People are increasingly weary and frustrated with the pace of improvement in law and order. This is reasonable given the little visible remission in nationwide crime, with gun shootings, knife killings, beatings with sticks and rods, street clashes, and mob attacks continuing to punctuate public life. As a result, the interim government is being branded weak, incompetent, and indifferent, accused of lacking clues about how to reverse the situation. But weak or incompetent compared to whom? And measured against which standard of “order”? To demand a restoration of law and order requires an honest analytical starting point: restore it to what period, exactly? This question is almost never asked, yet it is an important gateway to understanding the present crisis.
It bears recalling that the violence of knives, guns, and organised street terror also existed throughout the 15-and-a-half-year rule of Sheikh Hasina, but for the large part it took quite a different institutional form compared to what Bangladesh is witnessing now. This distinction matters because it explains why today’s violence feels chaotic, retaliatory, and socially diffused rather than centrally controlled. During the klepto-fascist phase of Hasina’s governance, violence was not an accidental failure of law and order—it was an instrument of rule.
For more than a decade, coercion replaced political competition. Opposition parties were systematically suppressed, journalists intimidated, and dissent criminalised. Enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings were not aberrations but rather signals carefully calibrated to instil fearwithout provoking decisive international rupture. At the grassroots level, ruling party activists and student wings functioned as informal enforcers, using knives, rods, and machetes not randomly, but rather selectively—to silence opponents and control tenders, campuses, and neighbourhoods.
That era produced suppressed violence, not peace. Crime statistics appeared manageable because fear discouraged reporting, and streets looked calm because dissent had been crushed, not resolved. The state monopolised violence but delegated its execution to party-aligned actors, creating a system in which brutality was rewarded with protection. Justice did not fail accidentally; it was deliberately suspended for loyal perpetrators. What Bangladesh is experiencing now is the “leakage” of that violence from the state back into society. Today’s violence is decentralised and retaliatory—anger released after years of humiliation, suppression, and forced silence. This is a classic post-authoritarian pattern: when fear collapses faster than institutions can be rebuilt, the muscle memory of violence remains. Klepto-fascism reprogrammes social behaviour, teaching citizens that law is irrelevant and that survival requires aggression. When such a system ends, society does not instantly revert to civic norms; it suffers the withdrawal symptoms of a long coercive regime.
This is why framing current violence simply as the result of a “law and order failure” is analytically shallow. While current law enforcement has undoubtedly left a lot to be desired, we must acknowledge that what Bangladesh is dealing with are the aftershocks of a long coercive regime, compounded by a persistent security vacuum. The interim government did not inherit a neutral administrative machine, but a hollowed-out shell. The police force, civil service, and security apparatus were shaped by years of loyalty-based internal politics, partisan capture, and unaccountability. No country can purge its entire bureaucracy in such a short time, nor can law enforcement alone fix the current security situation, as the damage is institutional and psychological, not merely criminal.
Even in countries with the most elaborate legal frameworks and the largest concentrations of law enforcement personnel, violence has proven stubbornly resistant to elimination. The US offers a sobering benchmark. There is no dearth of laws against violence, nor any shortage of police forces, courts, or prisons. Yet, shootings continue in schools, churches, marketplaces, and other public spaces with grim regularity, and the number of children killed or traumatised by such violence is staggering. This persistence demonstrates a hard structural truth: violence is not eradicated simply by writing more laws or deploying more enforcers. It is rooted in deeper social conditions—alienation, despair, institutional legitimacy, and economic exclusion—that policing alone cannot neutralise.
International experience points towards a different architecture for stability. Societies that experience low levels of everyday violence—such as the Nordic countries, Canada or New Zealand—are not peaceful because their citizens are inherently more virtuous or their police more brutal. They are peaceful because their economic and institutional systems prevent despair from becoming the dominant condition of youth. When people believe tomorrow will be better than today, violence loses its appeal long before police intervention becomes necessary. Bangladesh requires a three-fold structural transformation that addresses the root of the disease rather than just the symptoms.
First, the government must prioritise the restoration of institutional trust by replacing the legacy of partisan street enforcers with visible, neutral community policing. This is the essential transition from rule by force to rule of law, where the uniform once again represents state protection rather than party whim.
Parallel to this, the state must treat youth employment as a national security priority. For more than 15 years, political muscle was a viable career path for a certain section of the youth; that path must now be replaced by immediate, large-scale vocational fast-tracks. By transforming idle energy into economic capital, the government can reintegrate marginalised young men into the productive fabric of the nation.
Finally, the cycle of retaliatory violence can only be broken through the administration of non-selective, credible justice. Payback violence must be met with swift, transparent legal consequences for all perpetrators, regardless of their current or former political alignment. Only when citizens see the courtroom as more effective than the street will the demand for mob justice subside.
Ultimately, restoring law and order does not mean restoring the past. It means dismantling a legacy of fear and replacing it with institutions that citizens trust and opportunities that young people can see. Idle, politicised young men cannot be policed into peace; they must be reintegrated into productive economic life. Law can suppress symptoms, but only dignity, opportunity, and legitimacy can cure the disease.
Dr Abdullah A Dewan is professor emeritus of economics at Eastern Michigan University in the US, and a former physicist and nuclear engineer at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC). He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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