Umran Chowdhury

Umran Chowdhury
Born	(1990-12-28) December 28, 1990 Dhaka
Occupation	Lawyer, writer, surveyor, historian
Nationality	Bangladeshi

Umran Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi lawyer, writer, surveyor, historian, and columnist. He has been a researcher at the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He frequently writes for the Dhaka Tribune. Chowdhury has been widely considered as a public intellectual and man of letters.

Early life and education

Chowdhury is the son of former National Party member of parliament Kamran Hossain Chowdhury and the late English teacher, socialite and Rabindra Sangeet singer Shusmita Amin Chowdhury (Dina). The family were royal guests in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1996. Born and brought up in Dhaka, he attended Scholastica school from preschool to the twelfth grade; his classmates included the niece of Khaleda Zia and the son of Abdul Jalil, former Awami League MP Nizamuddin Jalil. While in high school, Chowdhury undertook his first internship at the Grameen Bank. He was a research assistant to Ambassador Farooq Sobhan at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute after finishing high school in 2009. Chowdhury trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He lived in Mauritius while studying international law at the Sorbonne.

Career

Chowdhury worked in the law firm of M Amir-ul Islam and Tania Amir from 2019 to 2020. He was appointed as a Research Assistant in the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA), while his boss Tania Amir was appointed as honorary secretary of BILIA. Chowdhury moved to London in 2021 for his postgraduate studies at the SOAS School of Law. He was a volunteer at the SOAS Centre for Human Rights Law. Chowdhury was appointed as a Research Assistant to the British-Nigerian solicitor and arbitrator Dr. Emilia Onyema, who is a professor of international commercial law at SOAS. He assisted Dr. Onyema to produce the 2022 SOAS Arbitration in Africa Survey. Chowdhury also worked in Wilmer Hale as an intern. In January 2023, Chowdhury joined the law firm of Kamal Hossain after returning to Bangladesh. He provides research assistance to Sara Hossain. He has also worked with the Centre for Peace and Justice at BRAC University.

Columnist and historian

Chowdhury began writing 'Letters to Editors' as early as a teenager, which were published in Time, The Daily Star and the BBC News website. Since 2017, his writings have been published in the Dhaka Tribune, Indian Express, Scroll.in, Haaretz, Kluwer Arbitration Blog, and Whiteboard. Chowdhury has been a prolific columnist for the Dhaka Tribune which is edited by Zafar Sobhan. In 2020, Chowdhury penned an article for the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in the prelude to the Abraham Accords which considered Bangladesh as a potential candidate for normalization with Israel. In the article, he recalled his autograph from Yasser Arafat; while Chowdhury appeared open to the idea of a one state solution. In 2021, Chowdhury wrote on the long history of the Rohingya which Myanmar refused to acknowledge. On behalf of the Dhaka Tribune, Chowdhury did an exclusive interview of a leading Rohingya activist regarding conditions in Rakhine State; the activist later became a minister in the National Unity Government of Myanmar. In September 2023, Chowdhury and Sam Bidwell from the Adam Smith Institute wrote a joint article in Radwan Mujib Siddiq's Whiteboard magazine on the Commonwealth's relevance for Bangladesh.

Chowdhury writes history on his Substack websites, including Bangladesh Statecraft, the East Pakistan History Forum, and the Faridpur Historical Survey, which covers political, legal, and diplomatic history. Chowdhury's posts on Bangladesh Statecraft are concurrently published in the Dhaka Tribune as opinion articles. Chowdhury has written on the creation of SAARC, the Proclamation of Bangladeshi Independence, the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh, the Constitution of Bangladesh, martial law, Bangladesh's contributions to the Yom Kippur War and Gulf War; Bangladesh-United States relations, Bangladesh-India relations, Soviet-Bangladesh relations, Bangladesh-Pakistan relations, Bangladesh-China relations, free market economic reforms, the state religion of Islam, secularism, India-Bangladesh enclaves, the Ganges water dispute, the Indo-Bangla Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Peace, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, the 1971 genocide, and Henry Kissinger. He relies on the Bangladesh Gazette to analyze laws enacted by each Bangladeshi government. He also relies on books by statesmen, including Kamal Hossain and Moudud Ahmed. He has advocated constitutional and political reform through his writings, including calling for more millennial and Gen Z representation in the Constitutional Reform Commission. Chowdhury also proposed Muhammad Yunus, Irene Khan, and Sara Hossain as candidates for President of Bangladesh.

See also

• Lal Mia