About The Project

This project explores the contemporary patterns of media ownership in Bangladesh. While there has been a significant growth of the media industry during the last two decades, Bangladesh has also experienced serious erosion of media freedom. To unpack the complex relationship between ownership and media, gathering data and understanding the overlapping features of ownership are essential. The Center for Governance Studies (CGS) undertook this project in October 2019 with Professor Ali Riaz and Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman as the Principal Investigators. Under their leadership, the research team completed the project in December 2020. The project was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USA.

Principal Investigators

Ali Riaz is a Distinguished Professor of political science at Illinois State University, USA. He is a nonresident Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council and the President of the American Institute of Bangladesh (AIBS). He held the Thomas E Eimermann Professorship in Political Science (2018-2020) and was the University Professor (2012-2018). Riaz previously taught at universities in Bangladesh, England, and South Carolina, USA, worked as a Broadcast Journalist at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London and served as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington D.C. Ali Riaz earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1993. his recent publications include Voting in A Hybrid Regime: Understanding 2018 Bangladeshi Election (2019), Lived Islam and Islamism in Bangladesh (2017); Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (2016). He has edited Religion and Politics in South Asia (second edition 2021). He has also co-edited Political Violence in South Asia (2019) and the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Bangladesh (2016).

Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman is a Ph.D. candidate (Fromson fellow) at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Massachusetts. He has taught International Relations at the University of Chittagong for about nine years. A graduate of Dhaka University, Mr. Rahman completed his second master’s degree in 2009 under the Fulbright Scholarship program with a specialization in International Terrorism from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California. He was a research fellow at the Center for Alternatives (Dhaka) during the 2014-15 period and helped develop various programs at the Center for Genocide Studies, Dhaka University. He has co-edited two books: Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Bangladesh (2016) and Neoliberal Development in Bangladesh (2020).

Research Assistants
Nazmul Arifeen
Muktadir Rashid
Shamsud Doza

Support Staff
Subir Das
Sanjoy Debnath
Nazmul Haque
Abdul Awal Sabuj
Tanvir Ahmed
Abu Al Sayeed