Four years ago, Ali Riaz, Distinguished Professor of political science at Illinois State University, received an email from a student who wanted to work with him on a project on Bangladeshi politics. It seemed no different from the many other emails Riaz receives every week from aspiring students around the world. The professor was about to politely wish the student success and express his inability to participate in the initiative.
But then, something about the message jumped out. Perhaps it was the way the writer evoked American social scientist Mancur Olson’s framework on the logic of collective action or the plan for employing this theory to analyse the 2013 Shahbag movement in Bangladesh. But in a few months, Riaz became the mentor of the author of email, Anupam Debashis Roy.
The relationship resulted in a research paper that won Roy an award as an undergraduate student at Howard University, and, last year, culminated in a book.
But Roy was not only an academic, as…