Dhaka's worldview

IFTEKHAR AHMED CHOUDHURY, the former Finance Minister of Bangladesh states that Dhaka's two major foreign policy aspirations of preservation of sovereignty and quest for resources combined with the fact that was surrounded on three sides by India informed its external behavior of  being a player in world politics with a web of extra-regional linkages.

In his article for the Institute of South Asian Studies, "Foundations of Bangladesh’s Foreign Policy Interactions", he states that Dhaka's international interactions were based on twelve pillars comprised of the states such as Western aid donors, South Asian states, Middle Eastern Muslim states, China, multilateral institutions such as the UN, Commonwealth, OIC, SAARC, and trade and financial institutions such as the WTO, Bretton Woods organizations, ADB and the Islamic Development Bank.

He concludes that there was a greater commitment to multilateralism and Dhaka generally kept a lower profile on high-risk issues and higher profile on low-risk issues.

Nation States - RIP

PARAG KHANNA, Director of Global Governance Initiative at the New America Foundation heralds the beginning of the urban age predicting that globalization would result in the emergence of global hub cities attracting talent and capital, and 3rd world megacities that would together drive governance, economics, innovation and diplomacy, pulling away from their home states while simultaneously competing for global influence among themselves and alongside states. In a commentary for Foreign Policy, "Beyond City Limits", he states that cities and the urban economies, like the Hanseatic league of yore, would serve as the centers of gravity for nations, being at the core of issues such as security, governance, climate change, inequality and poverty while making national borders and international organizations such as the UN irrelevant.

Al-Qaeda vs Afghan Taliban

Vahid Brown, fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Academy, states that there has been an uproar in the online jihadi community due to mixed messages emanating from the leadership of the Afghan Taliban and the al-Qaeda with the Taliban emphasizing the nationalist character of their movement and the al-Qaeda rejecting the nationalist version and reiterating its model of transnational jihad. In a commentary in Foreign Policy, "Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban: “Diametrically Opposed”?", he posits that the recent shift in the Quetta Shura's strategic communications was not to al-Qaeda's liking, and it raised serious concerns among the broader Salafi jihadi movement about the religio-political legitimacy of the Afghan Taliban's leadership, calling into question the notion of an al-Qaeda-Taliban merger.

Nuclear Networks and Proliferation

Michael Kraig, senior fellow at the Stanley Foundation states that the future threats of Nuclear terrorism would not come from countries, but from vast networks of operatives with only tenuous links to states who would steal or obtain nuclear material from the growing global black market and this necessitated an overhaul of the existing counterproliferation mindset, currently almost exclusively focused on rogue states to one which focused on law-enforcement to check illicit activities. In a Foreign Policy commentary, "Nuclear Network Theory", he calls for a global buildup in law-enforcement capabilities to detect human networks involved in both conventional and unconventional terrorist acts including real-time data sharing on extremist groups, developing more advanced legal capabilities to identifying phony or "front" businesses used by illicit transnational actors and claims that success in nonproliferation would require the creation of a cadre of national and transnational civil servants trained to crack down on black market trade.