Rohingyas and the Geographies of Precarity in Exile: Everyday Life in Bangladesh and Malaysia

Focusing on Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Malaysia, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the contribution of historical legacies of exclusion, along with contemporary practices of marginalisation and otherisation to the transcendence of the precarity landscape. In light of the 2017 displacement of over a million Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine state to neighbouring Bangladesh, the book offers a nuanced and empirically driven analysis of precarity across a wide spectrum at discrete and overlapping scales, shaped by statelessness, vulnerability, uncertainty, onward migration and everyday practices of exclusion. Bringing together the diverse manifestation along the lines of identity, status, space, mobility, gender and labour, the study proposes a comprehensive understanding of precarity, conceptualised as the ’interconnected geographies of precarity’. Elucidating the intricate web of structural constraints that predate (in Myanmar) and are continually reconstructed and actualised (in exile), the book examines the continuum of precarity in extended transnational spaces - a phenomenon that is complex, non-linear, transitional and multi-faceted.

Anas Ansar, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute, Freiburg, Germany.