Prefigurative Politics under Authoritarian Rule: The July Movement and New Forms of Resistance in Bangladesh

This research examines the emergence of a new form of prefigurative politics in Bangladesh, focusing on the recent July Movement as a case study of value-driven activism under authoritarian rule. For more than a decade, Bangladesh experienced increasingly repressive governance under the Awami League government of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Traditional opposition parties faced systematic suppression through mass arrests, enforced disappearances, violence, and political exclusion, particularly on university campuses where partisan dominance curtailed dissent. In this constrained political landscape, a new form of activism emerged that departed from conventional party competition and hierarchical leadership structures. Drawing on the idea of prefigurative politics, which describes activism where people practice the values and social relationships they want to see in the future (Fians 2022), this study examines how the July Resistance Movement created alternative forms of democratic participation. Rather than advancing a traditional partisan agenda, the movement mobilized around ethical commitments such as equality, inclusivity, anti-discrimination, and anti-corruption. It operated through decentralized coordination, horizontal participation, and collective self-management. Protesters occupied and democratically administered university dormitories, challenging the dominance of ruling party loyalists and constructing participatory governance structures within campus spaces. At the same time, a digital hashtag movement, such as #ReverseBrainDrain, enabled members of the Bengali diaspora to imagine their future role in national transformation, extending prefigurative political practice into transnational digital spaces. While existing scholarship on prefigurative politics has predominantly focused on social movements in the Global North (Bernburg, 2016; Biddau, Armenti, and Cottone, 2016; Katsiaficas, 1997), there has been limited attention paid to how such practices function within authoritarian contexts in South Asia. To address this gap, this study argues that in Bangladesh, prefigurative politics operates not only as an imaginative and ethical project but also as a strategic mechanism for bypassing authoritarian repression. Employing an autoethnographic approach grounded in the authors’ active participation in the July Movement, this research combines reflexive analysis with qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted with student activists and participants, alongside a systematic analysis of national and international news coverage to situate the movement within broader political developments. By understanding the use of prefigurative politics under authoritarian regimes, this study contributes to resistance studies by extending the concept beyond liberal democratic settings and demonstrating its strategic relevance within repressive political environments. Bibliography Bernburg, Jón Gunnar. 2016. Economic Crisis and Mass Protest: The Pots and Pans Revolution in Iceland. London: Routledge. Biddau, Federica, Alessandro Armenti, and Paola Cottone. 2016. “Socio-Psychological Aspects of Grassroots Participation in the Transition Movement: An Italian Case Study.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 4 (1): 142–165. Fians, Guilherme. 2022. “Prefigurative Politics.” In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. https://doi.org/10.29164/22prefigpolitics. Katsiaficas, George. 1997. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.