Identifying and Promoting Goals to Build Confidence and Trust in Civil-Military Relations in Bangladesh

Civil-Military Relations (CMR) in Bangladesh is a discourse of considerable academic and practical salience for at least three specific reasons. First, Bangladesh is a country, which with a background of long and sustained struggle for self-assertion, finally emerged as a state-entity out of a Liberation War in which both the civil and the military elements had fought in unison and shoulder to shoulder to ward off the occupation forces. Moreover, the military worked professionally during the Liberation War under an astute political leadership; thus creating one of the finest examples of CMR even in a war situation. Second, and an unpleasant surprise as it was, a country such as this with an assuring background of CMR had to go through the shocking phase of a praetorian army on the prowl to meddle in politics between 1975 and 1990. Third, despite such a dismal CMR track-record during the above-mentioned period there has been a positive turn-around since the 1990s as the military eschewed/had to eschew at least three occasions to be in the political saddle. As of now, the Bangladesh military is in a progressively steady process of transforming itself from having been for sometime praetorian to being professional. But in the overall context, there remains some more points to ponder vis-à-vis CMR in Bangladesh; the major one being how to retrieve the kind of trust between the civil and the military that featured during the Liberation War. While analysing the core theme in both pre and post-1990 perspectives the discussion is rounded off with a lead on the desired shape and contours of CMR in Bangladesh. Beginning with a relevant conceptual construct the discussion brings in five more sections to flesh out the relevant themes. Thus the section that follows th