Student Resistance Under Authoritarian Repression: Lessons from Bangladesh’s July 2024 Uprising

This study examines the July 2024 student uprising in Bangladesh as a critical site for understanding resistance under conditions of intensifying repression and authoritarian governance. Situating the uprising within the interdisciplinary field of Resistance Studies, the paper moves beyond event-centered accounts of student protest to analyze how resistance is shaped, constrained, and reconfigured through encounters with state power. The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach grounded in ethically appropriate sources, including publicly available media coverage, protest statements, slogans, visual materials, digital traces, and official state responses. Given the risks associated with research under repressive conditions, the analysis is explicitly attentive to questions of safety, positionality, and methodological restraint. Repression is treated not simply as a reaction to resistance, but as a structuring condition that actively shapes movement strategies, organizational forms, and political imaginaries. The analysis is guided by three core questions: What forms of repression were deployed against student resistance during the July 2024 uprising? How did students adapt their tactics, organizational practices, and modes of communication in response to repression? What do these dynamics reveal about the possibilities, limits, and vulnerabilities of resistance movements operating under authoritarian conditions? The paper demonstrates that state repression manifested through surveillance, intimidation, arrests, narrative delegitimization, and selective violence simultaneously constrained resistance and generated adaptive responses. Students relied on decentralized organizing, fluid leadership structures, symbolic and narrative forms of protest, and rapid tactical improvisation to sustain mobilization. While these strategies enabled short-term resilience and visibility, they also revealed structural fragilities, including movement fragmentation, activist exhaustion, and difficulties in sustaining resistance over time. By centering repression as a core analytic lens, this paper contributes to Resistance Studies by foregrounding resistance as an ongoing, contested process rather than a linear or heroic outcome. The Bangladeshi case highlights the relational and dynamic nature of resistance, emphasizing how movements continuously negotiate power, risk, and survival under hostile conditions. The study concludes by reflecting on the implications of this case for resistance movements globally, particularly in contexts of shrinking civic space. It offers practical insights for activists and scholar-activists on sustaining resistance through care, narrative autonomy, and cross-movement solidarity to building safe, connected, and resilient resistance communities in times of repression. Keywords: Resistance under repression, Student mobilization, Authoritarian governance, Movement sustainability, Global South resistance