To understand how a state turns its guns on its own people, one must look not to the heat of a riot, but to the cold mechanics of social psychology.
In 1973, the American social psychologist Herbert Kelman published a seminal paper, Violence Without Moral Restraint, exploring how ordinary citizens—bureaucrats, police officers, and neighbours—participate in mass murder without a flicker of guilt.
Kelman argued that the natural human aversion to killing is systematically dismantled through three reinforcing conditions: authorization from above, which absolves the individual of moral choice; routinization, which transforms atrocity into a bureaucratic habit; and dehumanization, which strips the victim of identity and community, switching off the bystander’s empathy.
The ferocity with which the Awami League government suppressed Bangladesh’s student-led uprising in July and August 2024 reads like a textbook application of Kelman’s thesis.
The horrors that unfolded over those weeks were not a sudden breakdown of law and order, but the culmination of a political architecture designed to erase the boundary between citizen and enemy.
The groundwork for this mass violence was laid long before the first shots were fired. From 2009 onward, the ruling regime engaged in a patient, linguistic erosion of its opponents' humanity.
Dehumanization relies first on the denial of identity—reducing individuals to a singular, toxic label. In Bangladesh, this began with the branding of Islamist groups as "anti-liberation," a term that was gradually expanded to swallow the mainstream political opposition under the ubiquitous catch-all "BNP-Jamaat."
Nuance was the first casualty. The second mechanism, the denial of community, pushed these labeled groups outside the boundaries of national belonging. Slogans demanding their banishment and the knee-jerk directive to critics to "go back to Pakistan" established a dangerous premise: certain citizens did not deserve the protection of the state, let alone its sympathy.
When the Anti-Discrimination Movement began in July 2024, the students’ demands for quota reform were entirely peaceful. Yet, before the state could deploy lethal force against unarmed youth, it had to convince its security apparatus that these children were existential threats.
The old vocabulary was swiftly recycled from the highest offices of government. Students were branded "Razakars," "terrorists," and "saboteurs." This rhetorical alchemy transformed fellow citizens into enemies of the state, providing the psychological clearance required for the final component: authorization.
With orders to "shoot on sight," the state unleashed an unprecedented campaign of violence. The clinical nature of the slaughter was evident in the data. Medical reports revealed that an overwhelming majority of the dead and injured had been shot in the head, chest, and eyes.
These were not warning shots fired by a panicked constabulary; they were lethal, targeted strikes. The depravity reached into private homes, where snipers positioned on rooftops killed young children standing near windows and balconies—atrocities later documented by the United Nations Human Rights Office.
In a grim escalation, the state turned the sky itself into a theatre of terror, using paramilitary helicopters to rain bullets and sound grenades onto crowded residential streets.
As the days bled into weeks, the violence entered Kelman’s phase of routinization, becoming a scheduled, bureaucratic exercise shielded by nationwide internet blackouts and curfews. Cruelty became standard operating procedure.
In areas like Savar and Jatrabari, security forces and party loyalists were filmed piling the bodies of protesters—some still clinging to life—into vehicles and setting them ablaze to efface the evidence of their crimes.
Hospitals were subverted into traps; police blocked medical treatment for the wounded, arrested patients from their beds, and assaulted ambulances. Under the cover of digital darkness, security forces conducted medieval-style sweeps through neighbourhoods, dragging thousands of young people into arbitrary detention and torture.
The human toll of the July–August uprising exceeded 1,400 lives. Two years after the carnage, those who orchestrated and executed the massacres—whether hiding in plain sight or exiled abroad—manifest no visible remorse.
Their conscience remains protected by the very psychological architecture that enabled the killing. In their minds, responsibility belonged always to a higher authority, and those who died were never quite human enough to warrant grief.
For Bangladesh, emerging from the trauma of state-sanctioned slaughter, diagnosing this machinery of dehumanization is no mere academic pursuit. It is the necessary, painful prerequisite for ensuring it can never be rebuilt.
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Nazmul Hasan is a researcher and activist