Living on the Edge

Mohammad Zaman is an international development/resettlement specialist and advisory professor, National Research Center for Resettlement, Hohai University, Nanjing, China. He carried out extensive ethnographic research on disaster and displacement in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna floodplain. For many years, his core research has been on char settlement, their economies and social organizations and how these have been historically shaped by the colonial and post-colonial land tenure and administration with regard to alluvial and diluvial lands. He is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and advisor to the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad, India.Mustafa Alam, a Professor (Retired) in Economics, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, has a rich background in research on issues relating to integrated water resources management. He participated as a professional team member in several Flood Action Plan study components in Bangladesh, where his involvement in the multidisciplinary Charland Study figured prominently. Prof. Alam gained valuable experience about char life in the country through this study, whereby he carried out extensive fieldwork in numerous chars spread around all the major river systems of the country. Apart from miscellaneous reports he produced on issues relating to chars in Bangladesh, he has a number of valuable publications to his credit on the subject. Given this background, Prof. Alam's role as an editor of this volume certainly adds value to the discourses contained in it.