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The 2024 Bangladesh Quota Reform Movement stands as one of the most consequential political upheavals in the nation's post-independence history. What began as a student-led protest demanding reform of a civil service quota system - which reserved 56% of government jobs for designated groups including descendants of 1971 Liberation War freedom fighters rapidly escalated into a nationwide uprising against authoritarianism. The state's violent crackdown claimed over 1,400 lives according to final tallies, wounded more than 20,000, and ultimately forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee the country on 5 August 2024 after 15 continuous years in power. This article provides a comprehensive, evidence-based analysis of the historical origins of the quota system, the proximate triggers of the 2024 protests, the human rights violations documented by the United Nations and international organizations, the political and economic structural factors that transformed a job-quota grievance into a mass revolution, and the post-Hasina transition led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. The article draws on United Nations Human Rights Council reports, Amnesty International documentation, peer-reviewed analyses, and contemporaneous reporting to assess both what happened and why it matters for Bangladesh's democratic future.

The phenomenon commonly referred to as women's empowerment may be analytically conceptualized as the capacity that women possess to exercise autonomous agency in charting their own social, political, and economic trajectories. In modern research, the ability of women to be involved in social, political, and economic activities is significantly limited, an issue that is more severe in the developing economy. Gender inequality has been formalized as the fifth objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The current paper provides an analysis of a continuum of mechanisms that aim to empower women. To evaluate the effectiveness of these empowerment strategies, this empirical study uses panel data based on thirty nine (39) developing economies between period of 2004 and 2024. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) used in the current research serves as a proxy of women empowerment and used as a dependent variable. The proxy of governance is the Governance Index (GOVI). The control variables include Gross Domestic Product Per Capita Growth (GDPPCGR), Labor Force, Female (LFF) and Gross Capital Formation (GCF). The Driscoll and Kraay (DK) standard error (based on fixed effects estimation) technique employed for addressing the problem of heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependency in the models. The findings of study show that governance has a strong impact on women empowerment.

The partition of British India in the year 1947 was one of the most important and hurtful events in the South Asian history that led to the birth of India and Pakistan. Among the principal points of partition that are analyzed in this article are the separation of state property between two new states that were created, mass migration and communal violence. The research methodology is qualitative in historical research and involves reference to secondary literature on the topic as well as primary data in the form of official papers, governmental reports, and contemporary records. This paper explores the role of the rush political move of dividing the subcontinent in the migration of one of the largest migrations in modern history where millions of Muslims fled to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus fled to India. The migratory process was characterized by a lot of communal violence which entailed murder, kidnappings and severe social unrest. The paper provides a comprehensive insight into the complex institutional and humanitarian effects of the partition by focusing on the administrative challenges in distributing the governmental systems of British India, military bases, and financial resources of the country.

The notion of 'backwardness' has been integral in organizing global hierarchies of knowledge and power since the colonial era. This article claims that backwardness was not a fact of nature as seen from the colonial point of view rather it is a political-economic product of colonial discourse and imperial economic institutions. Colonial knowledge systems endowed colonized societies with the characteristics of stagnation, irrationality, and deficiency while colonists’ political economy re-invented colonized societies to create structural underdevelopment. The article brings together postcolonial study, discourse analysis and global political economy to show how backwardness was self-confirming as it perpetuated and legitimized imperial domination and reinforced the domination of colonial powers. The paper further argues that the modern thinking on development emphasizes colonial norms and views the Global South societies as deficient, less mature or underdeveloped. In doing so, this article underscores the deep rooted colonial epistemologies on current development processes and suggests a critical review of the categories under which global inequalities are constructed.

Empowerment of women has been designed through an intricate interface of political ideologies, constitutional developments, and legislative reforms in Pakistan, spanning from the pre-partition era to the present. This review critically examines the political underpinnings of women’s empowerment with a particular focus on the evolution of women-centered policies and legal frameworks in Pakistan, and more specifically, the province of Punjab during 2008–2018. This qualitative review of secondary sources, including historical records, constitutional provisions, and legislative documents, traces how different political regimes have influenced the direction and effectiveness of women-centered policies. The findings reveal that while Pakistan has established a robust constitutional and legislative framework supporting gender equality, significant gaps persist between policy formulation and implementation. Provincial autonomy following the 18th Constitutional Amendment enabled Punjab to introduce comprehensive pro-women laws addressing workplace harassment, political representation, violence against women, and inheritance rights. However, these initiatives are often constrained by weak enforcement mechanisms, socio-cultural barriers, limited institutional capacity, and exclusion of marginalized groups, particularly in rural and informal sectors. The study concludes that despite notable progress, women’s empowerment in Pakistan remains uneven and requires stronger institutional accountability, inclusive policy design, and effective implementation strategies. The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a comprehensive political and legislative analysis while identifying critical areas for future research and policy intervention.

Pakistan is a democratic, welfare and Islamic state but the concept of good governance is still a dream especially in post-colonial societies, institutional crumbliness, political uncertainty, and socio-economic disparities context that are frequent barriers. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, uttered an inclusive dream of governance based on constitutionalism, rule of law, responsibility, and inclusivity. This research article critically examines Jinnah’s vision of good governance by scrutinizing his speeches, and political demeanor, placing them within modern governance theory. The study has argued that his governance viewpoint line up meticulously with contemporary democratic principles of governance that offers a normative framework for dealing Pakistan’s existing governance discrepancies. By integrating historical assessment with theoretical viewpoints, the study has highlighted the significance of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision for institutional reforms, democratic link, and proper leadership.

Over the last several years, the longstanding Baloch insurgency in Pakistan has seen an influx of female activists. On the one hand, women militants, like Shari Baloch, have become active participants in a series of terrorist attacks launched by insurgent groups like the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF). On the other hand, the growing number of females in organizations like the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) continues to rally in an unarmed resistance movement mobilizing mass protests for the missing persons or the enforced disappearances. However, the Pakistani government appears to be conflating the activities of these groups and advancing a particular discourse that frames women as victims of trafficking, grooming, and coercion by terrorist groups in Balochistan. This paper aims to review the gender-based aspects of the Balochistan conflict through the lens of human security and feminist security discourse to determine if such a framework can offer additional policy insights and research avenues in understanding the manifestations and motivations of female militants and those involved in non-violent protests. It will be argued that while the Pakistani government’s discourse on women trafficked and coerced into militant organizations addresses some aspects of the conflict, it may overshadow the efforts of those women who appear to be exercising their agency to further the sociopolitical and economic cause of Balochistan. Secondly, applying this discourse to an unarmed non-violent resistance movement may neglect a more significant human security issue in the region. This paper will contribute to the existing scholarship on the Baloch conflict by providing a more nuanced understanding of the gender-based aspects of the decades-long insurgency in Balochistan.

This article revisits Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) as a pioneering feminist utopian text that articulates resistance to both colonial modernity and indigenous patriarchy in early twentieth-century India. Situating the novella within the socio-historical context of colonial educational reform, gendered domesticity, and emerging feminist thought, the study examines how Rokeya deploys the utopian genre and dream narrative as deliberate literary strategies. Drawing on feminist theories of utopia, the article argues that Sultana’s Dream moves beyond simple gender role reversal to construct a political metaphor grounded in intellect, education, ethical governance, and non-violent transformation. Through the imaginative space of ‘Ladyland,’ Rokeya exposes the social construction of gender hierarchies, challenges patriarchal claims of masculine superiority, and redefines power as collective rationality rather than domination. The dream framework functions as both a narrative safeguard and a symbolic act of awakening, enabling Rokeya to envision women’s emancipation without reproducing violence or coercion. By reading Sultana’s Dream as a conscious act of feminist resistance rather than an escapist fantasy, this article extends existing scholarship on utopian literature and foregrounds Rokeya’s contribution to South Asian feminist thought as a writer who transformed imagination into a political tool for social critique and change.