Khushi Kabir is a human rights activist based in Bangladesh. She has a long and storied career in advocating for landless, indigenous, and women’s rights throughout the country and is a voice for progressive politics in Bangladesh and South Asia more broadly. The core of her work has been the organization Nijera Kori (NK), a nonhierarchical, non-service providing civil society organization in Bangladesh which supports landless peasants in organizing for change. Nijera Kori, which translates from Bengali as we do it ourselves, empowers local groups of landless peasants to advocate for their own rights—to state institutions, to local governmental organizations, and to NGOs mounting development projects in their communities. Founded in the 1980s out of a frustration with the systematic neglect of landless-issues, NK has grown into a broad network throughout the country that extends to over 1100 villages and over 200,000 members.
Kabir has been a vocal public advocate for a range of issues in Bangladesh including women’s rights, indigenous rights, conflict resolution in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, secularism and intellectual freedom, and more. She is an outspoken voice against the rise of militant Islam in Bangladesh and has been an active participant in Bangladesh’s pro-democracy movement. She played an important role in augmenting the Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB) into a strong network of NGOs and constructing links to other networks, citizen’s forums, and the government. She is the coordinator in Bangladesh for One Billion Rising, a transnational solidarity movement working against the exploitation of women and an Advisor for Sangat, a South Asian Feminist Network founded by feminist icon Kamla Bhasin. Kabir was one of the 1000 women collectively nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.