Bangladeshi-Americans Grow Up Debating Foreign Policy. Why Aren’t More of Us Making It?

If you spend enough time around a Bangladeshi family, it quickly becomes clear that almost any conversation can evolve into a discussion about politics ot foreign policy.

A wedding reception becomes a debate over Bangladesh’s next election. A family dinner turns into a conversation about governance, economic development, or human rights.

A long car ride somehow ends with everyone proposing solutions for South Asia’s biggest challenges. Cricket and soccer give way to geo-politics. Local news becomes a discussion about China, India, the United States, or the Gulf.

We even have a word for these conversations: Adda. To outsiders, adda may simply look like friends and family talking over tea. In reality, it is where ideas are tested, history is debated, current events are dissected, and younger generations quietly absorb the belief that what happens beyond their own neighborhoods matters.

Long before I knew what a think tank was, I understood that public policy mattered because I had spent years listening to adults debate, and sometimes passionately argue, about how Bangladesh could strengthen its institutions, improve governance, reduce poverty, and better position itself in the world.

Yet as I built a career in foreign affairs and international development, something increasingly puzzled me. For a community that spends so much time discussing policy, why were so few Bangladeshi-Americans, particularly from my generation, working in the institutions that actually shape it?

In some ways, I am an unsurprising person to have eventually founded the American Bangladesh Foundation. I have been writing and commenting on Bangladesh and South Asia for roughly fifteen years, going back to my Huffington Post days.

I earned two law degrees and began my professional career at The Carter Center, where my work included writing speeches for former US President Jimmy Carter.

Since then, I have built a career at the intersection of foreign affairs, international development, and higher education, while becoming involved in communities such as Muslim Americans in Public Service, Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen Initiative, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Term Membership Program.

Even my family history makes this trajectory look more obvious in retrospect than it actually was. Several relatives served at senior levels of Bangladesh’s military and government, while my father worked for BRAC.

In that sense, public service and international development were almost in my blood. Yet the irony is that growing up, I knew remarkably little about this legacy. I learned much of the story of my father’s work at BRAC not from him, but from his former colleagues and, most memorably, from the late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed himself when I had the privilege of meeting him in his BRAC office in 2011.

Hearing Abed sahib speak about my father’s contributions was both a source of immense pride and a surreal way to discover part of my own family history.

In retrospect, there is something almost comical about this. I could have written some spectacular college admissions essays about growing up inspired by a father doing pioneering work for one of the world’s most influential development organizations. Instead, I barely knew the story.

Alas, my parents had not yet mastered the very American art of converting childhood experiences into compelling admissions narratives. Yet there was a more consequential lesson: Sometimes the distance between generations is not a lack of accomplishment or inspiration, but a failure to transmit the stories that might help children imagine possibilities their parents never imagined.

In fact, I was never “supposed” to become a development professional. Like many immigrant children, I was supposed to go to medical school. When that did not happen, I went to law school and was then supposed to become a practicing attorney.

In my family and wider community, foreign policy was something we debated at home -- not something one could fathom pursuing as a profession. My parents’ instincts were understandable.

Their generation had crossed oceans, rebuilt careers, and worked extraordinarily hard to create stability for their children. Medicine, engineering, law, accounting, computer science, and business offered recognizable pathways to economic security.

Foreign policy and international development generally did not. My oldest maternal uncle, the patriarch of our family, often told the younger generation that we would have to “work twice as hard for half the opportunities.”

As my career progressed, I came to understand that advice differently. Getting into institutions was difficult enough, but some of the most consequential lessons came afterward.

No graduate program teaches you how to navigate an organization, find the right mentors, communicate disagreement without damaging relationships, make your work visible without appearing self-promotional, recover from professional setbacks, or recognise which seemingly minor opportunity might quietly shape the next decade of your career.

Those lessons are usually inherited through networks and mentorship. I began noticing the consequences early in my career. At The Carter Center, I met exceptional interns from universities across the United States and around the world who already saw diplomacy, journalism, public policy, conflict resolution, and international development as plausible careers.

I met Indian-Americans and Pakistani-Americans, as well as students from India and Pakistan, pursuing these paths. Yet I struggled to find Bangladeshi-Americans or students from Bangladesh who envisioned themselves doing the same. When I moved to other institutions, I kept seeing versions of the same pattern.

The problem clearly was not interest. Anyone who has survived a Bangladeshi dinner table or potluck debate knows that. Nor was it talent. What was missing were pathways: Mentors who could explain how these professions worked, networks that could provide introductions and encouragement, institutions willing to invest in emerging professionals, and examples that made an unconventional career seem less unconventional.

Gradually, I stopped asking why there were so few Bangladeshi-Americans in foreign affairs and started asking a more useful question: Why had we never built the eco-system that would make these careers easier for the next generation to enter?

Earlier this summer, my colleagues and I argued in The Business Standard that Bangladeshi philanthropy needs a mentality shift. Our community has an extraordinary tradition of generosity toward family, humanitarian causes, religious institutions, and cultural organisations, but Bangladesh’s next generation also needs investment in institutions that empower youth and influence policy.

Consider this essay, in some ways, part two of that argument: A more personal explanation of why I came to believe those institutions are necessary and why I ultimately created the American Bangladesh Foundation.

ABF seeks to build pathways for emerging leaders, support policy research and institutions in Bangladesh and the region, and create stronger connections between Bangladesh and the American policy community.

Importantly, this cannot be a project solely for Bangladeshi-Americans. Some of the people who have most shaped my understanding of Bangladesh were not Bangladeshi. Early in my career, I worked under Ambassador Mary Ann Peters, a former US ambassador to Bangladesh.

Although she knew how difficult Bangladesh could be to work in, what stayed with me was her unrelenting optimism about the country. She did not reduce Bangladesh to poverty, natural disasters, or political dysfunction. She spoke instead about its extraordinary potential.

In fact, for an American diplomat, Ambassador Peters sometimes sounded remarkably like a demanding Bengali mother: Bangladesh is already one of the ten most populous countries in the world, so naturally nothing short of becoming a top-ten country in every other respect should be acceptable.

There was always pride in how far Bangladesh had come, accompanied by an insistence that it could, and must, do much more. That same affection for Bangladesh, and determination to see it fulfill its potential, is shared by the many non-Bangladeshi members of our Board and Advisory Council.

While Bangladeshi-American foreign policy and development professionals have a unique stake in Bangladesh and the potential to become lifelong champions for the country, our goal cannot simply be to produce more Bangladeshi-Americans working in these fields.

We need to cultivate Bangladesh experts from every background: Journalists who understand the country outside moments of crisis, diplomats who appreciate its growing strategic importance, development practitioners who recognize it as a source of innovation rather than simply a recipient of assistance, and scholars who believe it deserves sustained intellectual attention.

There is also a generational dimension to this project. Our parents’ generation built the institutions their circumstances required: Families, businesses, mosques, cultural associations, and community organizations.

They supported relatives and humanitarian causes in Bangladesh while establishing lives in a new country, creating the stability that gave many of us the freedom to contemplate riskier ambitions. Every generation inherits a different assignment.

Theirs was to create stability; ours is to create opportunity. If the next Bangladeshi-American wants to become a diplomat, development economist, foreign correspondent, congressional adviser, or think tank scholar, they should not have to discover the path accidentally or alone.

I say that while recognizing another contradiction in my own story. I am not independently wealthy, nor do I come from wealth. My parents may be outright mortified that I am sharing this, but although both were highly educated and had accomplished careers in Bangladesh, in America they worked working-class jobs before retiring.

I mention that not with embarrassment, but with pride. Like so many immigrants, they traded professional status for the opportunity to give their children a different future.

There is something distinctly American about telling that story openly. In the Bangladeshi culture in which my parents were raised, downward mobility in professional status can carry a sense of shame, or at least become something families would rather not advertise.

In America, the same family history is often a badge of honor. Politicians routinely introduce themselves by telling voters that their parents drove taxis, worked in factories, cleaned buildings, or waited tables.

Far from diminishing their credentials, those stories can help propel them to the highest offices in the country. The very detail an immigrant parent might quietly omit from a Bangladeshi biography can become the most compelling paragraph in their child’s American one.

That cultural contradiction is part of my story too. My parents’ sacrifices did not give me inherited wealth or an established professional network, but they gave me something more consequential: The freedom to pursue opportunities they could not have contemplated for themselves.

Starting an organization alongside a full-time career was therefore neither obvious nor particularly convenient. But perhaps that is precisely why institution-building cannot be left only to people who are already wealthy, powerful, or exceptionally well-connected.

Sometimes an institution begins because someone encounters the same problem often enough that complaining about it eventually feels less useful than finding like-minded people and trying to solve it.

I was extraordinarily fortunate that mentors invested in me, but I do not want to romanticize my path as simply a story of doors being opened. By the time I was admitted to the Council on Foreign Relations this June, I had spent fifteen years writing about foreign affairs and international development, earned two law degrees, worked across Asia, managed international development projects across two continents, trained US State Department personnel, and taught guest lectures at Princeton.

None of this happened accidentally. There has been very little room for mediocrity in my career, and getting here has required talent, discipline, an enormous amount of work, and sacrifices I would not necessarily encourage the next generation to replicate.

Mentors did not do that work for me, but they made an enormous difference in where that work could lead. They taught me how institutions functioned, helped me recognize opportunities, encouraged me through setbacks, and offered guidance when talent and hard work alone could not tell me which direction to take.

Some later supported my application to the Council on Foreign Relations; others now advise ABF. Success in these fields will always demand ability, discipline, and hard work. My goal is not to lower those standards for the next generation. It is to make the path clearer.

That is ultimately what institutions like ABF mean to me: Hope. I want the next generation to inherit some of the knowledge mine had to acquire through trial and error, rather than depending on fortunate encounters or working relentlessly until someone happens to notice.

The point is not to manufacture success. It is to give talent and hard work a better chance of finding opportunity, turning pathways one generation discovered partly by accident into pathways the next can navigate intentionally.

When I think back to the adda of my childhood, I realize those endless conversations were never really about politics alone. They reflected a belief that both Bangladesh and America could be better, that thoughtful people could solve difficult problems, and that what happened in our small corner of the world mattered far beyond it.

That tradition of argument, curiosity, and optimism is one of the great strengths of our community. But perhaps the responsibility of my generation is to take it one step further. We have spent decades debating the future around our dinner tables.

Now we need to help build the institutions, cultivate the people, and create the opportunities that will allow the next generation to shape it.

Atif Choudhury is a foreign policy and international development practitioner. He is the founder and CEO of the American Bangladesh Foundation and a Term Member on the Council on Foreign Relations.