Theoretical review analyzes mass protests leading to the Awami League’s fall, suggesting implications for regime survival and civil-military relations.
On August 5, 2024, Bangladesh’s Awami League (AL) government under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fell following weeks of mass, student-led protests that broadened into a nationwide anti-regime uprising. This article offers a theoretically informed review and analysis of the uprising’s antecedents, dynamics, and outcomes. Drawing on the literature of contentious politics, regime survival and breakdown, civil–military relations, and economic grievance politics, the study synthesises open-source reporting, human rights documentation, and secondary scholarship to construct a process-tracing narrative. The central argument is that the AL’s fall combined mobilizational triggers (quota-reform protests catalysed by repression and information blackouts), coalition cascades (cross-class and cross-organisational alignment), security defection (military and police non-intervention or withdrawal), and elite exit (prime ministerial flight) under conditions of declining regime performance legitimacy and escalating coercive costs. The article contributes a typology of “trigger-to-transition” sequences relevant to hybrid and electoral-authoritarian regimes. It reflects on the interim arrangement headed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and the role of international actors. Policy implications regarding transitional justice, security sector reform, and election sequencing are offered.
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Das et al. (2025) studied this question.
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