Bardonomics

This is adapted from a paper I wrote for my Comparative Politics class at Harvard . A Friendless People Thousands have been killed. Hundreds of thousands have fled. They are a people without a home, much less a state. Such is the plight of the Rohingya, whom a UN spokesperson once called the most friendless people in the world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called the situation a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” (“UN”). This latest wave of state-sponsored violence follows a series of attacks by militants—a small insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)—in August on Myanmarese military outposts. The brutal military crackdown is ostensibly targeted at insurgents. Yet, it is unmistakably civilians who are bearing the brunt of the violence, with the UN High Commissioner calling the response “clearly disproportionate” and “without regard for basic principles of international law” (“UN”). The approach of ethnic institutionalism has

Image: Wikimedia Commons The four decades since Deng Xiaoping spearheaded “Reform and Opening Up” in China have seen growth on a scale unparalleled in modern history. Where hundreds of millions were once destitute, extreme poverty has been all but cast into the annals of history; the world competes to attract the wealth of China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes. Analyses of the country's explosive growth are aplenty. Real GDP has grown 64-fold, literacy is above 95%, and in a once Communist country the private sector, at least on paper, now accounts for 60 percent of economic activity. This piece, however, will look more at the stability of the country—while analysing potential economic factors underpinning this. A number of scholars predicted political and economic instability in China as nation rapidly became prosperous. Yet, in a country transformed, political and economic durability remain. The Chinese Community Party continues to enjoy high levels of popular leg

Image: Wikimedia Commons Established as East Pakistan after India’s independence and partition, Bangladesh’s two decades prior to independence were marked by neglect and discrimination. Of the two parts of Pakistan, the East was more populous, but it remained politically and economically dominated by West Pakistan. Over 1,600km of Indian territory separated the two Pakistans. Liberation activists charged that the central government in West Pakistan engaged in the ethnolinguistic discrimination against the majority Bengali East Pakistanis. Only the West Pakistani native tongue, Urdu, was recognised as an official language in the, and Bengalis were also largely underrepresented in the Pakistani bureaucracy and army. Economically, the government of West Pakistan was accused of appropriating surpluses from the East to fund the West’s imports, and the West withheld the allocation of funds for development in the East.   As maltreatment and mismanagement grew, calls for freedom from