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ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY
05 June 2020

Being Stateless and Surviving: The Rohingyas in Camps of Bangladesh

Sucharita Sengupta, a third year PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology and Sociology, discusses her new published work in Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia. This chapter is based on field work done for her PhD thesis, tentatively entitled as “Understanding Life as 'non-citizens': The Rohingyas of Myanmar”. Under the supervision of Professor Alessandro Monsutti and her second reader Professor Shalini Randeria, Sucharita details her fieldwork experience.

The chapter "Being Stateless and Surviving: The Rohingyas in Camps of Bangladesh", is based on my PhD field work and prior experience between 2014 - 2019. 

My first interactions with the Rohingya refugees was in India, 2014. This was soon followed by a  visit in 2015 to the biggest refugee camp in Bangladesh as a while I was working in a think tank in India, called the Calcutta Research Group.

My fieldworks in Bangladesh Rohingya camps in 2015 and 2019 show that the transitional definitions of contemporary notions of citizenship are largely shaped by the inflow of global capital and market. The study shows through the production of new and changing social relations, the Rohingya refugees are able to challenge the classical understanding of citizenship. How they are resilient and use strategies to evade state violence or escape legal or formal structures of citizenship, and lie somewhere at the ‘vanishing points’ of state margins.

The refugees are products of politics inside sovereign states and their ‘statelessness’, a part of the dynamics of border politics. In this kind of survival, precarity becomes the new normal, when everyday hardship is marked by waiting and hopes to gain access to new forms of citizenship rights in order to evade socio-economic vulnerabilities and political stamping out.

The government of Bangladesh initially had welcomed and resettled more than 1 million Rohingya in 2017, however, owing to resource crisis patience is now wearing thin. Recent bilateral talks between Bangladesh and Myanmar to repatriate the Rohingyas has also failed. Thus, Is there any way forward? How do the Rohingyas perceive themselves in this context? Do they consider themselves as stateless, more precisely non-citizens or, on the contrary as global citizens? These are some of the vantage points that this paper seeks to address. 

My fieldwork was done in Rohingya camps of Bangladesh, situated in the district of Cox’s Bazar, specifically in Ukhiya, Kutupalong and Teknaf (Teknaf is the border area between Myanmar and Bangladesh. It is through this point that most Rohingya refugees cross over from Myanmar to Bangladesh). Since I was a foreigner to the country, there were several restrictions that I had to face initially in terms of camp access and interacting with the camp residents. However, the enmeshed formal-semi formal and informal bureaucracy in many ways facilitated my research. There has been a significant change in Bangladesh’s refugee resettlement policy in recent years, between these two timelines and also the way it has endured and tackled the biggest refugee crisis in the world.

The two spaces of my work have been camps – where I have interacted with the camp inmates closely and Non-Camp Area, wherein I explored Cox’s Bazar, the changing profile of the city, and the main NGO and INGOs working on the Rohingya crisis. I also have visited local media houses and spoken to journalists, some of whom have spoken boldly about internal politics and dilemmas of the Bangladesh government in respect to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and their settlement in Bangladesh. Have attended several conferences and workshops both inside and outside the camps as an NGO volunteer and thus have closely witnessed the operational aspects of camps and work relations between Bangladeshis-Rohingyas, apart from perceiving personally and closely the reactions of NGO workers towards the Rohingyas in general.

Positioning myself was difficult due to a number of reasons as, to begin with, refugee camps are never the easiest sites to do fieldwork, but what was more difficult was the ‘gaze’,  the ‘patriarchal gaze’ too from both men and women. I was made to feel many a time that this was an extremely male-dominated gendered space and my presence created an ‘image’. I had my moments of fatigue, negativity and feelings of vacuum. Needless to say, the fieldwork was extremely difficult, right from my stay near the camp area from where also daily I had to commute for 2-3 hours on each side (owing to the traffic) so my day used to start from 6 am and ended at 10-11 in the night. Besides travelling in public transports, the interactions within the camps too had its pro and cons. Often my religion was a point of the question and other times my perspectives, that is, I had to put in a lot of effort to earn the trust of my interlocutors to be able to have detailed conversations or to transcend objectivity and be an empathiser and friend to them. It’s not very common for a woman from outside to be invited within a Rohinga household, but I was invited a few times for lunch or cups of coffee and nasta (snacks). Amidst every difficulty, these are the fond memories that I am carrying with me. It has been a very emotionally taxing yet enriching experience for me.