State Against the Streets: A Comparative Case Study on State Violence during the July Uprising in Bangladesh and the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka

Sammanfattning

In recent years, a wave of protests has swept the South Asian subcontinent. These protests have been spearheaded by Generation Z, a generation that has been described as disillusioned with, and disconnected from, politics. The protests have been met with disproportionate state violence, despite generally following non-violent disciplines. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are two such countries. This thesis compares the Bangladeshi July Uprising in 2022 and the Sri Lankan Aragalaya in 2024 on the basis of many shared similarities but a marked difference in the nature of the state violence they were met with. Through a comparative case study, guided by theories of postcolonialism, authoritarianism, and political polarisation, the thesis found that the two states share a history of colonial violence that resurfaces in different ways in the modern context. Bangladesh’s high political polarisation and political (rather than economic) protest demands resulted in the July Uprising being met with more violence than the Aragalaya, as Sri Lanka experienced low to none political polarisation and had economic rather than political demands.