Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore new forms of citizenship of people who challenge the state system through a case study of Rohingya refugees resettling in Bangladesh camps. The study will look at their journey of survival through making fake citizenship documents like passports to building new kinship ties.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to unveil the exclusion, self-resilience and counter resistance of Rohingya refugees surviving in camps of Bangladesh, devoid of citizenship status and fleeing persecution in Myanmar. The root of this problem although had emanated as a post-colonial fallout spanned between the murky borders of Myanmar-Bangladesh-India, but is now a widely discussed global and transnational phenomenon. My fieldworks in Bangladesh Rohingya camps in 2015 and 2019 show the transitional definitions of contemporary notions of citizenship which largely is shaped by inflow of global capital and market. This study shows how through the production of new and changing social relations, the Rohingya refugees are able to challenge the classical understanding of citizenship. At times using 'nomadic tactics' to transgress violence, they lie somewhere at the 'vanishing points' of state margins where 'techniques, identities, practices, and power relations' are used to regulate and confine flows. The refugees are products of politics inside sovereign states and their 'statelessness', a part of the dynamics of border politics. In this kind of a 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.

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 the paper seeks to address.