The politics of international law and India-Bangladesh land border management: a critical approach theory

This thesis explores the management of specific aspects of land border disputes on the India-Bangladesh frontier. Drawing on a critical theory approach which problematizes the politics of international law, it asks how a partial border dispute resolution between India and Bangladesh became possible and how and why it proved difficult to achieve in and after 1974, and it suggests that the interaction of law and politics is a major underlying cause of the patterns in that resolution. The specific approach used is taken from Koskenniemi (2005, 2011), who has argued that international legal theories tend to universalise conflicts which are better understood as specific problems in specific historical and political contexts, and that it is the politics of a dispute rather than the legal dimensions as law which shape the processes and possibilities of their resolution. The research asks how effective the available means for conflict resolution have been and why the ongoing border dispute between India and Bangladesh have proved so intractable. The employed methods, derived primarily from Strydom's (2011) account of critical theory methodology, use a qualitative analysis approach to examine substantive issues between the two countries, their history, diplomacy and geography, and to examine carefully how the disputes are seen, defined and acted upon by key players on both sides. The thesis includes a critical analysis of the India-Bangladesh land border dispute with the primary focus on the weaker actor, making sense of Bangladesh's response to attempts to dominate its border policies by a much larger country that was also, in the early 1970s, the sponsor of its independence. The thesis draws on a wide range of original sources, including primary documents sources from both sides and interview sources conducted by the author. It also includes a critical appraisal of the process of negotiation and the interlocking of legal and political arguments in the management of the conflict. The dispute has been partially resolved since the thesis was started, and the analysis aims to explain both the management and the degree of agreement reached by 2015