The interplay of doxa and episteme in Bangladesh's politics
In the terrain of Bangladeshi politics, the tension is not simply between belief and knowledge, myth and reason, or performance and policy. These oppositions—framed as doxa and episteme—do not neatly resolve into a hierarchy of value. Instead, they constitute a dialectic in perpetual suspension. The allure of doxa—popular belief, inherited legitimacy, and the immediacy of affect—often coexists with the imperatives of episteme: evidence, deliberation, and long-term vision. Yet, attempts to privilege one over the other repeatedly collapse, not least because the conditions for a stable synthesis are historically absent.
The dominance of doxa in Bangladeshi political life cannot be disentangled from the structural failure of episteme. Nor can episteme be simply summoned as a rational corrective to belief without grappling with the aspirations, anxieties, and lived conditions that doxa organises. Drawing on recent events—including the July 2024 uprising, the interim government's fragile mandate, and chronic budgetary neglect of public goods—this essay offers not a critique of doxa per se, but a reflection on how its entanglement with episteme produces a volatile political condition, perpetually caught between rupture and restoration. The argument resists framing doxa as pathology or casting episteme as panacea, and instead culminates in a contingent wager: that if democratic politics is to retain even a fragile footing in Bangladesh, we must cultivate the institutional and cultural space where critical knowledge can engage belief without disavowing it.
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Inherited from Plato and reworked by Pierre Bourdieu, the distinction between doxa and episteme has long served to diagnose the epistemic decay of public discourse. Doxa is that which circulates unquestioned; episteme demands justification, critique, and institutional depth. But to read Bangladeshi politics as a mere triumph of doxa over episteme would be to miss the deeper dialectic at play. In a society marked by colonial afterlives, authoritarian interruptions, and epistemic unevenness, doxa often fills the vacuum left by weak institutions of knowledge. Belief becomes infrastructure when state capacity fails.
Here, the slogans of liberation, invocations of unity, and fetishisation of sovereignty are not ideological residue alone—they serve as affective scaffolding that stabilises a fractured polity. Episteme, meanwhile, does not always arrive as emancipation. As Michel Foucault reminds us, episteme is not neutral; it governs the very conditions of truth production, delimiting what may be known, by whom, and on what terms. To many, it appears not as enlightenment but as elite imposition—technocratic, aloof, or externally induced. Thus, the friction between doxa and episteme is not a clear-cut antagonism but a shifting, unstable interplay of power, affect, and legitimacy.
Media and the epistemic short-circuit
Nowhere is this dialectic more evident than in Bangladesh's media landscape. It neither simply reproduces doxa nor wholly commits to episteme. Instead, it oscillates between moments of critical inquiry and spells of ideological closure.
This tension sharpened in the aftermath of the July 2024 uprising that ousted the formerly ruling Awami League. For a brief moment, an epistemic opening emerged: media scrutiny intensified, public discourse turned toward electoral fraud, economic mismanagement, and authoritarian drift. Yet, this space was quickly sealed off. Media narratives pivoted toward stability, institutional restoration, and investor reassurance. Doxa reasserted itself under the sign of national interest.
Still, the closure was incomplete. Student movements, independent platforms, and segments of civil society continued raising uncomfortable questions. But the simultaneous rise of mob justice—bypassing due process in favour of affective retribution—illustrated how easily the epistemic impulse could be eclipsed by doxa's visceral force. What this reveals is not the disappearance of episteme, but its fragility—its inability to institutionalise itself in the face of narrative consolidation and emotive closure.
Political parties: A feedback loop
Political parties, rather than being mere vessels of doxa, function as sites where doxa and episteme feed off each other. The Awami League's invocation of its liberation legacy or the BNP's narrative of marginalisation are not purely mythic constructs; they also reflect the epistemic vacuum left by underdeveloped democratic norms and public distrust of expert discourse.
Suppressing internal dissent, sidelining expert advice, and rewarding loyalty over competence create a culture in which knowledge is selectively deployed to affirm belief rather than interrogate it. This is not merely strategic—it is existential. In a polity where historical legitimacy often carries more weight than policy credibility, doxa becomes the currency of political survival.
The interim government's epistemic interregnum
The interim government, birthed by an epistemic rupture and popular mobilisation, initially held promise. Unencumbered by electoral calculations, it could have embraced technocratic governance and long-term planning. Expert panels were formed, policy white papers circulated, and consultations initiated. For a moment, episteme seemed to gain ground.
Yet, that promise has proved elusive. Pressed by the urgency of stabilisation and haunted by the spectre of collapse, the interim regime has leaned on the tropes of continuity: nation-branding, investor confidence, bureaucratic inertia. Its budgetary choices are telling. Education receives less than 2.5 percent of GDP, undermining efforts to cultivate critical thought. Health remains sidelined in a country vulnerable to both pandemics and chronic illnesses. Agriculture—crucial for rural livelihoods and food security—faces declining support amid mounting climate threats.
Rather than a clean break from doxa, we witness a painful return to it. The government, lacking both the democratic legitimacy for sweeping reform and the public trust necessary to anchor technocratic rationality, is caught in a double bind: govern too rationally and risk mass alienation; govern by sentiment and reenact past failures.
Arab Spring syndrome and the epistemophobia of governance
Hovering over this impasse is the ghost of the Arab Spring—the fear that epistemic uprisings end not in democratic renewal but in chaos, authoritarian relapse, or technocratic drift. The lesson many elites draw is caution: too much reform too fast can unmoor the system. The lesson many citizens internalise is impatience: if knowledge does not deliver material or affective results quickly, it is dismissed as irrelevant.
This mutual suspicion makes episteme hard to anchor. It is not that reasoned policy is unwelcome—but that, in the absence of institutional memory and civic trust, it struggles to resonate, to "stick." Doxa, for all its volatility, offers immediacy; episteme offers complexity, which can feel like delayed gratification and postponement.
A non-synthetic path forward
If a path forward exists, it lies not in the forced synthesis of doxa and episteme, but in embracing their constitutive tension. Episteme must learn to translate itself without arrogance; doxa must be engaged without condescension. This demands civic education rooted in dialogue, not rote; media that functions less as sermon and more as agora; and budgets aligned not with donor expectations or performative sovereignty, but with the structural needs of the vulnerable.
Most crucially, we need a political ethic that resists collapsing into either technocratic detachment or populist fury. To invoke episteme today is not to prescribe a cure; it is to place a wager—a wager, paradoxically, in the power of knowledge to disrupt belief.
In an era haunted by failed uprisings and weaponised mythologies, the wager is fragile and fraught—yet if democracy is to endure in Bangladesh, it is one we cannot afford to squander.
Dr Faridul Alam is a retired academic and writes from New York City, US.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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