethnographies on ‘the state’ have engaged with the ‘idea of the state’ and its diverse and changing material manifestations.

Many of these studies build on the work of Timothy Mitchell (1991, 1999) who, drawing on Abrams’s work, points out that the difficulty to conceptualise ‘the state’ is not coincidental and urges us to examine the state ‘not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist’ (1991: 94). He suggests, focusing on how the idea of a boundary or separation between the state and society is created in the everyday, something he calls ‘structural effect’. Referring to Foucault, who argues that the intensification of regulation in modern societies was less the result of centralised state power, but rather the effect of general ‘governmentalisation’ of society and dispersed forms of disciplinary power, Mitchell conceptualises the ‘state’ as an:

‘effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society’ (1991: 95).

Mitchell’s conceptualisation allows for a more empirically grounded perspective on ‘the state’ rather than a prescriptive perspective without being limited to looking exclusively at discourses or representations. However, it seems that despite the focus on observable social practice and its explicit assumption of diverse and indeed ever-shifting formations of state-idea-cum-effects, even Timothy Mitchell’s conceptualisation does not fully escape the normative legacy of modernist and Euro-centric heritage. His methodological-theoretical intervention presumes a strong popular distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’ and is also linked to ideas of functional differentiation. Relatedly, in his seminal essay ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’ he spends much time arguing that the strengthening of the idea of ‘the state’ emerged concomitantly with the idea of ‘the economy’ (Mitchell 1999).

Yet as we have seen in our opening example, such presumption should not be taken for granted as being significant for the perspective of all actors. It seems that many of the students and observers of the traffic movement were quite aware of the impossibility of a clear-cut state-society distinction when they discussed the partiality of policing and the application of the law. Also, other articles in this special issue show that many of the research interlocutors do not think of ‘economy’ and ‘politics’ as separate spheres, but are highly aware of the entanglement between both and, indeed, might seek links to (party) political and/or ‘state’ power in order to secure material gains (see also Kuttig, Berger or Ruud in this issue). The way in which the traffic movement became (or at least was perceived as being) entangled with party-political divisions is rather telling with regard to the characteristics of ‘state formation’ in Bangladesh.

It seems that ‘the state’ in Bangladesh is not necessarily, though it is at times, perceived as a distinct ‘abstraction in relation to the concreteness of the social’ (Mitchell 1991: 95), but is often equalled with the party in power or even personified in the prime minister, a phenomenon that Schulz discusses in this special issue as the ‘party-state effect’. At the same time, the contribution of Hoque reminds us that party power is only one form of power or distinct authority interlinked with imaginations of the state. In contrast to notions of the ‘unified’ and territorially bound ‘state’, perceptions about what actually constitutes ‘state power’ might thus be very different depending on the ethnographic context. Nonetheless, throughout these contributions, many of our interlocutors seem to be strikingly aware of the ‘blurriness’ of the boundary between ‘politics’ and ‘economy’, or ‘society’ and ‘state’.

We thus approach ‘the state’ as a field of study rather than with a universalist theory about what the state is or even how it is imagined. For this special issue, we start from ethnographically grounded observations rather than any particular theoretical framework. Thereby, we aim at offering relevant perspectives for the existing theoretical debate and approaches to conceptualising ‘the state’ without presupposing certain universalist forms of state formation.

II The debate of the state in South Asia and beyond

In recent decades, studies situated in South Asia have figured prominently in the renewed interest in and debate on the anthropology of the state. The vast majority of these studies have focused on India, ⁷ with some significant works on Sri Lanka (e.g., Klem and Maunaguru 2018; Spencer 1990; Tambiah 1996), Nepal (e.g., Hachhethu 2002), and Pakistan (e.g., Gayer 2014; Hull 2012; Martin 2016), while Bangladesh appears to be underrepresented. Although a few early works (Bertocci 1970; Jahangir 1979) and some recent publications (e.g., Berger 2017; Hackenbroch 2013; Ruud 2011; Shehabuddin 2008) have focused more explicitly on the state in intriguing ways, they rarely engage with more conceptual debates or comparative perspectives and are thus largely absent in the transregional literature. This special issue aims to fill this gap by systematically bringing together ethnographic accounts of the state, democracy, and bureaucracy in Bangladesh.

The vast body of literature on India often serves as a conceptual starting point in the debate on the state. Scholars have been fascinated by India’s history of more than 60 years of relatively stable, democratic rule and one of the highest election participation rates in the world. At the same time, the majority of the population is disillusioned and ‘talking dirty’ about politics (Ruud 2001), whereby, according to most studies, politicians are marked by low levels of trust and high corruption rates (cf. Banerjee 2014).

Ethnographic research has explored how different forms of authority and power structures intersect with what is perceived as ‘the state’. Such studies capture the sustained relevance of patron–client relationships, political leadership, ‘goonda politics’, the role of brokers, factionalism, and caste histories in changing state formations through concepts such as ‘political society’ (Chatterjee 2004), ‘patronage democracy’ (Chandra 2004), ‘patronage state’ (e.g., Witsoe 2013), or ‘vernacular democracy’ (Michelutti 2008).

‘Development Raj’ (Ludden 2000), India’s large-scale development bureaucracy and social engineering projects carried out by state legislations such as the quota system or Mandal Commission as well as other innovations to ensure more social equality like, for instance, the ‘National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’ of 2005 (NREGA), have attracted much scholarly attention (Corbridge et al. 2005). Recently, this has resulted in new attention on the impact of different forms of governance and civil administration (Baer and Mathur 2015) focusing, inter alia, on transparency and accountability in the Indian state bureaucracy through paper, documents, and/or files (e.g., Hull 2012; Mathur 2016), other forms of materiality (e.g., Baer 2007; Hansen 2001) and digitalisation (e.g., Rao 2019). We contend that Bangladesh’s distinct characteristics can significantly contribute to sharpening the ongoing academic debate about the state, particularly in a comparative perspective with regional, and historically intertwined, neighbours such as India or Pakistan. At the same time, however, we propose that the ‘case’ of Bangladesh is conducive for the theorisation of the state beyond South Asia and can perhaps even serve to question the usefulness of such regional lenses.

The exceptional level to which people engage with ‘the state’ or ‘nation’ in Bangladesh can be seen in the vital activities of civil society and the country’s history of significant political movements. However, what sets Bangladesh apart from its neighbours is its political system characterised by the hegemonic role of political parties. High levels of disillusionment with party-politics are coupled with high levels of voluntary and involuntary engagement with and interest in politics, hinting at an exceptional role of party-politics that has been a relatively neglected area in the ‘debate on the state’ in South Asia but has figured more prominently in the literature on South America (e.g., Lazar 2004).

The state of Bangladesh can look back at a long history of state bureaucracy with substantial continuities reaching back to British colonialism and even the Mughal period but has also undergone substantial shifts including partition as well as changing governments, which have encompassed autocratic military regimes, authoritarianism, and democracy.

In addition, the prominence of the NGO sector, international entanglements with regard to international organisations, foreign influence and diaspora groups, as well as the significance of religious leaders result in a multiplicity of competing and intersecting authorities. This has implications not only for state formations in the form of public contestations and policy development, but also institutional manifestations such as multiple, competing forms of schools for general education, including BRAC-model inspired NGO schools, Alia and Qawmi madrasha, and a wide range of private schools in addition to the government ones. What this kind of institutional pluralism in the educational, but also legal and welfare sectors imply for subject-formation and shifting understandings of ‘the state’ remains so far under-researched for Bangladesh.

III On the state of ‘the state’ after 50 Years

With the 50th anniversary of the Bangladeshi state approaching in 2021, this special issue marks a timely contribution. Much has changed since the country’s independence in 1971. After the devastating cyclone in 1970, ⁸ the deadly 1971 civil war for independence from Pakistan involving atrocities such as mass killings and rape, ⁹ slow progress in terms of international recognition, and the famine of 1974, ¹⁰ the newly formed country was plagued by poverty and considered a ‘basket case’ by the international community (Lewis 2011; van Schendel 2009). Today, Bangladesh is categorised as a ‘lower-middle income-country’ with the formulated government vision to reach middle-income status by 2021, ¹¹ and it is often named as a success story in terms of development (N. Hossain 2017), being home to some of the biggest internationally operating NGOs such as BRAC. Although the country still tends to be framed in terms of ‘lack’ or ‘disaster’, its international significance, transnational connection, and relative power in global politics and economy has changed tremendously (cf. Gardner 2012; Gilbert 2018).

Moreover, from the emergence of what Hamzi Alavi (1972) has called a ‘military-bureaucratic oligarchy’ in the early 1970s, the role of Bangladesh’s military evolved and changed throughout the decades. Today, Bangladesh is the fourth largest troop contributor to the United Nations peacekeeping missions and has successfully built a ‘prestigious international profile’, leading to a significant influx of foreign currency, which arguably has mitigated their direct domestic political situation (Lewis 2011: 99). Thus, notwithstanding the difficulty and possible limitations of such an endeavour, we believe that (ethnographic) research on military as well as security agencies also beyond the Chittagong Hill Tracts are needed to better understand their role in the state–society nexus. Furthermore, Bangladesh is one of the largest exporters of garments and shrimps, as well as one of the largest recipients of remittance from its emigrant workers mostly in the Middle East, but also in the US and the UK (Lewis 2011; van Schendel 2009).

Bangladesh’s economic success has ensued despite political instability and uncertainty. After 1971, the country experienced major shifts in government regimes and policies. After the democratically elected Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, ‘father of the nation’ and first president of Bangladesh (1971–1975), was killed in a military coup in 1975—following a de facto introduction of one-party rule—the country experienced a long period of (autocratic) military regimes, first under Ziaur Rahman (1975–1983, also killed in a military coup), and later Hussain Muhammad Ershad (1983–1990), until democracy was reinstalled in 1991. The democratic period has been marked by a bipolar political system characterised by contentious and at times violent street politics between the two main parties, the Awami League (AL), the party of independence, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), formed by Ziaur Rahman.

From a conventionally informed understanding of the ideological political spectrum, AL is often considered a centre-left party that has historically advocated a form of Bengali nationalism based on language and culture, secularism, and social justice. The BNP is conventionally categorised as a centre-right party advocating a form of Bangladeshi nationalism, emphasising Islamic values while simultaneously supporting a free market economy. However, some scholars posit that, from their inception, both parties have integrated various social groups and thus built themselves on foundations of only limited ideologically coherence. Khondker (2004: 24), for instance, argues that the AL’s elitist class structure is somewhat contradictory to its left-leaning socialist orientation, whereas the BNP integrated Maoists and right-wing nationalists when the party was founded in 1978 and is thus perceived by some commentators to be an anti-AL party at its core (Ali 2010: 148). The (shifting) alliances with Jamaat-e-Islami ¹² have been particularly controversial, with one side asserting political strategy and not ideological proximity as the main reason behind these alliances, while others see the long-term BNP–Jamaat coalition as one of the fundamental markers of an ideological differentiation between a ‘secular’ AL and a more conservative Islamic BNP.

Both, AL and BNP, have developed a dynastic ‘cult of personality’ of the parties’ founding fathers (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman respectively) and their families to enhance party unity and political-ideological hegemony (cf. Hassan and Nazneen 2017; Ruud and Islam 2016). Following factional struggles within the AL in the 1980s, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, has emerged as the unchallenged leader of the AL party. The BNP, on the other hand, has been headed by Khaleda Zia since the death of her husband Ziaur Rahman.

Since 2014, the country has experienced an increasing authoritarian bent under the AL government. The AL’s landslide victory in the previous 2018 elections were widely considered unfair and marred by widespread intimidation and manipulation. ¹³ This confrontational political system has been dubbed ‘partyarchy’ (Hassan 2006) and later ‘party-state (democracy)’ in which the ruling party usurps control over the ‘state’ so that a ‘distinction between the [ruling] party and the government becomes confused’ and access to ‘the state’ and its resources becomes contingent on party political participation (Suykens 2017: 3). However, while these arguably general and universalist theoretical frameworks receive much attention in policy circles, implicitly equating the ‘party-system’ with ‘the state’, there is only a slowly emerging number of ethnographic studies providing empirical evidence to substantiate how such a ‘party-state-effect’ and its political subjectivities are produced in the everyday beyond direct party politics. Similarly and relatedly, the well-developed literature on competing nationalisms in Bangladesh, while having instructively shown how such contestations are interlinked with the specific political history of Bangladesh, the dominance of party-political contestations and an alleged conflict between ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ ideologies, ¹⁴ have despite their focus on ‘nation’, contributed comparatively little to the theorising on ‘the state’.

Speaking of the 50th anniversary of ‘the state’ Bangladesh is, of course, problematic insofar as it belies the long history of statehood and changing state-formation within the territory of what is now ‘Bangladesh’. There is not only much territorial and structural continuity with the British-Indian colonial state as well as the Pakistan period, which is still clearly visible in the contemporary legal code, but bears substantial traces of much-longer-existing traditions of state administration and bureaucracy going back to the Mughal empire and partially even the Bengal Sultanate that remain particularly visible in the history of the land revenue and management system. As Akhil Gupta points out, ‘the colonial state [British Raj] was always already “postcolonial”’ as ‘many of the offices of the colonial state were taken directly, in function and form, from the precolonial Mughal bureaucracy’ (2015: 270).

Interestingly, despite this long history of state-formation in what is today Bangladesh, there has been surprisingly little theorisation on ‘statehood’. Despite the large number of studies and scholarly articles on issues such as nationalism and what has been perceived as a ‘contested national identity’ (e.g., Ahmed 1990; Alexander 2013; A. Hossain 2015; Mookherjee 2015; Uddin 2006), or on civil society and the NGO sector (e.g., Karim 2011; Lewis 2011; Naher 2006), we have little ethnographic studies on how people engage with ‘the state’ and its core institutions or regulations. For instance, despite detailed studies on social negotiations around what has been perceived as ‘informal’ or ‘non-state’ law such as shalish or fatwa (Berger 2017; Shehabuddin 2008), very few works have explicitly asked how encoded and official state-law is enacted, plays out in everyday life and shapes people’s subjectivities and perspectives on ‘the state’. While we know much about the social dynamics of access to resources for informal settlements (e.g., Hackenbroch and Hossain 2012) or how rural power structures are linked to control over land (e.g., Abu and Gardner 2016; Bertocci 1970; Gardner 1995; Jahangir 1979; Westergaard 1985), we know relatively little about the politics and social life of the more ‘formal’ markets such as real estate markets in the major cities and their interlinkage with governmental offices and regulations. ¹⁵ There is comparatively much written on issues such as violent entrepreneurs or mastan-ism and its relation to party politics, patronage, and control of resources (e.g., Atkinson-Sheppard 2016; Jackman 2017; Ruud 2010), but little is known of other interactions with the police. Studies on the NGO sector, and more particularly micro-finance, have explored in detail how several programmes not only construct rural women as potential ‘entrepreneurs’ and failed market subjects along neoliberal ideas of self-reliance, but they also enforce different forms of control, ‘governmentalities’ and shape people’s subjectivities (e.g., Huang 2016; Karim 2011; Salehin 2016). Yet, there is much less literature on how changing government policies, regulations, or practices impact everyday lives of different people in Bangladesh.

Perhaps this scholarly focus is related to a developmentalist lens through which Bangladesh has often been approached, impacting research agendas tremendously (cf. White 1992: 11–25) and readings of Bangladesh as a ‘weak state’ with a ‘strong society’ (White 1999). Many of these studies that focus on what Barbara Harriss-White (2003) has called the ‘shadow state’ rather than on core areas of the Bangladeshi state, nevertheless also illuminate everyday experiences with official state actors and their regulations. Remarkably, many of these studies in the more informal sectors remind us that distinctions between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, or ‘state’ and ‘non-state’, are difficult to draw, emphasising that these boundaries are always blurred and continuously renegotiated (e.g., Hackenbroch and Hossain 2012).

Despite elucidating and prolific writings (e.g., Chowdhury 2019; Mookherjee 2015; Ruud 2003; Shehabuddin 2008), the relative inattention to ‘the state’ in the ethnographically informed corpus of literature is surprising given that the interest in politics and ‘the state’ was a major focus in early ‘village studies’ on Bengal (see also Lewis and van Schendel in this special issue). Recently, however, research interest has reconnected to these earlier themes, and ethnographic studies have engaged with party politics and the production of (local) authority structures. Two of the most promising emerging research fields are student politics (Andersen 2013; Kabir and Greenwood 2017; Kuttig 2019; Ruud 2010; Schulz 2019; Suykens 2018) and the interrelation of party politics with violence, criminality and order (Jackman 2017; Suykens and Islam 2013). While offering an entry point to the existing comparative debate, this special issue aims at going beyond this research focus to expand our understanding of what is considered the state in Bangladesh. In that regard, this special issue intentionally features articles focusing on urban contexts, formal state institutions, and more elitist segments of society in order to broaden the perspective and complement the scholarship on rural areas or informal settlements.

IV Patronage as politics?

A relevant point of reference—both in the existing literature on South Asia and more broadly, on Bangladesh as well as in this special issue—is the lens of patronage to understand and conceptualise power, authority, and the ‘state’. While earlier scholars often seemed interested in the relation between ‘older’ power structures and their interaction with ‘new’ state structures (e.g., Bertocci 1970; Jahangir 1979), these issues have apparently ‘dropped off the menu of ethnographers’ interests’ (Piliavsky 2014b: 13) since the late 1980s. The recent resurgent interest in brokers and patronage has been concomitant with a renewed interest in state formation, ‘vernacular democracy’ and often the relation between physical violence and political power.

Anthropologists working on patronage and politics in India have particularly contributed to deconstructing normative ideas in liberal political theory that tend to view patronage as an impediment for development and democratisation (Björkman 2014; Chatterjee 2004; Piliavsky 2014a). And while this literature has been criticised for thereby downplaying the exploitative side of ‘patronage’ (e.g., Berenschot 2014; cf.: James 2011; Martin 2016), it has convincingly been shown that ‘patronage’ and ‘democracy’ or ‘modern statehood’ are not opposites but can indeed be seen as mutually reinforcing and intersecting (Michelutti 2008).

Patronage is also a central element in macro-conceptualisations of the ‘state’ (system) in Bangladesh. Its significance for gaining access to the ‘state’ and its resources has led David Lewis (2011) to characterise Bangladesh as a ‘patron state’. The relation between (local) authority structures, distribution of power, factionalism, political violence, muscle politics, and political leadership formation through the logic of patronage is one of the best explored scholarly fields with regard to politics in Bangladesh and has proliferated particularly in the last decade (e.g., Jackman 2017; Kuttig 2019; Suykens and Islam 2013). Political parties are here conceptualised as ‘vehicles’ of patronage to gain access to the state and legal impunity. The so-called ‘violent entrepreneurs’ are subjected to the patronage of, but at times also exert control over, political parties or particular political leaders (Jackman 2017; Ruud 2010). This exceptionally strong focus on patronage as politics and on political violence in the literature on Bangladesh grows out of the fact that the majority of scholars assume a weak ideological consolidation within the two main alliances.

However, this reduction of politics to the logic of a mere transaction of benefits, although important, does limit our understanding of the ‘state’ not only in Bangladesh, but in South Asia and beyond.

V Large issues in small places: Partial perspectives on the state

The contributions in this special issue approach ‘the state’ from an ethnographic perspective. We believe that the very limitation of the methodology for theory-building is a major strength when we think about something that is so concrete and yet so elusive as ‘the state’. Our ethnography explores particular ‘locations’—be it specific geographical places that are more traditionally associated with the method such as villages (Hoque in this special issue); or ‘social locations’ within particular groups such as the bus labour federation (Kuttig), and (upper) middle-class intellectuals in Dhaka (Mookherjee) or in Sylhet (Schulz); or locations defined around particular institutions, material things, events or issues (such as in the accounts of Berger, Visser, Mookerjee). And so, what we get is a situated but also necessarily partial view as we limit ourselves to certain ‘state effects’ and the perspectives of specific interlocutors in contemporary Bangladesh. The perspective is ‘partial’ in two ways. It allows us to see selective aspects that only form parts of an imagined whole derived from a specific spatio-temporal context and, secondly, a ‘partisan’ or ‘biased’ view as we focus on the perspective of specific groups or interlocutors. Arguably, however, it is this partial view that is particularly conducive for reflecting critically on ‘large issues’ like the state. While macro-perspectives engage with a level of abstraction that tend to erase the complexities of social practices, the partial and situated studies of ethnographers are more readily equipped to grasp and describe the intricate dynamics of lived experiences that often only partially ‘fit’ the theories derived from macro-perspectives, universalist models, and normative assumptions.

The authors’ material in this special issue questions all-encompassing conceptualisations of ‘the state’ and ‘state-power’. While each article offers only ‘partial’ understandings of ‘the state’, together these afford rich descriptions of how widely perceived ‘state structures’ emerge and are shaped by power inequalities, competing knowledge systems, and multiple normative orders. This inductive approach allows us to explore ‘the state’ without reducing our theoretical frame to only seeing ‘the state’ and instead reveals the multiplicity of power structures and different forms of authority. When individuals navigate varying power structures in order to ‘get things done’, they interact with existing ‘state structures’ such as courts in a way that might be different from their legal-formal definitions and their interactions simultaneously reshape institutions, practices, and public perceptions. As Berger elucidates in his article, even the preference of his interlocutors for non-state institutions in the realm of conflict resolution does not necessarily render ‘state’ courts insignificant but rather they continue to bear enormous symbolic influence from which the very same interlocutors draw strategically. While Berger argues that boundaries between state and non-state institutions are hard to draw, other articles contend that what is perceived as ‘the state’ itself is also not clear and dependent on different locations. Kuttig, for instance, in his article on the transport labour federation, argues that the conflation of socio-political identities and the ‘blurring’ of existing categories of leadership shape how people in provincial towns perceive ‘the state’.

The partial views offered by different articles seem to be even contradictory at times. Many articles stress that ‘the state’ is imagined as a powerful actor, indeed often exploring how those who are imagined to constitute the state are implicitly equalised with ‘those in power’, thus conflating different forms of authority (e.g., Schulz), or with potential for delivering economic improvement and development (e.g., Hoque). Yet, Ruud shows how ‘the state’ and ‘centralised power’ often appear as rather distant in ‘Middle Bangladesh’ where local networks of powerful individuals tend to undermine systems put in place by central bureaucrats. Such contradictions and ambiguities are arguably the result of different locations, research focus, and conceptual lenses. But we contend that beyond this, these differences reveal substantial characteristics of ‘the state’ itself: its notorious partiality. The state is not only—as pointed out by Abrams—‘a unified symbol of an actual disunity’ (1988 [1977]: 79) but partial in the sense that as an ‘ideological project’ (ibid.: 76), it seems to result in different imaginations and divergent formations of subjectivities even within the same geographic location, in ways that are often inherently linked with ideas of belonging and broader power structures.

This becomes even more apparent if we consider the work by Ellen Bal and Nasrin Siraj (2007) on the dynamics of claims-making and imaginations of ‘real citizenship’ of Bengali settlers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a region that remains unfortunately unrepresented in this special issue. The imaginations, claims and political organisation by Muslim-Bengali immigrants, especially their strong sense of entitlement qua citizenship and Bengali-ness, stands in sharp contrast to common attitudes made by most ‘ordinary’ Bengalis in some of this issue’s articles (e.g., Hoque, Mookherjee). Ironically, their analysis of this dynamic read through this lens seems to suggest that ideas of rights and entitlements against the state are not only shaped by (party-)political, social, economic, or symbolic capital but can also depend on ethnic and religious belonging.

We contend that the diversity and complementarity of these situated, partial and ethnographically rich collection of articles allows us to grasp in a more nuanced way how people in Bangladesh engage with what they perceive as ‘the state’. We do so obviously in our own ‘partial’ way, which is in part an outcome of the scarcity of qualitative research in a number of fields as we outlined above—for example, the absence of ethnographies focusing on the military or state bureaucracies. One of the most regrettable limitations of this special issue, however, is that it does not figure the work of any Bangladeshi scholar even though we really tried to seek out their contributions ¹⁶ . Unfortunately, it appears that despite the increasing number of well-trained anthropologists and other social scientists (cf. Lewis and van Schendel in this special issue) in Bangladesh, academic debates on Bangladesh in internationally recognised journals are dominated by scholars based at Euro-American universities. We, nevertheless, hope that this compilation will allow scholars to understand some of the complex dynamics in contemporary Bangladesh. Readers can get insights into both ‘structural effects’, including certain recurrent patterns that seem to be more generally characteristic of ‘the state’ in contemporary Bangladesh and also the ruptures, incoherence, limitations and partiality of the observable imaginations and structural effects. Although this collection assembles articles with the explicit regional focus on Bangladesh, we hope that its spatial and historical situatedness will prove useful for comparative debates and thus contribute to pushing forward and refining the general ongoing and much-needed conceptual debates on ‘the state’.