Muhammad Abdur Raqib

His dissertation research explores the way state officials rely on the law to authorize and manage state-sponsored violence in pre- and post-revolutionary Bangladesh. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Bangladeshi Magistrate Court before the 2024 revolution and in Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal in a newly emerged political settlement, he unfolds how victims of state-sponsored violence, many of whom were prosecuted under authoritarian laws, navigate their relations to the state and to one another. In his fieldwork in the terrorism court, he explores lawfare as a process that makes violence legible, institutionalizes claims, and entangles subjects in an authoritarian political settlement, while also opening the possibility of life-affirming institutions and radical futurity for the victims. Later, he focused on the trial of state officials in the ICT tribunal in a revolutionary moment, and unfolded the ways ICT reproduces the same juridical distinctions, between credible and non-credible victims, between prosecutable and non-prosecutable violence, that sustained repression in the first place. By situating counter-lawfare initiated by victim networks in post-authoritarian transition, his project thus unfolds law not as a moral horizon against which violence is judged, but as a terrain of struggle through which violence is reorganized, rendered legible, and, at times, resisted.