Saimum Parvez

• Ph.D.
• PostDoc Position at Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Political violence is one of the major features of the political landscape of Bangladesh. This chapter proposes a three-tier approach, macro, meso, and micro, to understand what prompts violence and offers explanations of the nature and patterns of political violence in Bangladesh in the past decade and a half. The 2001–2017 period is used for anal...

The Islamic State (IS) is going through a shift in its strategy and tactics with a major organisational restructuring in the post-Caliphate phase. Instead of controlling a territory with a centralised system, the jihadist organisation is attempting to expand its ideologies via local affiliates, exploiting existing local grievances. Although South A...

This study examines the role of the press in shaping national identities in contemporary Bangladesh. It employs the critical discourse analysis method to analyze newspapers’ content and closely examines the news texts of three high-profile events in 2013: the Shahbag movement, the murder of blogger Rajib, and the Hefajat movement. Based on the crit...

Although militant groups have been present in Bangladesh since the 1990s, the country catapulted to international media attention on July 1, 2016, after an attack on a café in the upscale neighborhood of the capital Dhaka. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack which killed 29 people, mostly foreigners. The attack came in the wake...

Notwithstanding the discernable participation of women in terrorist groups, empirical research on women in terrorism is very scant in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, our article examines women's involvement in terrorism by analyzing the life stories of dozens of Bangladeshi women terrorists. We use a terrorist life-cycle approach to understand the ro...

This paper explains how do terrorist organisations evolve with the development of new communication technologies, with a particular focus on Bangladesh.

With the global proliferation of hybrid regimes, manipulated elections are on the rise as the rulers of hybrid regimes organize elections to maintain the veneer of democracy. Yet available studies on hybrid regimes have not explored the detail mechanisms of election manipulation and the role of various institutions in the process. This article inte...

This study investigates trends and patterns of violent extremism in Bangladesh based on the database of Bangladesh Peace Observatory (BPO). By analyzing the increasing and decreasing tendency of violent extremism with temporal and spatial variations, this study reveals several interesting findings: such as incidents related to violent extremism wit...

In 2018, Bangladesh and India both experienced a significant decline in terrorist attacks compared to the previous five years. Hard CT measures coupled with community-based ‘soft’ approaches have proven useful. However, new challenges, particularly the Rohingya refugee crisis, could jeopardise recent success, as terrorist groups could regain their...

Despite the visible presence of violent extremist groups, and evidence of their connection with transnational groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, the number of empirical studies on this topic is limited in Bangladesh. There have been over 50 violent extremist attacks in Bangladesh in recent years (2013-2017) and digital media was used in dif...

Public diplomacy is going through perplexing changes and challenges due to technological innovations and renewed interest in the ‘soft power’ approach. This article analyses the methods and tactics of US public diplomacy regarding Iran. It discusses the close relationship between propaganda and public diplomacy and how different tactics and initiat...