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Contribution short abstract

This paper explores Bangladesh’s Bihari camps as micro-ecologies of "disruptive immobility." By linking Islamic sabr with digital labor, I argue that stateless groups unsettle state authority and re-territorialize space through disciplined endurance and economic agency.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines the Bihari community in Bangladesh as a critical site for rethinking mobility as an embodied, legal, and temporal condition shaped by constraint. Following the 1971 Liberation War, this Urdu-speaking minority was confined to dense urban camps marked by infrastructural fragility and prolonged statelessness. I conceptualize these camps as micro-ecologies where restricted movement actively reshapes relationships between the body, the State, and space. The paper advances the concept of “disruptive immobility” to describe how prolonged spatial confinement unsettles dominant assumptions equating agency with movement. First, it shows how economic adaptations—particularly the shift from low-wage garment labor to digital gig work—enable new forms of re-territorialization within enforced immobility. Second, it analyzes the transformation of the Stranded Pakistanis General Repatriation Committee into a citizenship-claiming institution, interpreted through the Islamic concept of ṣabr (endurance). Here, ṣabr is framed not as passive waiting, but as a disciplined, collective ethical practice oriented toward temporal continuity and political recognition. Third, it highlights how younger generations, through digital participation and social integration, rework Partition-era identities and expand horizons of belonging.By bringing Western critical theory into dialogue with Islamic ontology, the paper proposes a framework for understanding mobility through endurance, suspension, and temporal reconfiguration. The Bihari experience demonstrates how marginalized communities unsettle legal categories and state authority not through movement alone, but through sustained practices of inhabiting constraint in precarious conditions.