The Political Chimera: Was Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina Regime Fascist, Authoritarian, Populist or a Mix of all Three?

Abstract The fall of Sheikh Hasina’s long-ruling Awami League government in August 2024 has sparked the debate on whether Bangladesh’s government was fascist, authoritarian, populist, or a hybrid of all three. This article re-evaluates that inquiry through a comparative and postcolonial lens. It utilises established theories of fascism and contemporary reinterpretations that examine fascism’s morphological persistence in modern authoritarian populism. Simultaneously, it interacts with the extensive regime-type literature concerning populism as both ideology and style, as well as hybrid or competitive authoritarianism. This study suggests that Hasina’s Bangladesh represented a fascist–authoritarian–populist amalgamation: a civilian autocracy maintained through emotional mobilisation, developmental nationalism, and digital coercion. It contextualises the Bangladeshi case within the political modernity of the global South. Also, through analyses of legal changes and co-optation of the judiciary, this paper shows the total control that the Hasina regime was able to exercise on the state institutions, which were hollowed out but still kept up in a performative capacity to keep up a ‘democratic’ veneer. The research concludes that the Hasina regime cannot be readily categorised within a singular typology; rather, it reflects a postcolonial form of authoritarian populism characterised by fascist characteristics.