Introduction: The Fall of an Authoritarian Order Bangladesh in 2025 is living through one of the most turbulent moments since its birth in 1971. The collapse of Sheikh Hasina’s long rule was not a peaceful retirement, as liberal commentators in the West might suggest, but the product of a mass revolt against authoritarian neoliberalism. For more than a decade, the Awami League perfected the machinery of repression: rigged elections, a domesticated judiciary, violent policing of opposition, and wholesale capture of civil institutions. Yet beneath the facade of “stability” lay deep…