Bangladesh Student Uprising: Successful Collective Action against State Capture

The student-led uprising in Bangladesh in July 2024 was the first successful Generation Z-led political movement that resulted in a successful overthrow of a repressive and corrupt autocracy. The collective action that this involved emerged spontaneously, but it was also based on several years of remarkable alignment of understanding and of objectives across different strands of popular mobilizations.

This research documents and analyses the factors that enabled a successful popular collective action to overthrow a highly repressive regime that had engaged in state capture over fifteen years.

A critical component of the research will be to talk extensively and record the experiences, voices, and the video footage on phones taken by the people on the street. We will then analyse these findings using a political settlements/collective action framing to map the heterogeneity of networks and interests involved in the uprising, and how they gradually coalesced to form a power block that despite being unarmed, was ultimately more powerful than the combined repressive apparatus of the state.

A documentation of the processes in Bangladesh, and an analysis of why it was successful, will help to improve our understanding of collective action challenges and how movements for the reform or overthrow of repressive state capture regimes can succeed.

SOAS-ACE is currently undertaking research in Bangladesh and Nigeria, including in the education, health and power sectors, as well as on successful collective action that overthrew a corrupt autocracy. Moving beyond pure research, we are also monitoring the implementation of anti-corruption strategies our research has recommended, such as a strategy to reduce pharmaceutical companies’ overpricing of medicines.

Our partner on this project is the Change Initiative.