Tariq Karim

THE ICONOCLAST FILES

Tariq Karim, a former career diplomat and academic, is currently Visiting Fellow at BRAC University.

Why the Himalayan Third Pole is crucial in climate governance

The Hindu Kush Himalaya region is of seminal importance to climatic changes affecting our planet.

8m ago

The Bay of Bengal and Bangladesh in the Indo-Pacific region

The Bay of Bengal countries have the potential to form a cohesive community that fosters economic cooperation, promotes peaceful connectivity, and addresses common challenges, charting a path towards prosperity and security for the region and beyond.

1y ago

Bangabandhu’s foreign policy legacy can still guide us

Bangladesh's geostrategic importance has catapulted astronomically with global focus swivelling to the Indo-Pacific region.

2y ago

Bangladesh and the US need each other

Our Planet Earth was so named by human beings who are essentially terrestrial creatures. But how would a visitor from outer space, from another planet or galaxy, react on discovering our planet for the first time?

2y ago

Bangabandhu’s foreign policy legacy

Bangladesh this year celebrates its 50th anniversary of independence as well as the birth centenary of our Father of the Nation. On August 15, the nation also mourns the brutal assassination of Bangabandhu 46 years ago—a heinous act designed to erase all that he stood for.

3y ago

Bangabandhu: the architect of Bangladesh's foreign policy

We celebrate 2020 as “Mujib Borsho”, to mark our Founding Father Bangabandhu’s birth centenary; we also mourn, and reflect on, his brutal assassination 46 years ago on the 15th August 1975.

4y ago

Coping with coronavirus and preparing for a life after it

April 13 was Easter Monday, an everlasting testimony to the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion and its symbolic assertion that there is life after what is perceived as death. In the midst of a somewhat stifling home confinement in fear of the ubiquitously merciless and relentlessly marauding novel coronavirus, somehow the day and its symbolism was comfortingly reassuring.

4y ago

Preparing for a post COVID-19 world

Three days ago, on March 25, listening to a briefing on the then available latest global statistics about the COVID-19, I learnt that the global total of recorded cases was then a little over 400,000, spread across over 169 countries.

4y ago
March 1, 2020
March 1, 2020

The concept of sovereignty and internal affairs of state

When political events in the domestic sphere of a state transcend the internal space of that state, through a process of empathetic osmosis, and impacts negatively upon the domestic political and governance harmony of one or more neighbouring states around or adjacent to it,

February 12, 2020
February 12, 2020

The crying need for collaborative management of our waterbodies

At the very core of our entire ecosystem is the location and availability of fresh water on which lives and human livelihood are fundamentally dependent.

December 4, 2019
December 4, 2019

Bangladesh-India Relations: A Tangled Skein

India’s biggest challenge when dealing with its immediate neighbours is, first and foremost, the sense of its sheer size that dwarfs the combined size of all the others.

October 20, 2018
October 20, 2018

Addressing the critical challenge to our water security

At the very core of our entire ecosystem is the location and availability of fresh water on which sustaining lives and human livelihood are fundamentally dependent.

October 8, 2018
October 8, 2018

Reviving the Bengal Presidency template of connectivity

The historical-civilisational Indian sub-continent, now known as “South Asia”, was for millennia the most integrated region in the world.

August 2, 2018
August 2, 2018

Addressing the problem of trash and plastic waste

Our attitude to garbage disposal and plastic waste is flagrantly callous. What is particularly eye-soring is the mass of plastic waste of all types, ubiquitously filling up unending stretches of areas beside roads, railway lines, all conceivable nooks and crannies between buildings/shanties and, most egregious of all, as flotsam floating listlessly on all types of water bodies that have still managed to escape attention of insatiable land-developers.

July 18, 2018
July 18, 2018

Whence comes our culture of impunity?

These days, I assail myself with questions triggered by the everyday acts of thoughtlessness that I witness committed by the multitude around me everywhere, young and old, male and female.

July 9, 2018
July 9, 2018

Ghost of a colonial past

Practically all the institutions of our state are institutions that we have inherited from our about-200-years of British colonial rule. Pax Britannica was intentionally designed to be of everlasting nature. In imperial Britain's imagination, the sun would never set on the British Empire.

July 7, 2018
July 7, 2018

Rising above the sea of "yes-men"

In Shakespeare's great tragedy King Lear, a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends “who will not varnish the truth to please him.”

June 12, 2018
June 12, 2018

Bangladesh's travails: A relentless saga

Despite our numerous achievements in domestic and international spheres, the following refrain has refused to go away in the last several decades: “why is Bangladesh so bitterly divided as a polity? Why are Bangladesh's political leaders so totally consumed by their personal animosities towards each other that they neglect good governance of the state? Why does Bangladesh, having rejected political Islam as the...

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