The countries of the world are not maintaining same status. Some – the North – are rich and enjoying all the opportunities of modern life while others – the South – are poor and lacking the basic necessities of life. Nowadays these countries with two opposite character termed as developed and less developed countries. The developed courtiers extend their hand to promote the development of less developed countries (LDCs) through their own development agencies – USSID, DFID, JIKA, CIDS, SIDS, etc. There are several financial institutions (e.g., WB, ADB, IDB and IMF) which also this purpose. Besides there are some national and international Non Government Organizations (NGOs) working to promote development. Read the rest of this entry »
For a millennium, the struggle for mankind’s destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the 21st century, it may be so again. The end of the cold war and the collapse of the USSR have given added salience to such assessments and the terrorist attack of 9/11 led to the claim that the spread of political Islam marks the onset of a new cold war where the western liberal democratic norms are pitted against the religious revivalists norms of Islamic monotheism. The USA and other western powers crafted their foreign policy in terms of threat perceptions of the Muslims world as the front of monolithic political forces that needed to be contained wherever possible and destroyed when the circumstances allowed. The United States responded to the attacks of 11 September 2001 by declaring an unjust war-Global War on Terror (GWOT) to contain what they call axis of evil. In face of western foreign policy responses US invasion on Afghanistan and Iraq, US-Iran stand off and continued media portrayals of Islamic threat, the Muslim world, has appeared, indeed, in a danger of extinction. How much they have to pay for such an imaginary and perceived western hostility is really an important query of may warm hearted peace loving Muslims around the world. The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is forthcoming in a period when the rhetoric of the global war on terror is being reframed as that of a “long war” against “Islamic Revivalism”. But how long the bloody war is likely to inflate? 
Just after 1971, the liberation war, Henry Kissinger commented Bangladesh, a “Bottomless basket”. In 2003, United Nation termed Bangladesh as a LDC (Least Developed Country). The World Bank called us “the Bangladesh paradox”. So what is actually happening in the country? What is the condition of Bangladeshi economy? Is there any hope left?