Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh’s Indo-Pacific imagination has not been new, being a key littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the Bay being one of the hotspots of the Indo-Pacific. It, however, took quite some time for Bangladesh to realise its potential through the Bay, given maritime boundary delimitation in the legal domain with its two big neighbours, India and Myanmar. With the legal settlement of the disputes with the both, Bangladesh found its key gateway to the Bay and emerged as a geopolitical actor in South Asia. This, however, also indicates Bangladesh’s realistic and somewhat unique outlook towards the maritime domain-the meaning of security for Bangladesh is not only ‘defense/military’ centric-rather attends to its development needs, as articulated in its very first Indo-Pacific Outlook (IOU). This chapter, therefore, identifies Bangladesh’s emerging geopolitical significance that can be achieved through the Bay of Bengal in this ‘Maritime Century’. To this end, the paper discusses Bangladesh’s key maritime interests and priorities, strategies to attain these interests and priorities, and the gaps, if any, and how those can be addressed. The paper concludes by pointing out some concrete policy-making areas of work in the Bay of Bengal for Bangladesh.