Agencies of Social Movements: Experiences of Bangladesh's Shahbag Movement and Hefazat-e-Islam

This paper aims to address the emergence of parallel yet contradictory social movements in Bangladesh and explore the following question: what political factors in Bangladesh led to the emergence of these parallel movements? Unlike what social movements discourse has addressed, Bangladesh has seen the rise of two powerful and binary camps. To understand the growth of such conflicting movements, this paper hypothesizes that the framing of identity and ideology by the movement participants and the media have engendered the concurrent yet conflicting movements in Bangladesh. The paper focuses on how framing strategies led to ideological polarization between these movements.