Description
Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, lacking any permanent legal refugee status, are frequently labelled as a “threat to national security”, “criminals”, “terrorists” and “dangerous”. At the same time, their camps are often described as breeding grounds for terrorism’ by the government and its security forces. These narratives and their transverses, which are subject to change based on political agenda, heavily influence the existing security discourse and practices in the camps. By drawing upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with 171 Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, this article explores the experiences and impact of the existing security strategies from the refugees’ perspectives which is absent from wider debates. This article offers two overarching arguments- firstly, the state’s existing omnipresent security approach in the camps is targeting refugees, making them further insecure and vulnerable through creating fear, negative labelling, and narratives. Secondly, in the absence of a well-defined and human-centred security policy, these approaches are adversely affecting refugees' ability to attain justice, human rights, education, freedom of movement, sustenance, safety, right to protection, voluntary repatriation, livelihood opportunities, integration, and more. Based on my empirical findings and analysis of the existing security discourse, this article offers three contributions. First, a problem-driven meta-method for comprehending everyday (in)security combines ethnography and discourse theory in a global South country- Bangladesh. Second, empirical findings of the gendered dimensions of everyday (in)security within the Rohingya refugee community resulted from the state’s security strategies. And finally, an intellectual contribution to contemporary scholarship on vernacular security by shedding light on the underexamined experience and perspectives of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. This analysis and contributions, I conclude, have significance in the contemporary debate of critical security and security politics in humanitarian contexts.
