Habibul Haque Khondker

Zayed University · Humanities and Social Sciences

Since the end of the Cold War, globalization—the process and the idea—has been reshaping the world. Global studies scholarship has emerged to make sense of the transnational manifestations of globalization: economic, social, cultural, ideological, technological, environmental, and postcolonial. But a series of crises in the first two decades of the...

In the late 1970s, a new awareness of wearing hijab emerged in Indonesia, especially among Muslim students in public schools. Even though it was banned by the New Order government throughout the 1980s, hijab was fi nally permitted to be worn in public schools and its use continued to spread in Indonesia since then. One of the activists who was...

Written in 2015 it may be relevant even today.

This volume has been released in the context of a range of events that have underlined how different the world is now to the moment 50 years ago when Bangladesh took its first steps. Events like COVID-19, the moment a miscalculation with the steering of a single boat in the Suez significantly altered global trade, and the ongoing challenge of clima...

Looking from afar one might not easily understand why Pakistan, a nation-state carved out of undivided India in August 1947 following a period of struggle and marked by the bloodbath of partition, did not even last for 25 years, a short lifespan for a contemporary nation. Many readers today—separated by a distance of fifty years—may have the same q...

This paper presents an overview of the globalization of higher education by focusing on the changes in recent decades. One of the changes involves the rise of the Asian universities. The paper highlights the importance of high quality research university for catching up in the race towards knowledge society.

By comparing the response to the COVID -19 pandemic in the Tiger economies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, this article examines the advantages and limitations of the statist command and control approaches to crisis management. Local, regional, and global politics as well as global political economy impinge and influence the state response. The...

The pandemic has wiped out over 4 million human lives and caused huge economic loss. As poverty forecasts famine, the super-rich became richer. The consequence of the pandemic has also shrunk the democratic space. In selected cases, the growing perception of social inequality matched the number of caseloads of infections and deaths. The response to...

Chinese soft power in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Sociology, in the words of its putative founder, August Comte (1798–1857), is both a science of society and humanity. The other, much older founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) too envisioned a universal history (and sociology too), as did Polybius in the second century BCE. Following these leads, this chapter examines the potential of soc...

In an attempt to examine Eurasian globalization historically, this paper outlines three phases of globalization starting from 200 BCE to 1492 CE as Phase 1 and 1500 CE to 1999 CE as Phase 2 and from 2000 CE Phase 3. By historicizing the concept and the process of globalization, the paper attempts to provide a more global rather than a Europe-centre...

Asia has been a beneficiary of economic globalization as evident in the rapid economic growth of a number of large Asian countries in the past three decades. Yet, the process of globalization has been both contested and coopted. In some Asian countries, globalization has been embraced unquestioningly and adopted as an economic strategy to catch up...

Abstract: Bureaucratic corruption causes the breakdown of the chain of command among the administrators, resulting in the weakness and fragility of state machinery. Consequently, they lose sovereignty, and they submit to or are dominated by foreign corporate and political powers. This paper adopts methods of historical analysis to explore the endem...

In evaluating the consequences of the Arab Spring 8 years later, this paper not only focuses on the short‐term consequences of the uprisings that swept through a number of countries in the Middle East and North African region but also analyzes the long‐term prospects for democratization and development in the MENA region. The impact of the Arab Spr...

Review of Asef Bayat

With India’s robust, neo-liberal economic growth and the growing buying power of the Indian consumers, cricket, a popular sport in India, too, has been transformed. Indian Premier League is a short-format, high-value cricket league that features major international cricket stars who come to India to join one of the eight franchised teams that take...

This chapter examines two related problems: first, the discourse of corruption as a social problem, and secondly, certain problems of agenda-setting in sociology, which continues to be dominated by Anglo-American sectarian and national interests. The chapter calls for making sociology truly universal as an academic discipline. An understanding of s...

Migrant workers are those who work for income in countries other than where they are born. Migration of the laboring class or the flow of people across national boundaries is a physical evidence of globalization, a master process which may be viewed as an amalgam of flows: flows of capital, labor, technology, popular culture, ideas of modernity and...

Professor A.K. Nazmul Karim (1922–1982), a Bangladeshi sociologist, educated at Columbia University and London University, played a pioneering role in establishing sociology as an academic discipline in Bangladesh with the help of UNESCO in 1957. His teaching and research on rural social stratification and political power inspired a generation of B...

The Industrial Revolution that set up the process of industrialization was a watershed, comparable to the Neolithic revolution that incorporated both agricultural revolution and urban revolution. Industrial revolution is defined as a rapid transformation of production and transportation caused by the application of new machines that use inanimate,...

The main task of this article is to link the issue of the identity of migrants to the human security of migrants with temporary labor status. This article explores not only the politico-economic circumstances of temporary labor migration amid conditions of insecurity, vulnerability, and precarity, and its social and cultural underpinnings, which ar...

Sheikh Hasina is the prime minister of Bangladesh (1996–2001, 2009–present), the eighth most populous and the third largest Muslim country of the world. This chapter attempts to provide an institutional and historical understanding of the emergence of Sheikh Hasina as one of the most powerful female leaders in South Asia. Her leadership style, whic...

This review essay discusses works of a leading sociologist and a leading economist on the subject of inequality and globalization. The books raise fresh ideas of inequality in the context of globalization by raising questions on the relationship between globalization and inequality throughout history. Although Therborn raises some fundamental quest...

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2011 study on global violence estimated that if measured by data from public health sources alone, Bangladesh has the highest rate of violence (8.5 homicide per 100,000 population, higher than the global average) within the region of South Asia. The World Health Organization’s World Report on Violence...

This paper surveys the state of the play with regard to women's inequality and the processes of changes leading to potential empowerment in selected Muslim majority countries. This paper uses the framework of sociologist Goran Therborn's existential inequality, which is complimented by the capability approaches of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. T...

This paper surveys the state of the play with regard to women's inequality and the processes of changes leading to potential empowerment in selected Muslim majority countries. This paper uses the framework of sociologist Goran Therborn's existential inequality, which is complimented by the capability approaches of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. T...

ProtoSociology is an interdisciplinary journal which crosses the borders of philosophy, social sciences, and their corresponding disciplines for more than two decades. Each issue concentrates on a specific topic taken from the current discussion to which scientists from different fields contribute the results of their research. ProtoSociology is f...

Famine, defined as excessive mortality due to extreme and protracted shortage of food, resulting from a mixture of political and economic factors, has been part of human history. Traditional thoughts of the causes of famine focused on acts of God or of nature. Later, the idea developed that famines were caused by population growth far exceeding gro...

This article seeks to review the impact of the new media on political mobilization in the Arab Spring of 2011. The article examines the relationship between the information communication technology, especially the new media and its consequences – both intended and unintended – on social movement in the Middle East and North Africa region. Tracing t...

This chapter examines problems of legal pluralism in Bangladesh by focusing on shalish, the informal dispute resolution and mediation often involving women and their various alleged transgressions of moral conduct. It deals with the efforts of civil society organizations in Bangladesh in general, with specific focus on the Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK)...

This paper traces the history of environmental movement and the growing awareness of sustainable living in the past half a century. Taking The Silent Spring of Rachel Spring (published in 1962) as a point of departure, this paper navigates through the interplay of awareness and consciousness raising, knowledge production, institution building, envi...

Challenges of Poverty and Inequality in the Arab World Despite spectacular economic rise of some of the Arab Gulf countries, poverty remains a persistent challenge in the Arab World. Social inequalities persist as new inequalities overlay old structured ones in a number of Arab countries. Depending on the entitlements patterns and the provision o...

By using Bangladesh’s experience with democracy and governance, this paper argues that the debate on whether democracy is a precondition for development or a strong developmental state is a pre-condition for democracy is somewhat unproductive. Rather than starting from such a stark opposition, this paper argues that it may be possible to pursue the...

This article examines the role of the new media in the 'Arab Spring' in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that although the new media is one of the factors in the social revolution among others such as social and political factors in the region, it nevertheless played a critical role especially in light of the absence of an...

The classical Marxist view and the liberal view of Seymour Lipset, despite their many differences, shared a common view of the linkage between middle class formation and the push for democratization. The rise of middle class historically known as the bourgeoisie, a word etymologi-cally connected to urban classes, was seen as the dreamers and carrie...

Plutarch’s insight on social inequality is valid today as scholars point to the puzzle of historical endurance of the problem of poverty as well as the risks associated with it for social stability. The quote Marx uses in his address to the National Labor Union of the United States after the Civil War has an eerie contemporary ring to it, and can b...

Bangladesh, the second largest Muslim democracy in the world, presents an interesting case study of a secular state for Muslim majority countries in other parts of the world. Bangladesh presents the hope that, in theory, a Muslim majority developing country can have a functional democracy. Nevertheless, the temptation of using religion for politica...

With a Muslim population of 130 million, Bangladesh is the third largest Muslimmajority country and has the fourth largest Muslim population in the world; yet, it has retained a fairly tolerant and secular character for most of her history. Although there have been occasional drifts towards religious extremism, the secular character has never been...

Do we confuse globalization for Americanization? What are the distinctive elements in the interplay of the local and the global?This much needed book is the first full length text to examine globalization from the perspective of both the West and the East. It considers globalization as a general social and economic process, and the challenges it pr...

This paper examines the growing contestations over public space of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, between Islamic and secular groups since the country’s independence in 1971. The contestations illustrate the deeper ideological competitions between the secular, liberal and right‐wing religious ideologies in a country where 85% of the 150 mil...

This paper examines the notions of "home," "nation" and "the world" among the Bengali-speaking families in Singapore. The forces of globalization have played a significant role in making the Bengali-speaking families transnational, first by uprooting them from Bengal, a territory now shared between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, an...

This paper revisits the concept of state autonomy in the context of globalization. Earlier literature either considered state autonomy from the social forces in broad institutional and cultural terms or from the dominant classes in a restrictive sense. However, in either case the focus remained on domestic/national society, not the global society....

A detailed and reflexive summary of Jeffrey Alexander's book Civil Sphere

This article examines corruption as a social problem and a phenomenon that illustrates certain problems in agenda-setting in sociology. Understanding such questions as why corruption remains largely outside the purview of sociology, and how sociological agendas are set can be found in the works of Syed Hussein Alatas, who wrote about corruption as...

The socio-cultural changes in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore, can be beneficially examined in terms of the concepts of globalisation and glocalisation. The two concepts are related and their evolution and transformation highlight the tangled relationship between the discipline of sociology and globalisation. Although the soc...

Argues taht the idea of global and national/international categories being inherently opposed, is a fallacy of the globalization debate. Seeks to illustrate how “international” co-operation can have favourable national consdequences. Explores the implications of international volunteerism for nation-building in Singapore.

This paper examines the evolution and transformation of the concept of globalization highlighting the tangled relationship between the discipline of sociology and globalization. The paper will also trace the history and the development of the concept of "glocalization", which originated in Japan as a popular business strategy. Professor Roland Robe...