The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing

The Rohingyas have become a ‘crisis’ for all including the host countries, the international community and even for themselves. Much has been written about the clearance operation perpetrated by Myanmar military forces and vigilantes in 2017, forcing Rohingya survivors to migrate and seek refuge in other countries. How they have been surviving during the post-2017 period has largely been left out in academic literature. The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing addresses the many aspects of Rohingya lives in Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Southeast Asian countries and in the West. 

This book studies the transforming public discourse about Rohingyas, the blame-game of ecological costs of Rohingya presence, and the declining relationship between the host communities and the refugees. It examines causes for escalating intra-group conflicts, decreasing international support and the repatriation failures. It analyses the critical roles of the international community, global civil society and diaspora activism, and discusses what the future might hold. ‘Burden’ sharing should be seen as sharing responsibilities for global justice. It is not the Rohingyas who are the burden.

Nasir Uddin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He studied and carried out research at the University of Oxford (UK), School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University (UK), the London School of Economics (LSE) at London University (UK), Heidelberg University (Germany), VU Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University (India), the University of Hull (UK), Kyoto University (Japan), and the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh). He has received prestigious awards and fellowships including the MEXT Scholarship, the British Academy Visiting Scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, a Visiting Scholarship at LSE, a Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University and Asian Studies Fellowship at East-West Center, Washington, DC, USA. His latest edited book is Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia (2019, co-edited with Nasreen Chowdhory). His latest monograph is The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life (2020).