Global conflicts are at their highest level in 10 years.
Death tolls ran into six figures In Ethiopia and Ukraine last year.
Afghanistan was peaceful compared to the previous four decades but still saw over 4,000 people killed.
Carnage continues across conflict zones as varied as Mali, Myanmar, and Yemen.
Peace seems forever out of reach. The potential for border disputes and resource conflicts to escalate around the world is as high as ever.
In the 1990s a new wave of globalization heralded some hope for improving global living standards after the end of the Cold war. Yet Bosnia, Congo, Darfur, and Rwanda all saw genocidal acts against civilians.
The havoc unleashed by the US led toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 -- and the inequality exacerbated by the global financial crisis the following decade brought an end to many illusions.
These are dangerous days. China and the US have dived into a new Cold war for strategic dominance. This is far from rational when they are each other's biggest trading partners; its knock-on effects could be far worse than the escalation of global food fuel and fertilizer prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
For Bangladesh, which needs a peaceful multilateral order and stable world economy to flourish, all this bodes poorly.
As with climate change, where developing countries have contributed less to historical carbon emissions but face the brunt of their negative impacts, poorer nations pay the bigger price for wars sustained by the rivalries of global powers.
Unfairness is baked into the international system. Rich nations get to import cheap goods while also exporting their pollution. Poor nations must hope to become rich enough to clean up their dirty air and rivers. Some day.
Hence it is Bangladesh which faces assorted diplomatic pressures to sign up to the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and turn its back on non-alignment, even though key Quad member Australia has far bigger economic ties with China and India's similar ties with Russia extend to decades of deeply entrenched military and nuclear co-operation.
Bangladesh needs to improve rule of law and the quality of its governance to keep growing its economy and diplomatic reach. By 2050 it will have around 220 million people to feed, educate, and nurture. Without improving its historically dysfunctional politics, the chances of being able to do so successfully in the face of pressures both internal and external, can only diminish.
As the global economy endures more turbulence, the prognosis for Bangladesh's economy becomes less optimistic -- and potential for turmoil grows.
Given widespread disengagement from the political process, with many people not seeing the point of voting, and the major parties sticking to old playbooks, fundamental improvement seems unlikely.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina can point to the passing of key development milestones and adroit management of major crises during her long tenure. But cynicism, criminality in student politics, and destructive politicization of professional bodies are as ingrained as ever in the nation's political culture and indulged by all its parties.
Little surprise then the public at large never truly believes that corruption will go away and cease to blight the nation's potential.
In a well-functioning political system, the BNP might be expected to take advantage of the anti-incumbency factor, but since boycotting the chance to do so in 2013, it has never fully recovered electorally.
Its best hope now lies in the ruling party being unable to manage internal divisions and economic downturns.
Caretaker governments during elections seem to have proved helpful in the past in ensuring fair, free -- and crucially -- fully contested elections in Bangladesh.
But the idea is perhaps now a shibboleth. After all, the 2-year-long CTG administration of 2006 fell flat on its face; the technocratic “third way” it espoused failed to deliver improvements for ordinary people and proved vastly unpopular.
Besides, in other countries, the term means something altogether different. The Institute of Government describes the UK's system of caretaker governments as follows:
“From the start of the election period until polling day, restrictions are in place that require the government to restrict themselves largely to ‘essential business'. Ministers, including the prime minister, remain in office but should not announce new policy, make new appointments, sign new contracts, or take decisions of long-term consequence unless not doing so would be detrimental to public interest.”
In other words, limitations on the exercise of power but not on the office. Implicit is an expectation that votes will be made freely and counted fairly.
Lack of such trust in officialdom and public servants is the problem that Bangladesh should address; the former provision for a wholly distinct non-partisan election time government merely sidesteps this, it does not try to tackle the root cause.
Just as ordinary people deserve better than the elites that benefit most from Bangladesh's dysfunctional democracy, so the world needs great powers to put more energy into cooperation in an age of climate change than they do into zero sum games and nuclear arms races.
By 2050 there will be an extra 2 billion people on the planet. They need the people of today to play better games than the ones we have inherited.
Niaz Alam is London Bureau Chief of the Dhaka Tribune.
