Next year, the Crime and Justice Research Centre will co-host the Crime and Justice in Asia and the Global South International Conference with the Asian Criminological Society. The conference will be held in Cairns from 10-13 July 2017 and will feature international speakers:
- Professor Rosemary Barberet;
- Professor Jiahong Liu;
- Professor John Braithwaite; and
- Professor Raewyn Connell.
To showcase the diversity of topics that will be presented during the conference, each week the CJRC blog will feature an accepted abstract from a presenter.
This week’s featured abstract is from Associate Professor Kamal Uddin from the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh. A/Prof Uddin is also a successful recipient of a CJRC Early-Career Researcher Scholarship in Southern Criminology.
Last month, the CJRC awarded eleven successful applicants from around the world with Early-Career Researcher and Senior Fellow scholarships in Southern Criminology. The main purpose of the scholarships are to support the travel and attendance to the 2017 conference and to support collaborative research with CJRC scholars on topics related to developing the projects of Southern Criminology. A list of the successful applicants can be accessed here.
Featured abstract:
“Militarization of Policing, Controlling Crime and Terrorism, and Human Rights in Bangladesh” by Associate Professor Kamal Uddin, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
This paper deals with militarization of policing and controlling crime in Bangladesh, with special focus on the human rights in criminal justice. Application of military personnel, military philosophy, using advanced military training and weapons , and aggressive tools and tactics in policing in Bangladesh have seen, particularly with the establishment of a single force- Rapid Action Battalion in 2004 as an anti-crime and anti-terrorist elite force, and to help the regular police force handle with critical situations of law enforcement. The paper links between three variables- militarization of policing, couture of impunity and corruption. It inter-relates the causal factors together to elaborate a theoretical framework in which the phenomenon can be analysed. Based on the relations between these variables, this paper argues that militarization of policing in Bangladesh has largely failed to control crime and terrorism. It also contributes to human rights violations due to a culture of impunity and a high degree of corruption. This paper investigates how and why Bangladeshi police force is engaged in committing human rights violations in the course of controlling crime and terrorism based interviews of different stakeholders and survey. The paper employs qualitative and quantitative techniques of data analysis in order to process the body of evidence collected during the fieldwork. Issues of collusion between criminals and political leadership, lack of accountability of law and order agencies and lack of effectiveness of the judiciary are raised to explain additional causes of undermining criminal justice in Bangladesh. Finally, this paper outlines some policy implications.
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