ABSTRACT
The discussion about civil society in countries like Bangladesh is a little surreal. The term 'natural state' is a reference to North and team characterising limited access states as natural states, subdivided between fragile, basic and mature. Before considering the case of Bangladesh more specifically, the core argument in Violence and Social Orders should be outlined since it offers a highly recognisable framework for a deep structures approach to governance. Although the liberation narrative for Bangladesh juxtaposed an incipient nation of small peasants against the landlord and bureaucratic-military elites of the Punjab, the East Bengal delta was more complex in its agrarian structure. However, the issue under the limited access state conditions of Bangladesh is the nature of this institutional permeability. Under conditions such as for Bangladesh, this permeability is treated from the De Tocqueville perspective as negative in the sense of mutual contamination between domains, thus denying a rights-based existence for all the population.
