Reforming Reforms: Can Civic Tech Safeguard Bangladesh's Democratic Gains?

The 2024 student-led uprising rewrote Bangladesh's political imagination. It said, loudly and at enormous human cost, that citizens are not subjects. But political imagination, however brilliant, fades. Two years later, the question that every governance researcher must answer is: can we build systems resilient enough that democratic gains cannot simply be legislated away? Civic tech, deployed deliberately, creates path dependency. It makes certain forms of regression expensive, visible, and politically risky.