Developmental Multialignment: Bangladesh’s Pragmatic Statecraft in a Multipolar World, 1971–2026
In an era of intensifying great-power competition, small states in the Global South are often portrayed as vulnerable to coercion and pressure to align with one power or another. Challenging this deterministic view, this paper argues that Bangladesh exemplifies a distinct foreign policy strategy: developmental multialignment. Moving beyond traditional frameworks of hedging and non-alignment, which prioritize risk mitigation and security, developmental multialignment is a proactive strategy where external partnerships are orchestrated primarily to advance economic growth, infrastructure development, and domestic regime legitimacy. Through a qualitative case study using process tracing, primary-document analysis, and ten expert interviews conducted in 2025, this paper charts the evolution of Bangladesh’s foreign policy from its post-independence posture through the political transitions of 2024–2026 and its continuing engagement with a diverse set of partners, including China, India, the United States, Japan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states. The findings show that Bangladesh leverages its geostrategic location in the Bay of Bengal, its role as a top UN peacekeeper, and its economic potential to extract concessions and diversify dependencies, turning structural vulnerabilities into sources of agency. The paper contributes to the literature on small-state diplomacy by foregrounding development—rather than mere survival—as a central driver of alignment strategy, and by offering a nuanced model for how states in the Global South can navigate multipolarity while safeguarding their autonomy. The conclusion identifies institutional coherence, strategic foresight, and robust risk management as critical imperatives for sustaining this strategy amid escalating Indo-Pacific rivalries. The post-2024 political transition provides an important test of the argument: although the relative emphasis attached to particular partners has changed, Bangladesh’s broader strategy of diversified external engagement has persisted. The paper therefore conceptualizes developmental multialignment as a contingent strategy rather than a fixed alignment.
