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The book cogently touches upon the dichotomies that beset the nation during its nascent stage and some of which continue to haunt its path. Kamran argues that an inherent religious bias prevented democracy from flourishing in Pakistan. This was despite the nation’s conceptualization on lines of the western modern construct. The religious ‘rationale’ conflicted with ideas of democracy as interpreted and propagated by the West and instead an ‘establishmentarian democracy’ started taking shape.

The concept of the Indo-Pacific itself is a debated one and is seen differently by various theorists, as pointed out by Shubhrajeet Konwer (p.105). It is seen either as a balancing strategy by the realists, or as a new institutional setting of cooperation among the countries of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean by the liberalists, or as an ideational construct of shared values to face a common enemy by the constructivists.

Bangladesh has had democratic governments with intermittent breaks when the military junta took over power through coup d’etat. The recent uprising was not an intervention by the army—to many it appeared to be spontaneous outburst of the masses although now, with the unearthing of many sources, the narrative does not correspond with that which attracted our attention at the outset.

There is disappointment, particularly at the exclusion of Dalits in the Republic’s politics of representation as Nepal de facto returns to the pre-revolutionary political system of domination of hill khas Nepali upper castes. Dalits may be 14 percent of the population but in the November 2022 elections

The world witnesses Israel’s barbaric destruction in Gaza, and people took to the streets to demand a ceasefire to end the horrific destruction on Gaza instigated in October 2023. The Israeli (occupation) defence and armed forces, along with private industries, seized this opportunity to market their goods. Israel uses video footage of their weapons in action to aim at boosting their sale of arms and surveillance technology.

In many parts of the Ottoman Empire, the massive immigration of Caucasian refugees created a demographically chaotic situation, as what Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary termed in the early 20th century, ‘unmixing of peoples’ which later on spawned a plethora of parochial nationalist and sub-nationalist movements in the post-Ottoman era.