“Geo-Cultural” Identity and Addressing Statelessness: A Critical Analysis of Rohingya Refugees in the Context of Bangladesh

Abstract

In 2017, Bangladesh, despite its status as a developing nation with limited resources, opened its borders to over one million Rohingya refugees fleeing military violence in Myanmar, highlighting a critical crisis of statelessness and forced displacement. It is important to recognize this crucial problem of statelessness and displacement experienced by the Rohingya people. While many academic papers focused on this phenomenon from the perspective of law and humanitarian issues, there was no sufficient discussion of how historical and territorial identities affect the formation of statelessness. In this regard, the present study investigates the role of geo-cultural identity, characterized by cultural, lingual, historical, and territorial characteristics, in the context of the issue under analysis. The research posits that statelessness cannot be understood only from the perspective of the legal situation since it is based on the refusal to acknowledge geo-cultural identity of the refugees. For this purpose, qualitative fieldwork, including ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews, was conducted with the refugees living in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, and humanitarian workers who helped to solve the problems of this group of people. The findings of this study prove that the refusal to acknowledge geo-cultural identity results in the structural injustice and marginalization of the refugees.

IUBAT Review—A Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 9(1): 177-191